To The 99%

I’ve been observing your messages for some time now.

I do find some, if not many, of them agreeable.

I am part of the 99% too, and I am also part of the 1%.

In fact, I am part of the (less than) 0.0000001%

Because I am completely unique, there is no combination of physical characteristics, personality traits, mental patterns, religious and spiritual beliefs and life experiences that matches mine.

I am also part of the 99% because I have some debts, I am working to earn just enough to pay my debts and survive to support my family, but have little left to save, let alone invest, and I am a bad monthly performance away from being removed from my sole source of income, my current job, and having to go through the grueling job-finding routine again (which can last anywhere between a month to a few months, which means there will be some months I have to default on my loan repayments, meaning a negative impact on my credit score, bla bla bla).

But I am also lucky that I am part of a network of supporting friends and family members. I am also lucky that my religious community is also a supportive community. We help each other. Not that many people are that lucky (or realise they are actually lucky).

But I want to put across one very important point which I feel is being missed or overlooked or simply disregarded conveniently in this “Us VS Them” mentality.

WE ARE ALSO PART OF THE SOURCE OF OUR OWN PROBLEMS.

Let’s face this monster head on, people.

WE TOO HAVE CONTRIBUTED TO THE 1% BEING RICHER THAN ALL OF US COMBINED.

While not all of us in the world are living in a democratic country where we can vote for the leaders that we want, but many of us do have this (hard-earned, hard-won) privilege.

We blame the greedy, the conniving, the cunning, the mal-opportunist for crashing the stock markets, manipulating foreign exchange rates to such an extent as to impoverish entire nations while enriching their personal wealth, yet we forget something -

WE the 99% are the ones who mass consume, who bought the products, who chose the brands, who voted with our wallets, our credit cards, who voted with money that we don’t have to buy what we don’t need to impress people that we don’t like.

WE the 99% are the ones who seek to satiate our unending lusts, desires, fetishes, hunger, greed for PERFECT products or PERFECT services with the LOWEST possible cost, delivered to us in the SHORTEST amount of time possible, creating the perfect market for these “Demons” of ours to exploit us.

WE the 99% are the ones who bitch about our jobs, our bosses, the economy, the price of fuel and goods, while watching TV, watching Lost, or American Idol, or America’s Next Top Model, drinking and binging, feeding our own vicious cycle (which is a virtuous profit cycle to the 1%), and then DO NOTHING about our problems, drown our day’s sorrows with late night TV or Facebook or YouTube, then come back to work the next morning exhausted, lethargic and without any motivation to work, then get laid off for a poor performance, while some people -

Who WERE from the 99% and eventually get to be part of the 1% – quit TV, quit the distractions, quit the drinking and binging, quit the overspending – work hard in something that they enjoy doing, develop discipline, develop their skills, upgrade and improve their knowledge and skill sets, create something useful for the world, offer it to the world and get rich in the process.

I’m not saying all those who are in the 1% get there that way. I am sure most of us who are in the 99% who are complaining about this are not complaining about those who rightfully earn their wealth and get what they deserve.

WE the 99% think and believe that luck is everything, luck determines wealth, luck determines good health, luck determines a good life, not knowing the TRUTH that WE can create our own luck through applying right effort to right knowledge.

For God’s sake, let’s stop whining, complaining, bitching. We’ve already got the attention we deserve, now let’s go do something worthwhile, let’s upgrade ourselves, learn something new, develop our innate talents and skills (each and everyone of us has a unique gift, talent or skill that we can sharpen, hone and use to improve our life), grow things, grow ourselves, quit our jobs (if necessary), question our bosses, question authority, find solutions, start a business, run a sideline business doing something we love, network and get to know more people, get to know “the rich and greedy 1%” (maybe more of them are willing to share their success secrets with us than we care to believe), try things, FAIL at something, learn and pick ourselves up and try again, until we can truly say we are happy with our lives.

AND stop spending the money we don’t have to buy things we don’t need to impress people we don’t like.