Spending money feels kinda gross sometimes. Is that just the effect of living under capitalism and sensing the weight of society, or is there something more behind it?
It's not just misspend money, even well spend money is strange. There is a certain impulse to hoard the money, a kind of voice in us that tells us to only buy the things most necessary, and it's difficult to tell apart if that's ideology of rational parsimony, trauma or a distraught headmate not getting what they want. We know in a sense that it's not true; we can't save ourselves by saving money, and we aren't rich anyway, but all these comparisons are moot in respect of life experience.
But it's not just that. In this experience of buying all of society is present _in this reflection of ourselves_. It's this terrifying experience of actually being caught, of realizing, that whatever we might do, we will not escape this reality, only shuffle the chairs on the deck. It is this deep realization not just of the scam, but of the desire in the scam.
Wanting to be scammed is weird. We obviously don't want to be taken advantage of by someone else's desire to deprive us; but if we deprive ourselves, be it by incompetence, inaction or greed, it's hard to moralize. Rather, there is a certain desire for the thing I get in recompense of being scammed; I buy something I want, but at the prize of money, of a limited resource I should, in theory, rationally partition. There is this competing desire between the want for the thing and the want for control; the tension between impulse buys and budgeting. But this not just as a question of decision (that would be trivial), but as a question of desire itself, of these very different kind of desires that form the tensions also between us headmates.
Much like theoretical desire, practical desire is torn even in the same action. Doing something might be rational and wantful, but the wantfulness irrational and the rationality unwanted. This tearing-apart of practical desire, this intense indecision even after having decided, for what reason to decide, is at the core of this specific kind of disgust at spending money, that it connects desires far outside even accountability, let alone justification, to a kind of rationality that is colder than any individual desire can measure. And yet, we have to participate in it.
This then connects to what I call "regretless regret". I regret my decision - that is, my indecision looms heavily over my past then - but actually it is not the decision itself, but the combination of opposing, of incommensurable goals, that drove it; as much as I don't regret the outcome, I must regret the act, this externalization of mind, this simplification of all my desires into this base form - to posess - and then even more, this weird enjoyment over a formal act! having made a decision can create such a relieve, but it can't explain why it was taken, and yet, it justifies, to the mind yet just still wondering, exactly that decision it is still contritious over. That might also be part of this strange regret; a kind of overpowering of the contradictions of goals by the reality of wanting and doing.
That's all very fine and good, but it doesn't help us. We still make sometimes bad decisions, even if they aren't regrettable, and the way something good is reached can be horrible, even if not immoral. The only way I have found dealing with this is to seperate the act from the experience. In this case, the experience of buying has all sorts of elements that the formal act of money transfer hasn't, such as time and place, ease, confusion, state of mind etc. Having made a buying decision badly doesn't mean having made a bad one; the act is formal, not subjective, is out there, not in our experience. Practical desire becomes real in its realization of itself; and it's the double meaning of that word - as self-consciousness as well as self-actualization - that is at the core of our confusion. We think we have actualized all we want, only seeing the formality of our very action, the emptyness of the transfer of worldy and intellectual currency, unable to represent that it was meant to be, falling down to be consciousness as emptiness. In this sense, our "self-realization" is stuck in reflection, doesn't want to actualize itself and cuts of the means for that.
Yet, we are doing something, even in thinking and reflecting. It's just a shame that it doesn't explain us what it also stops is from doing. In this sense then desire is the most mysterious of forces; that it doesn't describe, even to itself, what is was made out and from. Rather, our desire is itself this contradiction of aversion-attraction, attraction-aversion; and to want _that_, and to be that want itself (if a self is more a want than a think, which seems clear to me), then creates the very contradictions it was made to avoid. And then there's tension in that.
Maybe that tension is this strange disgust of having to deal with the world. It's not particularly strong, but it does create a strange tension to action itself. If it's a tension _within_ action, then however we already act, in this strange position of desire. And it's the very way this acting and desiring is acted out that is the basis for its later categorizations; only in its contradictions does then truly shine through the slush of reality.