Money: What is It?

Once upon a time - around 600 BC in Lydia, where today you’d find Turkey - someone struck a chunk of electrum, a natural alloy of gold and silver, and declared it worth something. With that single metallic stamp of authority, money began its long and colorful career. No longer did traders need to fumble with livestock or lug around sacks of barley. The people of Lydia had a convenient substitute for tangible goods. Soon after, this quiet innovation slipped across the Aegean, snaked its way through the European plains, floated eastward to Persia, and wove itself into every corner of society. And as is our custom with anything we find remotely useful, we took it too far.

We toss around figures, adding and subtracting imaginary wealth like it’s an objective force of nature, balancing the scales between convenience and absurdity, as our governments tally up debts that run into trillions of dollars. The great paradox is that these astronomical numbers drift far beyond any calculable assets or commodities, existing more in theory than in practice.

Somewhere in the recesses of an accountant’s ledger or a CEO’s balance sheet, there’s a quiet, persistent question nobody wants to address too loudly: what does debt mean? What does money mean? Its power seems sacred, revered as though minted by the heavens, yet it has all the real-world value of a Monopoly bill when the game’s over. But here we are, entangled in an intricate web of dollars and debt, persuaded that our lives depend on it.

Today, we live in a world that talks about money as though it’s a force as inexorable as gravity, an unyielding truth rather than a collective choice. And for that, we might wonder: do these concepts mean anything? Or are we chasing shadows in a cave of our own making?

“Money makes the world go around...”

The Hypnotic Spell of Currency

Money as a concept is, as they say, a pretty good trick. You can’t eat it, wear it, or use it to fuel a generator. The ancient Lydians couldn’t, nor can the citizens of any of today’s nations, where the balance sheets of their treasuries display debts that would rival an infinity symbol in their digits. Money remains a form of collective hallucination, a tool without intrinsic value that derives its worth from nothing more than the agreement of those who handle it. It is the world's longest-running confidence game.

To understand money’s meaning, it helps to look at it as a kind of apparition - a wraith we conjured up to measure our wants, weigh our actions, and track our lives. Money is fundamentally a metaphor, a placeholder for the things we want or need but can’t easily measure. It has no inherent value; it’s only worth what we collectively agree to assign it. And yet, despite the illusion, money retains its grip on us. It influences our relationships, shapes our goals, and even becomes, in some sense, a reflection of our self-worth.

Gold bars, seashells, a promissory note scribbled on vellum - it hardly matters. Once we collectively agree that something is "currency," we imbue it with a status far greater than mere material. We talk about money as though it’s something truly alive, something with an innate, autonomous purpose, even though, like any conjured spirit, its power relies solely on our collective belief.

For most of human history, “wealth” and “debt” were hardly concepts. People simply lived, took what they needed from the world, and gave when they could. Exchange was woven into social interactions - no abstract tally marks following them around like spectral chains. These ancient cultures might have found our current devotion to debt and money curious, even perplexing. To them, worth was tied to one’s person, one’s actions, not to any quantifiable string of digits.

One can almost imagine, from within the dim glow of vaults and safes, money winking back at us, quietly acknowledging the great unspoken joke that money isn’t real at all. Or, to put it differently, that it is real only to the extent that we play along. Money is an idea so well-rooted that we’ve forgotten it’s just that - an idea, no more factual than an old wives’ tale.

“The world go around...”

A Brief History of Collective Delusion

Money, as we know, started humbly. Seashells, cacao beans, and the slightly more dignified bars of precious metal - all were once deemed valuable by ancient civilizations. When people grew weary of bartering their cattle and crops directly, they concocted a system of currency to streamline the process. The Tang Dynasty in China had coins made of bronze with square holes in the middle, each symbolic of prosperity.

Ancient kingdoms minted their own coins, each ruler imprinting his face on one side and a symbol of the realm on the other. You could say this was a sign of ownership or authority, but it was also an early PR move: “Trust me, these coins are worth something.” And because enough people did, they continued to trade, hoard, and spend these tokens, even long after the monarch in question had met his royal end.

In the Middle Ages, Marco Polo was astounded by the Chinese practice of using paper money. Fast forward a few thousand years, and we’re still at it - just with more digits, and now mostly invisible ones on a screen.

Money in the form of currency and paper notes had wound its way across the globe, planting the seeds for what would become central banks and national treasuries. These were essentially IOUs from banks, slips of paper meant to represent the value of something tangible, like gold or silver.

