Everything has a price, but not all prices appear on labels

I tried thinking about a possible angle to write around this movie, The Plan, but every turn of events had been a suitable one that I couldn't take one and leave the other. Possibly, by the time I am done, there will be lots of angles or just one. I decided the best way to find out which angle the universe wants me to share is to start writing. And here we are!
Everything has a price, but not all prices appear on labels.png
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When I first saw the three ladies, I envied them. I have always wanted to be friends with ladies I can trust but never actually succeeded. Backstabbing has been something I have gotten used to, especially with my gender so when you check, I have 99.9% friendship with guys instead of ladies. Sometimes I want to go out of my way and keep at least one girlfriend, but, it never ends well. So I have thrown my hands up in the air, accepting my fate.

So when I saw those ladies, I envied them, but the end proved that everything that happened to me while trying to keep friendships with ladies is a general thing and there's nothing really special about me.

You see, Kamara seemed to have had it all, a wealthy husband, good looks, and radiant energy around her. Mario struggles with giving birth but is married to a supportive husband. While Atika had no husband and did not seem to figure out life except playing second fiddle to the rest of the ladies and conniving to set Mario's marriage ablaze.

All through the movie, before the nature of each character was revealed, as always, I tried not to judge. In the end, I was happy I did not. This is because everyone had skeletons in their cupboard, and they all wrestled with their strength until a winner emerged.

You know, somewhere, I had thought the movie was trying to remind me that secretly building wealth as I have always talked about is the go-to means of sustaining and staying safe. For a single minute, I remembered, how Morgan Housel often said, **"Wealth is what you don't see" **. So as I saw Baba Jodda, I thought he was probably wealthy but hiding away in the guise of being a horse tender. Little I did know, my thoughts were wrong.

Another point, I taught the movie was trying to remind to stop taking everyone at face value. It turned out this was the highlight. It is the nature at which we trust other people when they show us or tell us what we want to see or hear. It is that sneaky spirit that wants to feel safe amongst the people that we call friends that makes us relax and believe what they say and what they do.

But you know as Robert Greene says, never put too much trust in friends, and always look for the results of their actions, not their intentions. Or should I remind you that Anne made sure I am fully aware that trust is the most valuable thing that I can give away? No! Surely, it was another evening to be reminded by the universe that the path of trust is so steep that one will need a lot of intelligence to safely cross to the other side.

And you know when it comes to money, trust is very valuable. A lot of our characters are revealed when we get into a lot of money. I first learned that money doesn't change people, it reveals them in the movie, Hacker. It was there that I began to start paying attention to how people react to less or more money especially when it's an amount they did not earn but felt entitled to.

In this movie, The Plan, I saw entitlement written all over the faces of the characters. Alhaji Badugu, the instigator of all these moves, Kamara's friends, and even Uncle Baddo's grandchild, AK. Each person wanted a piece of the pie that they did not lift a finger to earn. It was easy money so they killed, betrayed, swindled, and did all manners of things to keep a portion to themselves.

Everyone's lives were interwoven in this game without the players realizing.

This was a mere movie. But the lessons were beyond the screen and script. It was reality. It was a lesson in taking control of our greed and learning to be contented with what we have. As it stands, Morgan Housel called it reducing our ego, and increasing our humility.

The lesson was registered to the point that I was fully reminded how the movie, Good Girls taught me never to envy what other people have because I might not know the story behind it. Everyone outright lied, faked, and tried to keep up with the Joneses. And we all know how these things end. They never end well!

The idea of knowing when we have enough and being contented to not want more in a way that motivates us to make bad financial decisions is something that should have been ingrained into us from childhood. No, we can't blame the system anymore but as adults or people who have come to understand fully well the perceptions around money, we could do better. We could change the narrative around our financial principles and seek to be better at dealing with those negative energies that seek to destroy relationships every time money is introduced.

Those energies set the sparks of envy, and enmity flying when it seems one person is having more than we do. Instead of allowing bitterness to blind us to devising terrible means to take from others and give to ourselves without properly earning it, we should learn to work for the things that we want.

We should understand that hard work pays better in the long run than trying to take what is simply not ours.

It was the biggest lesson of them all.

Hard work and Contentment!

Why? Nothing's free!

Everything has a price! Pay yours forward!