This week, someone in my network openly asked the following questions:
“What is your relationship with money?”
“What has it taught you?”
“What do you love, what do you hate?”
Two weekends ago, I was also asked by a new contact to look into the first question, and I fully intended to look into this—until life started rolling and I got swept up.
Seeing these questions this morning was a good reminder to finally check in and take a deeper look.
Instead of replying directly to the thread where the questions were posted, I thought I’d write an article that summarises my uncovered core beliefs and learnings about money— positive, neutral and negative aspects. Here it goes!
Money is a consensual, shared belief.
We all believe what money represents or it would not work. In my opinion, this is the first and foremost quality of money. It has value because we believe it does. And the more our beliefs are justifiable, the more we believe in it.
The negative side of belief shows when this belief in money becomes too tenacious, it can often cause people to act in ways that are irrational, greedy, damaging and not condusive to a positive society—simply because their believe in the value and importance of money is absolute and overinflated.
Also, the negative side to belief shows when money does not work — seen in in modern breakdown of national economies, such as Zimbabwe and Venezuela. When the breakdown of belief in money occurs, it causes a wider bedrock of trust within a nation to erode, or even to disappear entirely.
Money can represent trust.
When money works properly, we trust in it. We almost do not need to question our trust in it as it works so well. Having this level of trust is a type of freedom. And since trust is extremely valuable, high levels of trust further enables a base level of reliability and abundance within society.
The trust implicit in the concept of money allows for money to be used freely as a medium of exchange.
Some negative sides of the trust aspects are:
- Our absolute trust can be manipulated and mismanaged. For instance, money may be slowly devalued over time. When trust in money is nearly invisible we may not notice this slow erosion of value.
- We come to habitually rely on a type of trust that is counted, compared, measured and conditional. This reliance on the trust of money can errode, and interfere in more natural types of trust between people—including unconditional trust.
Money can represent free time.
I differentiate the concept of “free time” from “time”. Wealthy individuals can use money to buy (or simply demand) free time to spend how they wish. But money cannot buy additional time—at least not much, and not yet.
We often sacrifice our free time to earn money. Our ancestors—before money existed—did not sacrifice free time for money, and they often enjoyed ample free time. Their lives may have been shorter, but often could end up with more free time than our lives typically allow for. The money we earn can often represent sacrificed time—and what this sacrificed free time is worth.
The positive side of this is that reaching levels of financial abundance provides additional levels of freedom, providing the potential to express our lives more fully and authentically.
Some of the negative sides of this are:
- Freedom of time can be misspent and the potential for expression can be wasted.
- Manipulations, such as debt, speculation, and interest, may have us sacrificing far more free time than is authentically fair in terms of the value lost.
- If overall financial abundance is scarce, many of us may end up sacrificing much to only spend it on the exact thing we have lost—sometimes once re-earned our valuable life-force energy is now more depleted.
Money can represent energy.
Much of the value of money comes from the energy and free time it represents to earn it, as well as the energy and free time that can be employed by it once it is earned. This can come from the energy we personally give up, or may represent the energy that we utilise, such as livestock, electric, fossil fuels, solar, biological, nuclear etc.
The positive side of this, is that money allows for collected energy to be directed towards an activity, an endeavour or a cause that may be far greater that a single individual has the energy to give.
Some of the negative sides of this are:
- Energy may be depleted from individuals, animals, environment in a non-sustainable, destructive, or dishonourable way.
- Energy may be directed towards endeavours that do not serve everyone equally, or honouraby.
Money can represent our collective knowledge, experience and skills.
Often our collective knowledge, skills, and experience requires both time and energy to aquire. And furthermore—once acquired—this knowledge, experience and skills applied becomes trusted in. Once this work is done repeatedly—and with quality—others in society will start to trust in these abilities. Money is then tied to trusting in these abilities—often improving their value further.
The positive side of this is that it allows us to earn more money by increasing our knowledge, experience and skills. It gives each individual to potentially improve their lot in life.
Some of the negative sides of this are:
- Not all knowledge, experience and skills are valued fairly. Some skills might be extremely important to society (i.e. teachers) but do not get paid for the contribution they represent. After all, did “essential workers” in the Covid-19 pandemic get paid based on their contribution value? Do artists get paid compared to how much they enrich society?
- Skills, knowledge and experience can sometimes represent areas that merely manipulate and exploit society (i.e. gambling, career politicians, sub-prime mortgage broker). These positions can be paid well, while offering little true value to the essential, cultural, and fundamental aspects of our world and society.
Money can represent materials.
Often time and energy are combined with material goods to create additional levels of value.
This can be applied to raw materials, that are gathered and resold.
It can also be applied to manufactured material goods—which take the raw materials and adds time, energy, and collective knowledge, experience and skills.
A reputation for well-made materials adds the added value of trust.
The benefit of this material aspect of money is that it means that valuable goods can be provided as a service to others that represent all of the above qualities at best. It allows for materials to be created, used and valued accordingly.
Some of the negative sides of this are:
- Materials—like money itself—can be overvalued, overly coveted, and engender obsessive behaviour. Especially as material goods can encapsulate energy, time, quality and scarcity into an object—and therefore represent high levels of monetary value.
- Manipulations such as artificial scarcity, branding-oriented shallow levels of value can inflate the material value far more than is authentic.
- Materials can often not be sustainable, and high levels of demand (or greed) can be extremely harmful for the health of the planet and the psychological health of our society.
Money is a symbol.
Ultimately, money is a token that symbolises all of the above in a single concept that is believed by the masses. By encapsulating many aspects in a single symbol—and backed by pervasive, consensual belief—it is not surprising money has become such a powerful and tenacious concept that has spread throughout the entire globe.
It is both convenient and powerful to have units of this symbol at our disposal. We can use quanties of this symbol to employ time, energy, trust, skills, experience, knowlege and materials in a directed fashion. Skillful use of money can provide almost miraculous powers. Large quantities of wealth is almost akin to having a genie/jinn at our command to summon nearly any wish we can dream of. Looking from this perspective, money becomes a sigil—when massively multiplied it unleashes a spell of ultimate power.
The dark side of this, is the attraction such a power can have. The lure of great quantities of wealth has allowed for massive societal and environmental destruction to occur, and the mass striving for wealth has driven vast numbers of people towards an almost obsessive, destructive, time-poor existence that can often seperate ourselves from authentically experiencing life. Many chase the dream of finally reaching the day where a command of money will finally empower their lives—granting the utmost wish of free time and free will.
Conclusion
Of course, there is more to the nature and dynamics of money then this writing exercise conveys. To navigate all that this symbol represents, and its many pitfalls, we need just to realise that money is best regulated to be merely a useful symbol— a symbol that simply represents a number of mutable concepts. But it is not those concepts.
If we remember what is ultimately behind the value that is represented by this symbol, we can prevent being caught in the allure of the symbol alone, and look—instead—to what the symbol points towards.
Instead of being caught up in the accumulation of an alluring symbol, we can alternatively seek ways to increase our free time, energy, trust, knowledge, skills, experience, and quality materials as a more authentic source of true value. Interestingly, if we support others to also increase those aspects in their lives, we may end up living in an ecosystem of rich abundance—an abundance far beyond the mere symbol that money ultimately is.
Only once the nature of money is realised, can we break out of the spell of money, and instead use it to spell out what our lives would be like if backed by what money fundamentally represents — a life of abundant time, energy, trust, knowledge, skills, experience, and quality materials to empower our collective experiences.