Governments guaranteed that you could swap your paper for something with real weight. But at some point, they cut the link and left us holding little more than faith. Faith in the government, in the economy, in each other’s willingness to accept the illusion and move along. And so, money slipped from being backed by actual gold bars to something far more nebulous - a mutual agreement, a collective belief that these bills and coins still actually meant something.

Today, most of the world operates on fiat money - a currency that has value simply because we all agree it does. It’s a remarkably fragile arrangement when you consider that a single shift in public perception could unravel the entire system, like an optical illusion that disappears once you tilt your head.

“The world go around…”

In Debt We Trust

And then there’s debt, the twin to money that’s somehow both its shadow and its reason for being.

Debt is the reminder that our wealth is borrowed, provisional, not ours in any final sense. It’s the darker half of a dual concept that defines our society: creating an infinite “tomorrow” that always promises to settle up. Debt, like money, is an empty thing, a flickering shade. Its gravity is born out of belief, not any natural law.

This is, of course, where governments come in, holding the strings that keep this marionette from going limp.

A quick glance at national debt figures reveals a staggering reality: the United States alone sails beyond $33 trillion in debt, with other developed nations echoing similar numbers in varying currencies. To put that in a relatable context, if the debt were made up of one-dollar bills, it would take a military jet flying at the speed of sound, reeling out a roll of dollar bills behind it, 14 years before it reeled out just one trillion-dollars in bills.

Such numbers would be laughable, were they not the silent heart of our economy. These debts are not insignificant, they’re just insubstantial - figures scribbled onto digital ledgers, never intended to be “paid off” in any real sense. There are countries whose economies rest on nothing but the promise of debt, balancing ever-so-gingerly on the brink of insolvency. And yet, the sun still rises, the gears keep turning, and the world doesn’t fall apart. No one seems too worried; if anything, the alarm only sounds if the rate of growth slackens.

This faith-based economy, this elaborate puppet show, might seem absurd - until you remember the tacit understanding between government and citizen: as long as everyone is in debt, no one is. Money, and the debts it creates, keep us in our places, holding down jobs, paying taxes, and staying pleasantly confined within the bounds of modern citizenship. We collectively pretend that national debt is some majestic, solemn duty instead of a math problem nobody knows how to solve. After all, when you owe $33 trillion, it’s hardly even real anymore - it’s a mythical creature we toss scraps to and hope it stays asleep. And the more the debt grows, the more we lean into the charade, a little like a game of Jenga that must be kept in motion, lest the whole thing come crashing down.

“Money makes the world go around...”

What Is Money but a Way to Play Pretend?

Consider money and debt as icons, secular relics of our age – symbols as potent and revered as any ancient totem. Each bill is a charm, a modern-day talisman that’s passed from hand to hand, believed in without question.

Of course, money in its modern form doesn’t stop at currency. Enter the credit card: a slim piece of plastic that lets us spend money we don’t have to buy things we don’t need to impress people we don’t particularly like.

It’s a streamlined system for accumulating the invisible, intangible shackles that make up personal debt, and it adds yet another layer to our shared delusion. Now, you’re not just rich or poor; you’re creditworthy or unworthy - a status governed by an algorithm no one fully understands, yet which, curiously enough, governs us.

Money exists as a layered cake of symbolism: the greenback, the card, the credit score. Each has a meaning tied to the other, and each serve as a rung on an invisible ladder, lifting some and trapping others. By these markers, our lives are delineated, our worth assigned, and our choices framed.

“It makes the world go ‘round.”

Digital Hocus Pocus

And just when we thought the act couldn’t get more surreal, enter Bitcoin, Dogecoin, and an entire zoo of digital “currencies” known as cryptocurrencies. Now, even the coins themselves are virtual, bits of code traded on networks maintained by computers solving complex puzzles. Bitcoin launched in 2009 with a promise: it would free us from government-backed currency, liberate us from banks, and create a decentralized, self-governing currency. And yet, ironically, Bitcoin has become less a currency and more a speculative asset.

Bitcoin’s value, like the paper money it sought to replace, is based entirely on what people are willing to pay for it - just another consensus, only this time in the world of bits and bytes. The moment we collectively decide it’s not worth anything, it evaporates. A Bitcoin has as much inherent worth as a seashell or a camel, a new-age placeholder for the concept of value.

