It's all about the money...

I've come to realize how influenced I have become by money, or material possession. I think I've had this realization before but it must not have been a big enough a realization to actually be a part of my disillusionment, or maybe my disillusionment phase was too immature then.

It was about four months ago that I got my first salary. It's a decent sum - enough to spend on food, rent, transportation and the occasional expensive weekend and still have half of it left to put into savings. Then on one particular payday, I found that almost a third of my pay went to taxes because I had not provided my PAN number. I felt a sense of loss that I had never felt before. Never before as in this-kind-of-feeling-wise and not as-deep-as-this-wise. The next month, I half expected the same cut in pay (being the moron that I am, I still hadn't acquired a PAN card.) I opened my pay slip. I was getting my full salary! And a few days later, my application for travel reimbursement got approved and I was getting paid around half my salary extra! I felt the same thing I felt a month ago but on the opposite polarity. I was in a constant good mood and I was brimming with confidence.

It seemed silly that these emotions were brought on and altered by the amount of money I was receiving, but that was the fact. Then I remembered the first time I got my salary. I had attained a whole new perspective on how I spent my money. I was counting every rupee I spent, I avoided unnecessary expenses and I even made an excel sheet to document my spending, complete with average and total daily expenditure columns. Now I can start to understand a lot of things like why someone would bargain even for a minuscule amount, or why someone would never miss a horrible meal at the mess he paid for. I understood the tendency to save but it was only recently that I felt it myself (at a strong enough degree.)

The biggest point of this post, is how we are all so affected by the monetary value of things, like how my salary got me high and low, or how expensive things make us happy. I guess it has something to do with our egos. I'm not saying I wasn't happy as a child when I got a supercool winged ninja-like robot that transformed into three dino-bots, but that was a different kind of happy. This is a different kind of happy. I don't trust myself with it.