Something Wicked This Way Comes

Perhaps when Ray Bradbury sat down to write his book, Something Wicked This Way Comes, he had it in his heart and mind that selfishness and wanting were the real evils in the world—and that if you ever wanted to know what the devil really looks like, look no further than pure desire.

It could be that he was also thinking that sometimes what we want can cloud our judgements in our pursuit of fulfillment, and not allow us to visualize the potential for real dangers that lie in wait for us in the future.

Everyone in this world wants something, and for most of us, we are impatient about getting it. It can make us do things that we might not otherwise do if we were freer to think ahead into the future, and consider the possibilities.

Beyond that, desire can sometimes cloud the realm of reality as well. In the book, one character dreamed of one day becoming a football hero despite the truth that he had suffered a severed arm and leg.

Lost in his unreal fantasy of impossible things, what achievements could he have actually realized?

All of this is a bit of a convoluted way for me to bring up money, and sometimes the way that we think about it, and the dangerous traps that we can sometimes fall into because of how we think about it.

The strong desire for money and riches can be a good thing if we are of the right mindset about it. But it can be a bad thing if we are like the character in Bradbury's story with a severed arm and leg.

I said earlier in a post on Noise that most people have goals. But that's not exactly true. What people actually have are desires. "I want to be rich," "I want to learn a new language," "I want to get a better job," and so on so forth. Pose the question, "How?" and you tend to get blank stares.

Simply wanting something to be true is not a goal. It's a desire. It does not become a goal until the groundwork has been carefully laid out to determine the best path for getting there.

If selfishness and wanting are the real evils in the world, as I suggested was a premise for the book, it is because it is these things that can sometimes be the culprits that slow us down, or put us farther and farther behind the 8-ball.

Let's take the, "I want to be rich," desire into mind, since my post is about money. What are some people willing to do in order to achieve that? Without a real path toward it.

The reality is that most people will squander what little money they have to simply get what they want, having a similar fuddled mind as the armless, legless man. Some will gamble, or play the lottery with the thought that the next spin or the next draw of numbers could change their lives in an instant. Others will toss good money into bad playing on the next hyped crypto, or the next hyped penny stock—only to walk away more broke than when they started.

This is not to suggest that becoming rich is an impossible dream. Of course I believe many people can achieve it. But, we're not all going to become billionaires the likes of Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos. Let's face it, even the 400 richest people in the world only account for 0.000005% of the entire world population.

When it comes to money, and the desire to become rich, when we make that an actual goal, in baby steps we can better define what that means. Today, tomorrow, the next day, the next year, 10 years from now, and beyond. If we are not lost in the fantasy of what is unlikely for us to achieve based on our circumstances now, the possibility of realizing an accomplishment are far more likely to become possible.

Maybe it is improbable that you will be able to double your personal wealth in the next year. But you can increase your personal wealth by 5% or 10% in the next year. When you break things down in this way, into realistic terms, it will make you less likely to do things that are counterproductive to the goal.

In the story, the focal point is the storm, and the dark carnival. The storm is really about the result of our desires getting in the way of us seeing the light, and the carnival is about how we can get caught up in fantasy, in the end giving up the possibility that we can ever achieve what we could have otherwise.

Lead image courtesy of Pixabay, user ErikTanghe. Panoramic Nature Sky - Free photo on Pixabay