What is your yardstick?

I was thinking the other day about my current financial situation, and how it has drastically changed in the past year. I went from making nearly $60K a year ago to probably less than $20 this year, and that is quite a drop if I do say so myself. But this is not something that is specific to me, or my career path, but is somewhat an occurrence happening all over this country right now.

The question is - what can I do about it, and how important is it in the grand scheme of things? Yes, money is important since we need it to survive. You know, putting food on the table, gas in the car, and paying the mortgage and other bills. Other than that, is it the most important thing in our lives? In some ways, we measure our success by our income. I think way too much importance is place on it myself.

Money seems to be the yardstick we measure our success with - and each other. How much do you make? What is your home worth? What kind of car do you drive? These kinds of questions may not always come out when we first meet people, but they are certainly on most people's minds. When you meet someone for the first time, questions like "what do you do?" are really just veiled inquiries about how much money you make, although an interest in your career is certainly thrown in there for good measure. It is engrained in our national psyche...

Not that we can change that any time soon, but the way our economy is going, changes are under foot. In case people haven't been noticing, we are in a long-lasting downward trend here in America, and the manufacturing jobs are nearly gone. Many companies struggle to stay profitable, and new opportunities are the only way to stay afloat for most people.

Maybe it's time we changed our focus? Instead of focusing on jobs, the economy, and our struggle to keep up with the "Jones" next door, why not focus on family, friends, and relationships instead? Instead of using money as our yardstick to measure success, how about another scaled altogether? So when you meet someone instead of asking what they do for a living, or how much they make, we may ask "how are your family members doing" or something similar. Maybe we could get back to hanging out with friends, real friends not the ones on Facebook, and try forming real bonds with people instead of struggling to move up the ladder financially all the time.

While we're at it, why not start measuring our health quotient too? How many times have you been to the gym this week, have you gotten your blood pressure back down again? It seems to me that these are much more important questions than the same old thing - did you hear so-and-so got laid off last week? The plant is laying off again...OK, we still need jobs. But we will get by, on less. Our quality of life won't suffer that much if we all make less money, but it will suffer if we don't start thinking about how important our families are to us, our friends, and the people in our communities as well. We're all in this together aren't we?


I would love to hear feedback on this, positive or negative.