This advent has been a time of much soul-searching in our household. Between the two of us we have been looking at what “life is all about”. Between us we have notched up a collective 16 years of university education during our married life and now we have recently [insert artistic license] become adults in a world that has moulded and shaped us into the people that we are. As I come towards the end of a curacy we may for the first time in our adult lives move to a place that we will be able to settle down in and call home. We may be able to leave behind the transient life we have known together since we were 18 years old and find a place that we will live in together for an extended period of time. The 8 dwellings we have lived in during our married life, often for little more than a year at a time will become a thing of the past.
And it is with this in mind that we realise we have become a product of the national educational system of our country of birth, England. We went to university in the late 1990’s when our country’s policy was to teach all of our young people to live in debt. The perceived wisdom from government was that we could all buy ourselves some happiness and economic growth. TV ads were predominantly for credit that was freely available and highly desirable. Those years of university education were predominantly paid for using a variety of state sponsored credit programmes.
This system has been designed to make us all desire more and more things in our lives to make us happy. We still live in a world that tells us we can buy happiness on interest free credit. We have been reevaluation where we stand in all of this….
