Is Life About Selling?

Is life about selling? Everywhere we go, we're "pitched". Movies, billboards, TV, radio, websites, cafes, concerts, vacations, the list is endless depending on the amount of time you're willing to allocate to thinking about places where we're propositioned to buy.

Money exists to simplify the exchange of goods and services. Rather than trade goats for beans, we can all exchange the "same thing" representing values of specific items. This makes business easier, but at what point does it become so consuming that it's beyond escape? When's the last day you didn't spend a single dollar? Can you remember?

Even at work, money flows from some part of your organization to the other. How does it get there? The reason I ask isn't to presume life's about selling, rather to highlight its enormous influence. It's why we describe hikes in the woods or walks on the beach as "getting away".

I believe there are people out there who work simply for the joy of the experience. Did Picasso paint because he loved art? Did Mozart write music because he had to share it with the world? Does the local surf bum spend summers on the beach because of a connection with the ocean? I hope so.

There are things money can't touch: emotion, wisdom, health. These predate the "invention of currency".  They comprise a foundation of things that make us human. Even though every year we buy "stuff" like tickets to the latest film, food, clothes, books, music, it doesn't have to define us. You aren't what you buy, you're what's left when everything's stripped away. So, though I wonder, even feel sad at times, about our obsession with material "things" there are priceless places where selling can't go.