A Christmas Carol and the spooky psychological effect of money

   It was 1843 when Charles Dickens published his novella ‘A Christmas Carol’. 

Ebenezer Scrooge, the story’s protagonist, is the absolute equivalent of stinginess. Just try checking out a thesaurus and you’ll find the word ‘Scroogelike’ among the synonyms. His love for money was such that he preferred to spend his time counting it, rather than share some of it with his fellow citizens in hardship during Christmastime.

   But what does money do to us? How does it affect our behavior? Simply counting money makes us more persistent, more resilient and less helpful. Just watch the following very interesting video: 

   And then there’s this (very) intriguing talk of Paul Piff in TED, where he lays out how bad we can get when it comes to money, just watch: 

   If you know how Dickens concludes his story, you’ll know that there’s hope. The 3 Christmas ghosts had a cathartic role in Mr. Scrooge’s life. He finally saw the truth, and namely that accumulating wealth for the sake of accumulation per se was a pure dead-end.   

   In a world of increasing financial inequity it would be wise to read and reread Charles Dickens’ tale of Ebenezer Scrooge and watch Paul Piffer’s talk more than once. Reminding everyone (ourselves included) on a constant basis that there’s only something to win on a social and an individual level if we take heed of the aforementioned is for this reason crucial.

   Aiming collectively at closing the wealth gap will only bring prosperity to our society (especially so for the wealthy folks).

 

   There’s a short story that I’ll be publishing soon, and it's called “The Monopoly Dread”. For the time being you can always read my other works:

 “The Halo Trap” (short story #1), 

“The Summer Experiment” (short story #2), 

 and "The Analysts" (a novel of 105.000 words)

all available through Amazon.