If Bitcoin is the “serious” attempt to remake money, meme coins like Dogecoin take things to a delightful extreme. Created as satire, to poke fun at the very idea of cryptocurrency, Dogecoin ended up a multi-billion-dollar asset, its value rocketing upward in response to tweets and internet hype. A reminder that money, once stripped of its concrete roots, can mean anything or nothing at all.

This sort of thing couldn’t happen with gold or land or any tangible good. But with money being digital, untethered, and open to interpretation, why not? When value is purely conceptual, why not assign it to something like a dog-faced coin?

And with meme coins, we see money in its purest form: as a construct that doesn’t have to mean anything. It’s as if someone took the quiet, unspoken understanding of traditional currency and put a clown wig on it. We’ve managed to outdo ourselves, assigning billions of dollars of ‘value’ to pixels. Because if money is imaginary, why not make it completely invisible too? Meme coins lay bare the absurdity of the entire concept - they’re money, a store of value, but only because we say so, and for no other reason than that.

“Money, money, money, money...”

A Peculiar Modern Sacrament

We might think of money as a kind of secular faith, a modern sacrament in which most willingly partake. And while it serves many useful functions, it demands belief. Without a congregation, the service would end abruptly.

Money has the remarkable ability to both liberate and imprison, depending on the amount and the place it finds itself. In some countries, it flows freely; in others, it barely trickles, the scarcity acting as both a sentence and a bitter irony.

So, if the value of money lies not in the metal, paper, or digits it comprises but rather in the act of believing in it, we might as well regard it as some grand, if slightly worn, stage production. To those willing to buy in, it offers the hope of security, luxury, and success, yet it remains as empty and fictional as any other communal dream.

“Money, money, money, money…”

Could We Live Without It?

But what if we no longer ‘bought’ into it? What if we broke the spell? Suppose we looked upon the paper bills, the silver coins, and the digital numbers on a screen with a critical eye and found them wanting? After all, humanity has survived longer without currency than with it. We spent millennia in kin-based societies, sharing resources, trading favors, and cooperating to ensure survival.

In such a world, value would come to rest on a person’s ability to contribute, on their skills, kindness, and ingenuity. Goods would be traded in trust, relationships built on reciprocity, and the ledger balanced by mutual aid rather than interest rates. Romantic, perhaps, but we’ve built our current system on something no less imaginary.

Would society crumble? It’s tempting to say we’d descend into chaos, but maybe, just maybe, we’d find something unexpected - a world in which value is measured by its true effect, not by a number beside it.

Or maybe we’d find something else to believe in - another symbolic talisman to take the place of money. Because if history has shown us anything, it’s that humanity craves symbols. Whether it’s a bar of electrum or a trillion-dollar debt, we’ll likely create a new currency if the old one dissolves. The form it takes doesn’t matter as much as the fact of our collective participation. For as long as we agree to play the game, the chips remain in motion, each one charged with the power we lend it.

“It makes the world go ‘round.”

The Show Must Go On

When all is said and done, money looks less like an essential truth and more like a story we tell ourselves to keep the machine running. Little more than an elegant fiction, an agreed-upon narrative, a sort of shared dream we find it difficult to wake up from. Bitcoin and meme coins only emphasize how arbitrary it all is, how flimsy the line between “valuable” and “worthless” has become. They remind us that currency is, at best, a placeholder, a “like” button we press because we agree, collectively, that it’s worth pressing.

For now, we go on trading, saving, and investing in a system as concrete as it is imaginary. We’ll keep checking our bank balances, paying down debts, and maybe even buy a slice of Dogecoin because, well, why not? After all, as long as we keep the story going, money has value. The punchline is, it has value only bcause we decided it does.

It’s oddly liberating, then, to imagine a life without money. Strip it away, and what remains? Only the stubborn insistence of human need: shelter, food, companionship, purpose. We would still have resources to share, but without this false god binding us into a relentless pursuit. We might give more freely, take only what we need, and find the surplus of life to be something tangible. We might weigh people’s actions, their integrity, their contributions - but then, those things are so much harder to calculate.

So, what is money? It’s a shared delusion, a trick of the mind we’ve turned into a global cult. We exchange it, hoard it, kill for it, all while knowing deep down it’s just numbers on a screen. But hey, that’s humanity for you - we can’t resist a good story, even when we’re the punchline.

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