A very large elephant in all our rooms is money. I honestly don’t know anyone that money doesn’t either directly, or indirectly affect. From the largest “first world” nations to the smallest “third world” country it creeps in and has an impact on small and large decisions alike, be it our own personal ones or those of your nation. If you ask most people, they will tell you that money is a good thing, or even a great thing. Without money nothing would get done, and not because there was no work, or no raw materials available, but because no one would ever be motivated to do anything without money. Money allows us to personally choose the things we want, to achieve our dreams, be it a new home, that classic car, or even go on that holiday. Money, so it’s said, is the cause of all of our technological advances. We have money to thank for bringing our country, state, city, town, the human species as it were, to the elevated level of living we “all” enjoy today. What I find funny is with money seemly being this huge deal for an adult life, why are there not classes required to understand, manage, and hopefully be successful with our money, given all throughout our grade school years?
What does money really represent? Time. Money is the measure of our work, our time given to someone, and they in return give us their “time” to pay us for work performed. I would say that those whom hold a lot of money are hoarding a bunch of peoples time, and somehow it became alright for people to hold mass amounts of it without actually using it. But lets go back to just the simple concept of money being equal to time. Say I do a side job that pays me 50 dollars flat, i agreed that my time lets say in 1980 was worth that. Now I never actually spend that 50 bucks but put it in a dresser and forget about it, it’s suddenly 2021 and I find that 50 bucks again. A pleasant surprise finding time lying around where you never expected huh? So in 1980 I also based the work involved, the length I would be doing it, and what I could actually reap from 50 bucks worth of time when I agreed to that payment. The shock is that my time, the 50 bucks, is no longer valued the same when I go to the store. For the sake of simplicity lets say I will purchase produce with it. Now why is that? Something called inflation. Eh? Alright, I already did the work in 1980, and a price was agreed to for what my work was worth, including what it would buy right? Otherwise you can pay someone one dollar for 8 hours of work… and that won’t happen in “first world” countries. So someone has decided that my time is not worth the same, the payer didn’t from 1980, and I certainly didn’t, so it’s not really the money that has been devalued, but my time I put into that 50 bucks. That’s insulting. And I can’t go ask the payer to make up for the loss to my time obviously, so then why can big business and governments ask me to pay to make up for theirs? Or better yet, keep making their time more valuable all the while devaluing my own time?
What does money really do? It has allowed us to trade our time, without actually working directly for the someone we are handing the money to. So in the past, I can make chairs, but you don’t need a chair, you milk cows and I need some milk, so I’m going to hand you my time in which you can then use that time for something you actually need. Makes sense on a small scale. Money rarely traded hands for the average person, as people grew things, made things, and did actually trade craft skills back and forth. Those actually collecting money (time) were normally governments of one form or another. Unfortunately what has happened is people realized very early on that collecting time allowed them to get what they wanted, large things, in essence they had all this money that had been stored off the time of others. As a species we really lack control over our lives, no say in governments big and small, and jobs are normally controlled by someone, so we all seek a sense of control with money. We all want our time to be valuable, otherwise why kill ourselves day in and out over it? From where I sit, money should be an easy way to trade time, but it has been complicated by those whom control it, change it’s value and thereby say how much our time is worth. Money has changed into being some type of middleman, literally. Money has also created jobs, but take away the money and the jobs make no sense, money jobs create nothing, they add nothing to the human species. Someone long ago learned to live off our time, not theirs because they aren’t engineering buildings, pouring roads, or cleaning our drinking water, but we gladly hand over our time to them, and they increase their own standard of living off our time. Think about this, the owner of Amazon doesn’t sit in a workshop and hand make the products he sells you, mainly workers in china do, He doesn’t maintain the website, engineers do, so he is living very well off other peoples time, but he’s not adding anything to the human species, he’s just adding more money to himself, which to be honest, he doesn’t need. Remove him from the picture, and the engineers and makers of the products are all still there. But he didn’t make the money system what it is, humans have been doing that since money was conceived.
What happens if we remove money from the picture? Bluntly, everything would just stop, and I mean everything. Nothing moves without money, computers make sure of that. People just wouldn’t understand what to do, because they expect money for whatever service is rendered. But lets look at this from another angle, if money is just a middleman for time, are all the resources say to build a house still sitting around? Are there still people whom know how to build it? Are the machines that are used in building this around? Yes, all these things are still there, but people just stop using the resources, the skills, and the machines because the money is gone. Seems a little insane right? We were building a bridge because a bridge needed to be built, we are no longer building due to the middleman to time. So if the people, the skills, and the need is there for a bridge, I think the bridge will still get built regardless of money. But as in an earlier post I stated that we should implement a Universal Basic Needs system, it’s hard for people to be motivated to do anything if they are hungry, homeless, and sick. And if the bridge being built leads to all those things, people will come in mass to ensure it’s built and built right.
