There are two points of view on money matters. Some people suppose that money makes people satisfied but others find money the evil.
On the one hand, money is really of a help to people. To start with, there are a lot of things that we can buy for money, for example different conveniences. They help us to make our life more comfortable. Secondly, what is really important is that only money can give us the feeling of independence. We create our future and if we want to live without problems we should have money. Finally, one of the best things that money can give us is power. When you have money you are in control.
On the other hand, money is only a symbol of wealth. To begin with, money is only paper, but it has been given too much importance and it has become people’s new God. In addition, money can spoil people. For instance, it’s not rare when rich people start using their money for evil purposes overusing their power and thinking that everything can be bought and everyone can be controlled. What is more, possessing big sums of money can cause lots of problems. For example, people around get envious, start doing something to get the piece of what you have and your life becomes more dangerous.
To sum up, money is really important for the modern world nowadays and plays a great role, but thinking of it and earning it people should save their human face not giving money too much power.
Translation of some words:
to make satisfied- to satisfy; on the one hand- On the one side; to start with- let's start off with; conveniences- amenities; comfortable- comfortable; secondly- Secondly; Independence- independence; power- force; on the other hand- on the other side; to begin with- let's start off with; symbol- symbol; importance- importance; in addition- in addition; to spoil- spoil; for instance- For example; evil purposes- bad intentions; what is more- moreover; to cause- cause, cause; piece- piece; human face- human face.
This text will help you write a discussion essay "pros and cons" in English on the topic "Money", "Money - a source of satisfaction or problems."
Other topics for discussion essays "for" and "against" (for and against essay):
- Money
When I went to flight school, I had to learn the pilot's language. Soon I was saying words like altimeter, aileron and rudder. When I moved on to helicopters, I used various words such as cyclic, collective, and rotors. I couldn't succeed as a pilot if I didn't know these words. The same is true for studying language of money.
If you want to be rich, you must learn to talk about money like rich people do. When will you learn to understand language of money, you won't have to worry about money anymore. By taking a little time each day to learn money words, you have a better chance get rich.
More importantly, by learning the words of money, you will reduce the chances of being fooled by money false prophets who preach the old rules of money: save money, buy a house, get out of debt, and invest your money for the long term in a well-diversified portfolio of mutual funds.
The good news is that it won't cost a lot of money to learn vocabulary. In fact, you can learn most of them for free by researching the Internet, reading financial books at the library, and viewing financial news.
Knowledge begins with words
Since money is knowledge, it follows that knowledge begins with words. Words are the fuel for our brains, and words shape our reality. If you use the wrong words, bad words, you will have bad thoughts and a bad life. Using bad words is like putting bad gas in a good car.
But words alone are not enough. They are simply a manifestation of your thinking. Changing your mindset starts with changing your words. Below are words from people with different mindsets using the Cash Flow Quadrant.
Employee (E)
A person who comes from the (E) quadrant might say, "I'm looking for a safe, secure job with good pay and excellent benefits."
Words like these tell me that a person's core value is safety in the face of fear. For them, the idea of security is often more important than money.
Employees can be presidents of companies... or janitors. .
Self-employee (S)
A person who comes from the (S) quadrant might say, “My rate is $75 an hour.” Or, “My normal commission rate is six percent.” Or, “I can't find good people to work on this project. "
Those in the (S) quadrant like to be their own boss or "do their own thing." When it comes to money, those in the (S) quadrant do not like to be dependent on other people for their income. If they work, they expect to be paid for their work. On the other hand, they understand that if they don't work, they don't deserve to get good money. They are fiercely independent souls.
Business Owner (B)
A person operating from quadrant (B) might say: "I'm looking for a new president to start my company."
Those in the (B) quadrant are almost opposite to those in the (S) quadrant. They like to surround themselves with people who can do the job better than they can. Their true motto is: "Why do it yourself when you can hire someone to do it for you and they can do it better?"
Those in quadrant (B) like to work in their company and hire smart people.
Investors (I)
Anyone working in the (I) quadrant might say, “Is this my cash flow based on internal rate of return or net rate of return?”
