Greetings musers!
Today's topic is something near and dear to my heart the sordid topic of coin! Unless you're a new reader, you already know that I work two jobs to make my financial goals. desire, intent and dedication to succeed financially. Well my friends this desire, intent and dedication to succeed financially has finally crossed over into wow! I pulled in about 1k in auctions between Sunday morning and afternoon, and put more auctions up this morning as well. I know to some of you this is a non-news as you're already masters of high finance. But to me this is a big deal. In fact it's a HUGE deal.
You see in my ideal self I'm beyond money. I'm almost aesthetic about it I have enough, I'm not greedy I feel like I should rise above it. This view helps me keep WOW in perspective (as I've said to people who've I've given gold to "It's just digital imaginary numbers"
In the real world I was once the same way, but reality, hard cruel pwing reality taught me otherwise. Frankly, I was almost delusional. Part of this was my own self-deception, and part was due to my grooming. I was being skilled up that I would be a learned man, a man who's skills and knowledge would mean that I could afford to have others watch out for me. This belief was re-enforced by several factors. The primary one was my upbringing I had literally been raised by my family with no concept of finances beyond the abstract, and thinking back on the matter I even recall that when I was curious about daily money matters my family eschewed me for not focusing on my studies
So now we flash forward, I'm in my mid-late 20's and practicing Aikido on a daily basis, I share a apartment with a roommate & I've become fairly self-sufficient. Still though my family is telling me that while I was self-sufficient now, after I grew up a bit more I would have other take care of my finances for me. To add to this In my martial arts practice I saw what my family discussed actually being carried out. First in my readings on Aikido (O-Sensei's son handled the dojo day to day business,) and in my own dojo with my Sensei's wife handling money matters. After all they were above petty dirty common details like payment & left that to others (course now I don't think highly of this.) but back then it made perfect sense to me.
I think the high point of this way of approaching finances was in 2003 when I bought my car. I didn't negotiate for it, I didn't haggle for it, the whole transaction was handled by my family. I came in, shook the dealers hand, went into the finance office, signed on the line and drove off. Of course though I learned (as many creative people do) that if you have others handle your fiance's hijinks's will ensue. So I learned grew up moved on. etc. etc.
Except in World of Warcraft.
In WOW a war has raged about in-game finances between my ideal self and real self for a long long time. I really noticed though back when 2.4 launched. Like now I was teaching 15-20 hours a week, and because of the requirements to raid I only had time to do SSO dailies. After a couple of weeks of SSO dailies I found that I had a huge surplus if money (at the time over 5k.) I didn't know what to do with all this gold, so I blew a lot of it: 20 slot bags, recipes, pets etc. I then went horde for the summer & spent the fall farming a wintersaber mount & doing old school raids since I had already seen the WOTLK beta.
After lich king launched. I found a comfortable balance of gold (1800-2k) I didn't feel rich, but I didn't feel poor either. I was OK. I knew that unlike other players who focused on heroic runs & raids so much that that they were perpetually broke.
I was happy like this until yesterday, something changed I don't know what it was but something clicked that synced my real world views on finances with my digital views on them. I do know what the catalyst for it was though. Yesterday morning I had an early tutorial (9am) so I decided to farm wintergrasp for eternals.
As I was farming I found out from my guild that eternals were no longer were as valuable as they had been. This stunned me, because I had a stockpile of them in my bank in case I needed them to trade for goods or services. But instead of bemoaning how things change, I decided to sell all my eternals on the ah along with the other items of vaule that were just gathering digital dust. In the mix I checked flasks and saw that I could make a killing selling them. And for a moment I hesitated because part of me wanted to be above commerce, but I then reconciled my ideal with the real. Between tutorials I logged in checked the mailbox and found 1000 gold waiting for me.
So today's another day & now Fenris has a new elixir master selling his wares on the market.
Where I'll be tomorrow though is another matter
Until another day
The Musing Moonkin
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