“Only in our dreams are we free. The rest of the time we need wages.” — Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters
I love this quote by Terry Pratchett. It struck me as soon as I read it, and often rings back into my mind.
What do you dream of?
If you had no need to worry about wages and paying the bills, what would you do with your time?
Life is time. And we know that work is us renting our time for others. What value we put onto that time is the wage we’ll accept. And we do our best to make it worth it.
But if you didn’t have to do that, if you could do anything you wanted and knew money wouldn’t be an issue, what would you do?
Terry always seeds societal glimpses and issues into his work. I love it. It inspires me. I love to add societal problems into my own writing too. Writing is telling stories about people, and these are issues of humanity.
Real, human issues.
There’s a lot of talk at the moment about people finding ways to live their own lives. To become entrepreneurs and use their skills for freelance. To carve their own paths to make wages in ways that might more closely align with their morals and dreams and goals.
One day, people reckon we might end up in a world where there are lots of small companies or solo trade workers, rather than massive groups of businesses.
Would that work for you?
Would that be a way we could get our wages and still get closer to our dreams?
It depends. Many dreams don’t fit into roles or skills, and many jobs that need doing are still basic, that no-one would call a dream. We’ll still need people to collect the rubbish, and still need people to clean.
So it’ll be that ever-cycling issue.
People live in their dreams, and collect wages.
But I think we’re getting closer. Just a little.
What would you do?
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