Your Better Self with Akanna: Sex & Money

We live in a world that incentivizes us to connect with one another.  Our natural inclination is to do things for ourselves and not care about how they affect others; to drift apart instead of staying bound together.

So every now and then, a disaster – be it natural or man-made – happens to bring us together again; forcing us to care about each other and to help one another get through the pain.  Our actions also have consequences that affect others, not just ourselves, forcing us to consider how others may be affected.

But these are external forces that bring us to care for or connect with other people.  There are internal forces too; desires that burn inside of us, that urge us to want to connect with others in order to fulfill them.

Sex and money are two supreme urges that incentivize us to connect with other people.  In the pursuit of either, another person is needed.

We know that ‘it is not good for man to be alone’, but does the primal man know this?  He knows that if you were to boil down his basic needs to two things; it would be the need for food and the need for sex.  He knows this because of how he feels when deprived of either.  He knows that he needs money to be able to purchase food, and a partner to be able to have sex.

So, his basic needs can be summed up in sex and money.  And in order to meet these needs, he has to form a connection, create an interaction, and engage in collaboration with at least someone else.  That’s the world’s way of incentivizing its inhabitants to connect with one another – by making the urges to have money and sex both impossible to satisfy without the involvement of someone else.

We see that it’s ultimately good for society too, not only for the individual.  Rightly done, sex is within the context of marriage.  This leads to the birth of children and the formation of a family, which is the bedrock and basic unit of every society – the family, not the individual, is.  This creates a conducive environment through which individuals are introduced to the world, and are given the necessary love, care, affection and stability required to become productive contributors to everyone else – to society.

Rightly done, money is earned within the context of a transaction between two or more people.  One person has a need to fill, while the other has the ability to fill that need with the hopes of being compensated for it.  This transaction could lead to the birth of a partnership or business, through which individuals are given the opportunity to contribute to society by adding value within the company, which in turn supplies that value to everyone else – to society.

Within the right contexts, sex and money have the potential to bring everyone together in the most beneficial ways to them as individuals and to society in general.

Now, when the two are combined together – within those right contexts – the most powerful entities the world would see could emerge.  Like sex brings about families and money brings about businesses, sex and money brought together under the right roof can create the most powerful family businesses, huge juggernauts that have the power to create lasting legacies and dynasties.

On the other hand – within the wrong contexts – sex and money brought together can create the worst things.  Prostitution, which does more harm than good to society, is a coming together of sex and money where the parties involved are primarily concerned with meeting their own individual needs for either sex or money.  The need of the other party is of secondary importance.

Making love or making money gives maximum pleasure to the parties involved when each person is primarily consumed with making it pleasurable for the other.  With sex, when the other party enjoys it, you enjoy it more.  With money, when your boss’ or customer’s needs are met, you feel good about collecting that pay.  When this is not the case, only harm and false pleasure result as in the cases of rape and theft.

We live in a world that works best when we are primarily concerned with doing to others what we would like to be done to us.  And the right contexts for having sex and making money provide us the opportunity to apply this golden rule.  It is the world’s way of incentivizing us to care, communicate, collaborate and connect.