Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1497-1499

Loving money may not be good for your love life, according to new research that finds that materialists have unhappier marriages than couples who don't care much about possessions.

The effect holds true across all levels of income, said study researcher Jason Carroll, a professor of family life at Brigham Young University. And a materialist marrying a like-minded soul may not get off the hook: The least satisfying marriages were those in which both spouses cared strongly about material goods.

"We thought it would be the incongruent or unmatched pattern that would be most problematic, where one's a spender and one's a saver," Carroll told LiveScience. "Our study found that it's the couples where both spouses have high levels of materialism that struggle the most.

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 So what can be done if you love your spouse but really want that shiny new BMW, too? Carroll said that for most people, materialism isn't black-and-white: People think they can pursue their toys but keep their relationship strong at the same time, and they may not realize how much their ambitions are hurting their loved ones. For most couples, breaking the materialistic thought process should help, Carroll said.

"I think it's about people stepping back and taking an inventory of their values and what really is important to them," Carroll said. "Are we allowing some of our materialistic ambitions to get in the way of things that really, at the core, matter a lot to us?"

Love of Money May Mess Up Your Marriage
Stephanie Pappas, Live Science Contributor | October 13, 2011
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I had a summer job as a student squeezing plastic milk bottles for 12 hours overnight to see if they leaked. When they did you smelt of sour milk by the time you went home. Mark Thomas, Manchester

Filling pork pies with jelly one at a time to ensure the "handmade" label. Leigh Dickinson

I worked for weeks unpacking small cereal bars from large boxes and then repackaging the same cereal bars into smaller boxes. Pointless. Jude Connor

I put pepperoni on 14,000 pizzas per day at a factory in Nottingham. If the conveyor belt broke down, we made smiley faces on the pizzas with the pepperoni. So if you ever see a smiley pizza, that's why. Pete Minting, Helensburgh

Working at a pork scratching factory removing the ones that had been cooked but still had hairs to then be re-cooked, to burn them off. I had 12 hours a day just watching them go past on a conveyor belt. I left after two weeks and have never eaten one since. Maria, Sheffield

Some of the world's most boring jobs
BBC News
1 August 2016
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Thanks to Kate McFarland
@kate_bi_news 

 

For complex reasons, our culture allows "economy" to mean only "money economy." It equates success and even goodness with monetary profit because it lacks any other standard of measurement. I am no economist, but I venture to suggest that one of the laws of such an economy is that a farmer is worth more dead than alive. A second law is that anything diseased is more profitable than anything that is healthy. What is wrong with us contributes more to the "gross national product" than what is right with us.

Wendell Berry,

The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural and Agricultural (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981) xiii.