Investors make money with money. They don't have to work because their money works for them. Because of this, they know how money works. They understand the language of money and they speak it fluently.
What do your words say about you?
Have you ever thought about the words you use? A good exercise this week is to reflect on your words. Know what you say and how you say it.
The same is true for those you work with or who work for you. Listen to their words this week as well.
After all, our words are good indicators of what is truly important to us.
The student asked the Master:
— How true are the words that money does not buy happiness?
He replied that they were completely correct. And it's easy to prove. For money can buy a bed, but not sleep; food, but no appetite; medicines, but not health; servants, but not friends; women, but not love; home, but not home; entertainment, but not joy; education, but not intelligence. And what is named does not exhaust the list.
(Parable of unknown origin)
For centuries, humanity has been looking for an answer to the question: does money bring happiness?
Researchers from different countries claim to have found the answer. Economists, trying to answer this question, assume that the more money the seller receives or the more the buyer saves, the more satisfied (or, you could say, happy) he will be. Economists' conclusion: the more money you have, the happier you are.
But, according to scientists, a refutation of this can be the lives of depressed stars, suicides of general directors, “loser tycoons and other unhappy people.” “Psychologists have been studying the relationship between well-being and happiness for decades,” writes Harvard University psychologist Daniel Gilbert in his best-selling book Stumbling on Happiness.
And they came to the conclusion that money can make people happier when it comes to moving from extreme poverty to the middle class, but it doesn’t have a significant impact later on.” Can money buy happiness? Many philosophers and idealists, alien to pragmatism, will answer: “No way!”
But there is also a very good slogan: “Those who say that money cannot buy happiness are simply spending it wrong.” So - here's a contradiction. And where can you find the answer, how can you understand whether it’s true or not, that money can’t buy happiness? In this article I will try to consider all the pros and cons of a pragmatic approach to life and draw a conclusion about whether happiness can be bought.
Psychologists and economists have been struggling for years to find answers to questions like “Why, the more money we have, the more we want?” or “Why doesn’t buying your dream home, car or cell phone bring more than a moment of joy?” The answer to these questions is simple: we can never be satisfied with what we have. We always dream of earning more - we are sure that then we will become happier.
But as soon as we get a promotion, we understand that there is no happiness (or at least there is no more of it). The more money we have, the less joy it brings us. In addition, as soon as we provide ourselves with everything necessary to satisfy basic needs, more funds than we need for this will not add to our happiness.
And this happens for the following reasons.
What you shouldn't buy:
A luxury car: you will surprise only your neighbors, and only with your narcissism. Don't forget that expensive purchases give you a feeling of joy, but not for long. - Expensive wine: in fact, you are unlikely to feel the difference between an expensive and not so expensive drink, but you will only increase your spending. - Anything on credit: Constant use of credit will force you to get used to a lifestyle that you can hardly afford. Moreover, you will have to limit yourself in everything - this is the price for serious purchases on credit.
Here is a list of the happiest nations
(the percentage shows the number of respondents who claim that they are absolutely happy). Australia - 46%, USA - 40%, Egypt - 36%, India - 34%, UK - 32%.
In addition, there are countries whose residents consider themselves very unhappy:
Hungary - 35%, Russia - 30%, Turkey - 28%, South Africa - 25%, Poland - 24%.
What does a good life consist of? Here's what people answer to this question: health - 84%, own home - 60%, children - 48%, interesting work - 46%, free time - 36%, spacious yard or garden - 22%, luxury or second car - 19 %, the latest electronic devices - 19%. So, I think these lists are enough to give you an idea of what, in general, people want to feel happy.
I hope this article helped you understand whether you are truly happy or not, and what exactly you need to achieve this. Set your priorities and be happy!
There are many sayings of great people about. Their words inspire, make you think, make you want to argue, and sometimes just laugh. But they are all extremely interesting.
“A different language is a different vision of life.”
(Federico Fellini)“Knowing many languages means having many keys to one lock.”
(Voltaire)“To speak another language means to have a second soul.”
