The Last Finn Eats Fish and Tomatoes

I have been writing short articles about time lately. So far their number is 24. I´m aiming at 40 and the goal looks totally possible. At least I want to believe so.

In this time-article process I have learned that the Mayas had a calendar that repeated itself every 260 years. All good and bad that happened 260 years ago would repeat itself now. If a calamity is to come it is waste of time (!) to try to stop it.

I also learned that the City of Assisi in Italy published their strategy on November 9th in 1210 and any Finnish city could copy that today in their effort to increase their prosperity.

However, from today´s perspective we can see one obvious mistake in the Assisi strategy. The City Fathers did not include caring for people in their concept of ´work´. They defined ´work´ as something that brings economic benefit to the town.

Just imagine what our present day would look like if caring for people had been included among the prosperity-bringing acitivities. The Assisi City Fathers left caring for the Church to do - and there it has remained. Just think what it would mean to appreciate caring for people as much as we appreciate producing paper making machines, for instance.

I also learned that the last Finn will die in the year 3702. It is a widowed old lady living in the Swedish-speaking Ostrobothnia. She has eaten a lot of fish and tomatoes and sung in a choir.

All Finnish-speaking Finns have died long ago, because we are gloomy, we avoid meeting people, we only sing when drunk, we try to avoid speaking Swedish, and we are pessimistic.

I personally like eating tomatoes and fish, but when writing those articles I often get caught by the dark and pessimistic idea that they will never be published, I´ll be bankrupt, and die before having learned Swedish well enough to speak it publicly.

Time is a social construction. I do not stop admiring us human beings - we are able to construct anything we need as a collective. As long as the Nature, heavenly bodies and gods controlled our time system, we were unable to organise our activities to produce anything systematic and precisely defined. But as soon as we changed the concept of time so that it became a neutral, evenly distributed, predictable and countable concept with a price tag on it, we were able to organise our activities to produce steam engines, locomotives, diesel cars, space travel, mobile phones, global banking, and 24-hour on-line currency speculation.

Having changed the concept of time, we can earnestly claim that time is money. Time has a price tag on it. You know the worth of your working hour as well as that of your neighbour´s. You also know that it is exactly the price of the individual hour that moves big factories from one continent to another. The price tag has a magnetic effect. It either pulls or pushes organisational activities world-wide. We also know that big enough magnets tend to be out of any human control.

But if you had a lot of money, what would you do with your time? I mean really much money.
I suppose that you lead normal life and that supposition leads to another - having enormous amounts of money you would be in a totally new and unfamiliar situation. In new, unfamilar situations people seldom know what to do. To be able to do anything we need role models. Luckily we know one really rich person - Bill Gates. What does he do?

Imagine Bill Gates walking in the street and seeing or dropping a piece of paper money on the ground. Of which value would the bill have to be so that it would be worth his time to stop and pick it up? We can count his average earning rate in dollars per second and we assume that it would take him four seconds to pick it up. In 1986 a five dollar bill would have been too small for him to bother with. Ten years ago, by 1998, a 10 000 dollar bill wasn´t worth trouble.

So the Bill Gates Wealth Index by Richard Florida reveals that being really rich you would not be picking up paper money from the streets.

What would you do instead? Eat tomatoes and sing in a choir? That is what the Swedish-speaking Ostrobothnians here in Finland do. And that is why they feel happy and outlive us others...