While channel flicking last Sunday, I hit on a music show and heard the following lyrics sung by pop star Travie McCoy: “I wanna be a billionaire so fricking bad… I wanna be on the cover of Forbes Magazine smiling next to Oprah and the Queen.”
Later that night, watching Carte Blanche, I caught a story about a so-called businessman who claimed he could make R460-million from accommodating tourists in Soweto schools during the World Cup. He managed to get a whopping R10-million in investments from the schools themselves, township residents and “service providers”. There his victims were, on television now, expressing their anger that — surprise, surprise — the entrepreneur is missing in action with their investments.
Watching these angry folk in their modest clothes and humble surroundings, I couldn’t help but wonder how they got the hundreds and thousands of rands they gave to the thieving clown. He had promised each investor that there would be at least R2-million in returns. I’m certain some must have emptied their savings, while others probably begged and borrowed in an effort to get rich quick. They’d obviously never dwelled on the words “this sounds too good to be true”.
It’s no great observation that our lives are governed by the need for instant gratification. Notions of instant wealth, fame and beauty make people lose touch with reality. We see ordinary people playing games on television and winning millions. On the internet YouTube shows us singing preteens rapidly thrust into fame and fortune. On the street we see young people driving by in luxury cars once they’ve moved to Jo’burg. And we look on enviously at the lives of officials and politicians. Fortunately, some of them also show us the reality of the flipside — that what goes up quickly, comes down even faster. Ask Khaya Ngqula and Jackie Selebi. Short cuts are short cuts … to humiliation.
We have to keep a check on reality. We live in a country bursting at the seams with opportunity, where there is room to do things that have never been done before, and we continually have to affirm how lucky we are.
I began to wonder about this last week, as I sat on the half-built rooftop of Main Street Life in the city, sipping champagne from a Coca-Cola glass shared with a stranger and two of my friends. We had 360° views of Johannesburg and we sat there dreaming of the myriad ways we could make it into the history books with good ideas and hard work.
In retrospect, it may have been a naive moment made fuzzy by the bubbly and our youth. But the one thing that will never change with the times is the truth of the old saying “easy come, easy go”. Money is nice to have, but we are on the threshold of an era in which money is not the most important thing in life. Hopefully it will be an era in which value will be placed on helping others, looking after the planet and working hard at getting the things that make one truly happy.