Don't Owe

What if we lived in a world where borrowing wasn't allowed? A society where you couldn't get something today if you had to leverage tomorrow to get it. It would be somewhat akin to cash society. Pay before you play. Pay to enter. Pay to receive. 

Initially, the idea the sprung from some unease about the national debt. I find it a little disconcerting we owe so much money as a nation. And then it started to occur to me such a "cash" policy could apply to many things. 

This clearly would be a good policy for our personal finances. Yes, we could argue having a home mortgage and car loan is almost necessary (unless of course, we had a better public transportation system and we could be mobile without our cars... a blog for another day). How much more peaceful would you be if you didn't have credit card debt to work off? 

What about a pay-in-advance system for health and wellness? Interesting... 

Let's take the meat industry, for example. An article released today said we pumped our meat with 30 million pounds of antibiotics last year. I imagine if we didn't do so, our factory farms would only be able to produce a fraction of the meat we consume. I think, perhaps, this could be a good thing. Less factory meat, less pollution, fewer health issues resulting from unhealthy meat products... We would have no choice but to explore ways to work in concert with nature to produce food. Nature = Good.

The pay upfront policy applied to how we care for our bodies: Instead of eating whatever we please and then dieting to work it off,  we only eat the amount of food our body needed to survive. If you exercise more, you would have an "allowance" to eat more food. Our current system of eat, exercise and diet means we're always playing catch up with ourselves which is pretty exhausting. If each nice long workout had the reward of our favorite treat afterwards, maybe more people would exercise. How about a points system to get food instead of a points system about our food? 

The bottom line is we could do ourselves, and each other, a huge favor by taking responsibility. We wouldn't owe ourselves, our bodies or anybody else anything. Maybe each day would actually feel like a gift if we all began to look at each day for today instead of paying the debt on yesterday.