Is money a positive motivator? It has it’s moments, but they are just that, moments. I would say the rest of the time, if we are all honest with each other, money is very oppressing, regressing, and depressing. I have to work, or I can’t survive, I don’t own some land I can grow a garden in, and I don’t have the money to buy a camper to put on it even if I did have the land, and more than likely I’d still need to pay for utilities of some type. Then there is money to chase education, for a better job to make more money, but you are already in debt from the education, then to get into more debt to buy a house that one will not pay off for 30 years. In that way I find money oppressing, work or you can’t eat, house, cloth, or enjoy technology. Again the camp for money say it fuels progress, but I don’t think so, I think it fuels skipping steps and missing discoveries because we are chasing the middle man. Money holds us to study what a big company will fund you to try to discover. Need an example? COVID vaccine. Why do we have so many vaccines, why isn’t there one well thought out 100 percent working safe vaccine for the species? Money. Each company wanted to be the one to corner the “market” on this medicine. Sad really. If it was about saving lives, we would have had one vaccine and the companies would share the money for the sells. A person may come up with a really great idea on paper that would be useful to an everyday person, but if a company won’t fund your idea through R&D it simply won’t go anywhere. Propaganda has been created by companies to sway the minds of the public to not use a material that was freely grown, and instead depend on synthetic material, of which the patent is held by the company creating the propaganda, which was the case with DuPont and Hemp. How is that progress? Seems as if money has simply stagnated human creativity on a massive scale, all to keep the money flowing up, which really has us stuck in almost a regression. When couples fight it’s normally about money. A website I checked out actually list “time” as the number one reason for couples to fight right before money. I find that interesting they separate the two, when I have presented here that money = time. If a person can’t reach their goals due to money it’s no small thing on our minds. How is money not depressing then? Money is no great positive motivator, it’s more like a slave driver. Is this all we are capable of, us mass of people here at the bottom of the money pyramid, chasing money hoping to get a level higher on the 5 major class groups? What do we want? Do we want our neighbors to be just as happy as we are? Could that not be a motivator instead? Improving the quality of life for our entire species and not just a lucky few whom get rich? Not just a lucky few whom own land and can build a house with a view and retire early?
As I write this, the USA has a federal minimum wage for 7.25 an hour. Am I worth so little to those whom are “elected” to run my country? When they decide to pay themselves more do they look at that 7.25 minimum wage figure and think, is this right? Is my time worth grossly more than the person whom comes and cuts back my hedges? When they set up free lifetime health benefits, do they look at pie charts of the people whom live there and think they aren’t deserving of free healthcare, they don’t work as hard. When they buy, who knows how many properties all over the world for them to stay in while and after they serve, do the numbers of people with no home at all in their own country just seem as background noise? They should have saved, probably all drunks, junkies, and crazies. Do they think we just didn’t try hard enough? This paragraph seemed to turn more ranty, but I suppose I wanted to convey the choices of those with control over the distribution of money, and how they actually quantify that others will have to find ways to pay for healthcare and massive hospital bills, and they will have lifetime free healthcare, when a lot of them are wealthy as it is. Money seems to have created mostly negativity, like greed, hoarding, and desire for those things we can’t yet afford. In recent years I started to realize that everyone will pull one over on you when it comes to money, doesn’t matter who they are, how close they are, if they perceive they deserve it more than you do, they won’t give it back, or will exploit it from you. And don’t think because they have money it keeps them from taking yours, if they are lacking they will strive to meet their needs the only way they have been taught growing up in the capitalist world, with money, be it theirs or yours. As a point, many people shoplift whom have the money to by what they are taking, it’s the thrill, feeling alive.
If the Universal Basic Needs and Education are sorted out one day, then the money system will be the next thing that has to go, and it will be fairly easy to do if we are already using computers to perform our Resource Management. Of course it would have to be phased out, but I’m sure it’s a system humans will be glad to give up once needs are being met through a system that strives to improve the lives of all whom live on this pale blue dot.
There are times I wish I could snap my fingers and show people how much better life can be, but I’m afraid like the small steps forward we have made in the past, it all happens with time, and since those whom hold most of that time in their bank accounts prefer to keep the status quo, achieving it seems most days as an insurmountable task. Hopefully our species comes to understand that life is too short to continue living this way and that it’s quite unsustainable. We will hopefully further decided to do a 180 towards a better way before all our time is sucked up into the hands of a few, and there is no more time left for us to change before the last page of human history is written and the book closed.