if I were a rich man

A former coworker asked how it was going, and I told him that I was having one of the best times of my life. All I had to do was not be working!

We agreed that the world would be a different place if more people could be beyond the daily grind. I realize that it's a facile assertion, and that as he said, nine people out of ten wouldn't know what to do with freedom, but it left me thinking. What would I do if I had money? It's not something I've seriously considered before, but having thought about over the course of the afternoon I came to some realizations.

if I were independent
I'd be doing exactly what I'm doing now. Building new businesses to match the opportunities I see, and seeing what I could turn into a profitable source of income.

Also I'd start an import business with fingers in every kind of area. Here in Japan, many things are not available or are too expensive. I could go around fixing that, one by one.

if I were a millionaire
Probably work less. Maybe 1/2 of my week would be on "work". The other half would be on writing, and I'd crank out both fiction and non-fiction.

And I might relocate to a farm to learn how to grow rice. For real! I'm the first generation in the Werneburg line not to make a living on the land and that disturbs me. Because quite frankly, the work I've done to date has added little value to things that were sustainable in the long-term. I mean to say that I've been a leech.

Besides, I think there's a future in farming. We're in a world where food prices are unstable and reserves are diminishing, yet hard-won farmland goes unused in places as far apart as southern Japan and central Canada. It's madness.

if I were a billionaire
I'd get into manufacturing and farming. Seriously! I would buy farmland in Japan like it's going out of style (which it has). Then I'd twist arms with the government (billionaires do that) and get countless immigrants from China and SE Asia to come and farm for me. I'd work on whittling away Japan's isolationism and turn it into a model for integrating immigrants. Probably by starting with a free language school that offers (micro?)loans and maybe even mortgages.

At the same time, I'd start seriously manufacturing things in a sustainable fashion. Not things like cars and televisions. Wooden furniture and toys. Clothes made of cotton and hemp and linen and wool and not polyester. And cameras that put fun results before bells-and-whistles. I'd make sexy retro film cameras and sell them to students at an outrageous loss.

And I'd have an R&D arm that researches effective solar-powered energy capture (not this farce of hyperexpensive and resource-pillaging silicon-in-glass). And I'd research trolleybuses and means of making moduar homes out of used stuff. My used-stuff homes would come with a thirty-year guarantee.

And I'd look for ways of extracting energy from petroleum —imagine a process of getting the energy out of crude oil without wastefully refining and then burning it. Something tells me it's possible.