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Tag: money is the means not the end

Monetime

Monetime

Published August 15, 2021

A very interesting book called Layered Money that I’m reading traces the evolution of money through time. In the very earliest days of commerce, there was no money – only the barter system. If I had potatoes from my farm, but desperately wanted cotton, then all I could do was to offer my potatoes and hope the cotton farmer wanted some. Of course potatoes were important (still are), but there could be a limit to how many potatoes a cotton farmer could eat.

So people devised ways to get around this. In the earliest days, money wasn’t coins or paper as we know it today. It was mostly seashells. Big and shiny meant richer and wealthier. But of course not everyone lived near a beach, and so that had to change. Iron pieces were then used too – for quite a while. And then unsurprisingly, silver and gold came along the way. People with a lot of gold and silver even today are considered rich.

Alongside that wealth, came human ego. Coins were introduced, and standardized in design and weight. And then coins were embossed with the faces of the kings and queens of the time. Currency notes too had the same features. Many rulers would kill and plunder simply to change the faces on them coins and notes. It was a matter of great personal pride. Coins from hundreds of years ago – of perhaps the greatest kings that ever lived in those times – are but worthless now. That face – completely unrecognizable and irrelevant to those born today.

And now we have digital currencies, like Bitcoins and Ether. Even these aren’t as individualistic as their creators would want them to be, because there are over 9500 cryptocurrencies. And anyone with coding knowledge, can create a new one. Time takes care of all egos.

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Is money important?

Is money important?

Published August 22, 2020

We are all scrambling mindlessly to make money. Or to make more money. Money is such an interesting invention.

For all the bad things in the world, the more the money, the worse it gets. If you are loaded, how does one say “No”, to all the friends that come to borrow and never repay. How does one keep away all the ‘eyes’ on your money. And the potential family feuds, and the rivalries, and even one’s own ego?

For all the good things however, there is quite nothing like money. It can buy time – a good amount of money means one doesn’t need to work as many hours in a typical job. It can also buy health to some extent, quality of life, maybe even a good life-partner! If one is inclined, it also helps in the service of others. Said differently, we cannot donate any money if we do not have any money in the first place.

There is nothing inherently wrong with money. But only as long as we treat it as the means, and not the end. Therefore money has to be a very personalised and calibrated metric. An exercise each one of us must embark on is to figure out for ourselves – how much is enough. This must be personalised, because it will depend on our own personal needs and expenses, without comparative inputs on the size of the neighbour’s car/house/yacht (because that will feature in their own calculation!). We can, however, consider those who live on 1/100th of what we have, but still lead happy lives. Our own ancestors for instance – would have had much lower take-homes, but they managed to raise significantly larger families!

Here is what we must always bear in mind. Money is very very very important. But it is not the most important thing.

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