XXVIII. It's Not Just about the Money...

Something just popped up in my mind, and I have to get it out.

This something is about money. Money--that thing we (in the West, at least) seem to spend our entire lives chasing, and which the vast majority of us will never have enough of.

When someone gets a job that pays more money than their current one, people expect them to be happy.

Everyone hopes to win the lottery jackpot--the prospect of getting lots of free money plus never having to work again will attract many.

But it's all fake.

Money is fake, that is.

In modern American society, instead of exchanging a good for a good, we use money to complete the deal. A long time ago, money was a representation of our country's actual wealth--specifically, of precious metals like gold and silver held by the Treasury. However, in the age of fiat currency, the "value" of money is an arbitrary determination made unilaterally by an institution with dubious links to private business, that the federal government has no real control over. This institution, the Federal Reserve, tinkers with interest rates whenever it feels that doing so would help big business--not to keep the currency in parity with some objective scale.

Money is now a completely imaginary thing, yet it has been elevated to a paramount position over our lives.

All the money chasing going on in our culture has collectively robbed us of the capacity to objectively consider what it actually is we're pursuing.

Money is treated as though it is the sole--or even the most important--economic currency. This is not remotely the case. Economics simply pertain to how we would rather spend our limited resources. Non-monetary considerations, such as pleasure, time, freedom, and stress seem to be largely ignored in the press and by our "representatives" when evaluating the economic state of our country. And I can tell you, nowadays there are plenty of livid, stressed-out, burnt-out Americans of all income levels.

But you probably won't read about it in the Wall Street Journal.