(Charlemagne)
“Whoever does not know foreign languages does not know anything about his own.”
(Wolfgang Goethe)“Without knowing foreign languages, you will never understand the silence of a foreigner.”
(Stanislav Jerzy Lec)“To learn the customs of any people, try to first learn their language.”
(Pythagoras of Samos)“Only having mastered the original material, that is, our native language, to the possible perfection, will we be able to master a foreign language to the possible perfection, but not before.”
(F. M. Dostoevsky)“Money speaks a language that is understood by all nations.”
(Afra Behn)“England and America are two countries divided by one language.”
(George Bernard Shaw)“You need to know English! Even the stupidest Englishmen know him quite well.”
(Lev Landau)“The difference between languages is so great that the same expression seems rude in one language and sublime in another.”
(John Dryden)“Some words are so long that they can be seen in perspective. When you look along a word like this, it tapers towards the end, like the rails of a railroad track.”
(Mark Twain)“For language learning, free curiosity is much more important than formidable necessity.”
(St. Augustine)“Language cannot be bad or good... After all, language is only a mirror. The same mirror that it’s stupid to blame.”
(Sergey Dovlatov)“People who learn foreign languages with ease most often have a strong character.”
(Ludwig Börne)“Foreign languages are beautiful when you don’t understand them.”
(Kurt Tucholsky)“The study of many languages fills the memory with words instead of facts and thoughts, while it is a receptacle that each person can perceive only a certain, limited mass of content. Further, the study of many languages is harmful in the sense that it arouses the belief in the possession of some special abilities and actually gives a person a certain seductive appearance in communication; it is harmful, moreover, and indirectly - in that it interferes with the acquisition of thorough knowledge and the desire to earn the respect of people in an honest way. Finally, it undermines the more refined linguistic sense of the mother tongue; thanks to this, the latter is irretrievably deteriorated and destroyed.”
(F. Nietzsche)“A man who does not know other languages, unless he is a genius, is bound to have defects in his ideas.”
(Victor Hugo)"The dictionary is based on the hypothesis - apparently unproven - that languages are composed of equivalent synonyms."
(Jorge Luis Borges)“Belladonna: in - a beautiful lady; c - deadly poison. A striking example of the identity inherent in two languages.”
(Ambrose Bierce)“The limits of my language are the limits of my world.”
(Ludwig Wittgenstein)“If you talk to a person in a language that he understands, you are talking to his head. If you speak to him in his native language, you speak to his heart."
(Nelson Mandela)“One language leads you into the corridor of life. Two languages open all doors along this path.”
(Frank Smith)“Knowledge of languages is the door to wisdom.”
(Roger Bacon)“Change your language and you will change your thoughts.”
(Karl Albrecht)“Language is not a genetic gift, it is a social gift. By learning a new language, you become a member of a club - a community of native speakers of that language.”
(Frank Smith)“The whole sum of human wisdom is not contained in just one language.”
(Ezra Pound)“No person should travel until he has learned the language of the country he is visiting. Otherwise, he voluntarily makes himself a big child - so helpless and so ridiculous.”
(Ralph Waldo Emerson)“The more languages you know, the less likely you are to become a terrorist.”
(To Upaman Chatterjee)
1.2.2. Social functions of money
Lack of money makes a person freer,and therefore more dangerous. Folk wisdomIsolating functions in the subject under study allows us to determine the target aspect of their use. In sociology, the following main social functions of money are distinguished:
1. Historical and cultural, reflecting national identification. However, in the context of globalization, national characteristics are being erased. Since 2002, the euro has become the single currency unit in 12 countries of the European Union. This is one of the negative aspects of the globalization process, which erases the traditional social function of money - historical and cultural.
2. Status function. It reflects the influence of money on the social status of an individual as an integrative indicator of a person’s position in society. Money has always largely determined a person’s position and social opportunities.
3. Social stratification function reflects the influence of money on the steady social differentiation of society in terms of income and quality of life, which leads to social polarization into the poor and the rich. This phenomenon has been defined as a “social rift.”
