Money drives our lives. For most people it’s why we work, give away a vast majority of our lives, often to jobs we find soulless and ungratifying. “No free lunch”, as the saying goes. But food literally just grows out of the ground and on trees. Lunch should in theory be the most free thing, the only thing you pay is a bit of time looking after a garden. If we truly moved beyond capitalism, where everyone’s basic needs were met and we pivoted society to be centric to human flourishing and in harmony with ecology we would find that lunch could in fact be free.
“But if we don’t slave away our best years grinding out pennies while generating stacks for the fat cats, then people will get lazy and mooch off the hard work of others, namely my hard work!!”, I hear you cry. This is the modern nightmare, not just that we still have to get up and go to work every damn day. But that we will be the ones left holding the proverbial shovel, doing all the dirty work while everyone else gets to sit around and do whatever they damn well like. In the mind of the temporarily embarrassed millionaire, we are one lotto ticket, one brilliant idea, or one brave step away from breaking our golden shackles and finally being free to do whatever it is our hearts desire, as the money rolls in and all our worries and cares are bought and paid for.
Modern society is truly a world of excess. Long ago we worked out how to store and move water to the places we needed it most. We invented new ways to fertilise our fields so as to grow an over abundance of whatever crops we felt like, hell in most fertile land we grow a monumental amount of crops just to feed the cattle that will eventually become our food. We now extract from the land not only food but power and materials, sure eventually we will run out of these things, but if we’re honest with ourselves so much of what we use is wasteful and it’s use is purposely design to be limited use, and I’m not even talking about smartphones and technology gadgets with built in obsolescence. A water bottle, a $5 t-shirt, the plastic bag that your grandma puts every individual piece of fruit in at the grocery store, every piece of shrinkwrapped plastic around every pair of scissors that you need another pair of scissors to open! Soft drink cans! The sheer amount of derelict cars and airplanes sitting in junk yards all across the planet.
We have enough. We have the technology and expertise to share, everything, globally at speed and with precision. But instead of using money as the actual driver for where things are needed, actual market driven economics, we give money “value”, we make money in and of itself the objective. Rather than the counter and indicator of movement and need that it should be, the greedy and the covetous hoard it for the influence it brings and to keep score about how righteous and powerful they are above other people.