Money and the Art of Losing Control: A story about friendship on the road or just a matter of time - Paperback

by Jan Anders Andersson (Author)

John, 46, meets Elsa, 86, and together they go for a hilarious trip to help their friend who has just returned from West Papua. The collision of their very different life experiences results in a strange dialogue in which John discovers new perspectives and solutions to life's big questions. On their rescue mission, their friendship matures through a number of unexpected trials.

Money and the Art of Losing Control is for those of you who are interested in how to make and spend money with a clear conscience and who would like to understand more about economics than you can learn at a university in Chicago. It is also for those of you who would like to know how religion, thermodynamics, humour, sex and philosophy can be combined into a simple working formula for a really good life.

For a philosophy of a complete life to prevail, it has to admit humanity.

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The Swedish Road to the MOQ

If you enjoy the films of Ingmar Bergman and the books of Robert Pirsig, you'll enjoy this book. It's often forgotten that much of Pirsig's second book, Lila. An Inquiry into Morals was written in a wood cabin on the Swedish coast. Money and the Art of Losing Control expands on the rather bleak atmosphere of the former to the knife edge of credibility. In a country that is cold and dark for much of the year, it should come of no surprise that the Swedish approach to life has developed an underlying black humour with a touch of stoicism and the rather uninhibited Scandinavian view (at least for my reserved English eyes) of human sexuality. You will not have to read too far in Mr Andersson's book to find all of these elements; often in combination.

Keeping in mind the caveat at the beginning of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance about it not being much concerned with motorcycle maintenance or Zen, you will be disappointed if you are looking to Money and the Art of Losing Control as a precise guide for making money. However, in the same way that Pirsig's book is a "meta-book" about motorcycle maintenance (in the sense of finding the best attitude of mind before engaging in this type of endeavour), you will likewise find Mr Andersson's book helpful in developing the right attitude for money making... Oh, and on the way (as we travel through the snowy Swedish forests with the happy couple of John and Elsa), it is also worth noting that included in the narrative are some useful insights about the good life as viewed through the prism of Robert Pirsig's "Metaphysics of Quality".

Dr Anthony McWatt
May 2012

Author Biography

I believe in science, love and reason. I had to write this book to find out how the four levels of MOQ can be defined and used practically. I found that the lowest common denominator of these levels is time. Saved time. Time is NOT money. Instead - money is SAVED time. Tremendous efforts are expended every day, globally, on making money, i.e. saving time for the customer. Much more effort than is spent on the thing that the saved time is intended to be used for. One can meditate for a long period on where this saved time originates from. To engage in that kind of meditation takes a lot of saved time. Saved time that is kept locked up and not used is worse than time wasted on things that don't directly give something back, like art, music, sleeping and dreaming - things that make life worth living. Saved time is also the ultimate basis for cosmological evolution, as the best way to arrange energy and particles in a vibrating string, atoms and molecules. As the best strategy for survival in competition with other species. As the best way to organize society and as the best way to explain what it's all about. Any event in our everyday life depends on the four levels of the MOQ and the differences between them. It was very amusing to find out what kind of trouble an uneven couple can get into regarding that. Deterioration through age is the reason events and individuals don't continue forever. Therefore every species has some kind of reproductive system so that commonly developed strategies can be handed down to fresh new copies of the group. Among humans, this is called sexual activity. In some retarded social areas, however, erotica and sexuality are banned from being discussed openly by those that are afraid of losing control, those who try to control society for their own benefit. These people do their best to keep you away from reality. They make you scared of it and they do what they can to turn you on with just about anything other than love, reason and your own desire. Don't let them rape your mind.