4. Regulatory-behavioral function regulates social and interpersonal relationships between people depending on their level of wealth and determines the individual’s choice of model of economic behavior.
5. Conflict function. Its essence is that money acts as the basis for the emergence of social tension and conflict situations in society, which can reach the scale of social conflict.
6. Moral function money is very contradictory. Money, on the one hand, inflames people’s base feelings: greed, avarice, self-interest, the desire for profit and enrichment at any cost, even to crime, and leads, as a rule, to corruption and large-scale criminalization of society. On the other hand, money serves as a stimulus for economic freedom and economic activity, a person’s labor behavior, and the basis of his moral and psychological comfort and self-confidence. Depending on the moral principles that guide a person when determining basic life values, different moral types of personality can be distinguished (Sillaste G.G., 2004, pp. 235-237).
Recognizing the many functions of money, as well as the legitimacy of various approaches to their allocation and classification, S.B. Abramova (2009) identified seven of the most important ones, the study of which can essentially cover the subject field of the sociology of money.
1. The function of maintaining the stability of the economic and social structure of society. Money is “responsible” for the processes of social stratification, which in specific societies take the form of social polarization... or the form of open social structures, a society of “equal opportunities”... Money can destroy the individual and the system where they do not have a chance to fully realize both economic and social functions.
2. Function of universalization of alienation. ...money as an attribute of a market society participates in the expansion of the material world. This gives rise, as E. Fromm wrote, to a tendency for plastic and superficial thinking to predominate: in the world of ideas - diverse but shallow knowledge; in the sphere of personality formation - of a “market” nature; at the social level - fragmented communication... Moral and practical elements are being squeezed out of everyday life, monetarization is intensifying... The basic characteristic of modernity stems from the fact that people cannot have connections in which money is not present.
3. The function of money as a means of achieving various goals, a tool for pragmatic solving social problems. … Money takes a dominant role in the hierarchy of means of achieving goals: the field of objects associated and valued by money grows, and money itself loses its specificity, becoming an instrument for anything. The internal contradiction of money lies in the fact that, being an absolute means of exchange, it becomes an absolute goal for people, and all other goals become their means. Money reduces all scales of value to a scale of monetary value.
4. The function of personality socialization, development of abilities and self-realization of a person. … Money fills the will of a person with material power and at the same time creates a social mechanism for its implementation, but they are indifferent to what this will is directed towards. At the same time, money as a means of realizing will is not passive - it creates or destroys the person himself, influences the prioritization and spiritual orientation of the individual... According to W. James, personality in the broad sense is the “I” plus capital and cash, the change of which inevitably leads to transformation of "I".
5. The function of comparing and assessing the place of an individual, a social community in the social structure. Money provides one of the basic human freedoms - the right to inequality. Money acts as an indicator of a person’s position among other people.
6. Function of mass media, agitation and propaganda. On the one hand, this aspect concerns the design of money... On the other hand, money is one of the symbols of the country, often more famous than the flag and anthem, both within the state and outside its borders.
7. Function of forming a money culture. This function can be considered as a final one, summarizing the “work” of all functions of money (Abramova S.B., 2009, pp. 137-140).
N.N. Zarubina (2005), based on the works of G. Simmel and S. Moscovici (1998), identifies the following social functions of money:
1) Society integration. Almost the only real socially integrating force lies in the processes of exchange and money as their means. Money turns out to be the basis of society and its essence, turning a mass of disconnected individuals into a social whole.
2) Mediation of interaction between a person and the objective world. In “market” societies, money establishes a person’s connection with the objective world, bypassing his sociocultural identity. A world in which connections are mediated by money is much larger and more diverse than a world based on natural, interpersonal or ideological connections. A traditional community consumes only what is produced within it; with the introduction of market relations, people gain access to everything that money can buy, goods and products, information and services.
3) A universal means of communication. The language of money is understandable to everyone and everywhere, like music and mathematics, it does not need translators or intermediaries.
