The Comedy of Money

Money is always funny, just never in the way you want it to be.

In January 2016 I thought a lot about money. I’ve written it in the diaries a dozen times in different ways:
"Rahaa ei ole. Money doesn’t exist."
or
"Olen köyhä, mutta ei se ole edes kiinnostavaa. I’m poor, but it’s not even interesting."

There’s something absurd in that. Poverty used to have a certain drama to it — the starving artist in the attic, the bohemian myth, the wine that was always just slightly sour but poetic. These days, it’s mostly just overdue invoices and the existential comedy of wondering if a 7 euro flat white counts as a reckless financial decision.

The money itself is abstract, almost fictional — numbers floating in apps, automated voices reminding you that “your payment is late,” promises that the next project, the next sale, the next miracle will fix it all.

And yet, art keeps happening. Somehow, the work finds a way through the gaps in the ledger, through the quiet panic of spreadsheets that don’t add up. Maybe that’s the real punchline: that creation persists even when the conditions for it make no sense at all.

Sometimes I imagine money as a side character in the Maa Kuu story — not a villain, but a kind of trickster: capricious, unreliable, occasionally generous in a way that feels almost cruel. You learn to laugh at it, or at least to smirk. Because what’s the alternative? To take it seriously? That way lies madness.

*"Rahaa ei ole." Money doesn’t exist. And yet the bills keep arriving, and the art keeps being made, and somehow the whole joke keeps telling itself.