Rewards

We’ve been conditioned from birth that when you behave, when you achieve and when those closest to you approve you will receive a reward. It all starts out with a sugar reward.

Rewards motivate us to do better next time and to strive for the next reward. During those early young years the rewards were handed to us, all we had to do was perform according to the wishes of our parents, our teachers and maybe even society.

As we grow into adulthood and we earn money we totally see that as the reward, after all we’ve been conditioned for a couple of decades and it’s now a habit. Really it’s no different to rewarding your dog.

“Hand holding scoops of sweet ice cream in a cone” by Alex Jones on Unsplash

And when we receive our reward as money, well then that means we can now start buying the rewards that we want. The money is exchanged for rewards like alcohol, food, holidays, houses, cars, jewellery, clothing, presents and stuff we definitely don’t need but still we feel we deserve them.

Knowing that we will receive the funds each month, each year, year in year out means that we feel safe in the knowledge that if we spend now, probably on credit, we will be able to pay off that credit in time. Trouble is we rarely do and we become slaves to the credit system and stay in debt for the rest of our lives.

The banks invented credit as a way of making more money and in doing so created a system of over-consuming or rather over-rewarding, because after all that’s what it is.

Happy spending!

Michael de Groot