4) Social equalization of people. Money, due to its abstractness and universality, has the ability to equalize people. Thanks to money, the individual is personally liberated from the mass of social, moral, and ideological ties, and the path to satisfying any desires and needs is simplified. On this basis, G. Simmel gives money the meaning of an emancipatory force.
5) Integration of a person into society. Money has the ability to connect people with each other. People who are strangers and have nothing in common with each other can come into contact through money - mutually useful and necessary: this, in fact, is what all life in modern society consists of. Everyone who has money can find their place in it, and poverty is terrible not just because of the extreme poverty of existence, but also because it instantly turns a person into an outcast, standing outside of society. Money thus creates the prerequisites for the integration of the individual into society. This property of money explains, in particular, the phenomenon of entrepreneurial activity of ethnic and religious minorities that has long been known to sociologists.
6) Formation of human identity. Possession of money is a pass to the esoteric circle of initiates, opposed to all other communities, including the national and religious majority. As a way of self-identification, money also determines personality traits. People who focus their lives on money themselves begin to acquire the properties inherent in money: indifference to the cultural and social characteristics of the environment and high mobility, they feel “at home” everywhere, do not know borders and barriers, quickly moving to where big profits are expected . Since money grows in the process of circulation, its acceleration requires a person to be able to increase the intensity of life, to “compress” time, performing a greater number of operations per unit.
7) Expanding social connections. The development of long-distance social connections is to the detriment of neighbors. Modern people are more likely to establish contacts with the most distant subjects, protecting themselves from the risk of excessive intimacy and reserving the opportunity to terminate relationships at any time. It is in the sphere of long-distance relationships that monetary rationality flourishes: not bound by stable moral and psychological obligations and emotions, a person is free to acquire, increase, and save money.
8) Updating trust/distrust in society. By alienating most personal social connections, money actualizes trust—the basis of a person’s relationship with it as an abstract expert system. This is trust not in the subjects of specific relationships or in a specific monetary unit, but in money in general, which is universally and unconditionally recognized as a universal equivalent, a means of realizing any goals, achieving any desires. But “trust in money” is fundamentally different from trust and faith in the traditional sense, since it implies an awareness of constant risk associated with fluctuations in exchange rates, the collapse of stock quotes, the collapse of banks, the machinations of unscrupulous businessmen, etc. Constant vigilance, attention to changes in the financial situation and readiness to immediately respond to them are a characteristic feature of a modern person, regardless of profession and financial situation.
9) Universalization and complication of man. This does not mean the richness of the spiritual life of the individual, his creative potential, etc., but the need and opportunity to focus on various goals and perform various, unrelated roles. In place of a holistic, integrated person of a traditional community (only as a member of it did he become a worker, owner, master, enter into friendly, family, power and other relationships, production for him is inseparable from consumption, work - from leisure, private life - from social) a partial individual comes; He does not devote himself entirely to any business or any goal, alternately acting as an employee, now as an owner, now as a spouse and parent, now as a voter, etc.
10) Transformation of rationality into a basic characteristic of modern culture. N.N. Zarubina, referring to M. Weber, notes that in Western culture rationalization takes on a cross-cutting and formal character, subordinating all spheres of life of society and the individual to a single logic, the most adequate expression of which is money, which does not have its own qualitative certainty. Thanks to total rationalization, methodism spreads to all spheres of human life - the habit of planning and breaking down any action into logical stages, separating subjective emotions, passions, attachments from objective conditions and consequences. Another manifestation of rationality is accuracy in assessing the benefits of everything from a business venture to marriage. Until monetary relations acquired a universal character, but were dissolved in non-alienated interpersonal connections, even in entrepreneurship and trade approximation reigned, and the objective and subjective aspects of activity were inextricably intertwined. Rationality, methodicality, accuracy become the most important virtues of modern man; a good, honest, reliable person is “a person worthy of credit.” (Zarubina N.N., 2005)
N.N. Zarubina notes that the dominance of end-to-end rationality of a formal nature has a reverse side of value irrationality: what is beneficial does not always correspond to ideas about goodness, nobility, honor, and even often contradicts them. What brings a lot of income is not always reasonable, beautiful, or moral.