Money is a way to standardize value.
I used to work in a store that sold collectibles. People would come and inquire about the value of their pieces. Many of them assumed their collectibles had increased in value, believing their possessions to have doubled, or even tripled over the years. While I could reassure them that if the right buyer was interested, then yes, their piece may have substantially risen in value, but the downfall was finding the right buyer.
Things are only worth what a purchaser will pay. To you it may be a priceless work of art; if no one is willing to buy it it is worth nothing. The word 'worth' implies the exchange of something equally as valuable. That is the role of money. We all know what we can buy for a dollar. It's consistent, reliable. Prices rise and prices fall, but we all know just how much we would, personally, trade for a dollar.
Money is only worth what you believe it's worth.
The more you need or want something, the higher it's value in your mind. The higher it's value in your mind the more you'd be willing to pay for it. We give power to the exchange of value for money. We choose to spend our money on things we think will improve our lives. Therein lies the trick. What you believe will improve your life is not what I believe will improve mine. Therefore the value of something you own may not be the same for me. Opposite to that if you have something that everyone believes will improve their lives the value of that thing will increase, as you will have people willing to pay more money for it than the next guy.
This is economy. There many things in our world that prove more valuable than others. It is our desire for those things that drive value, and in turn drive the exchange of money for value. It is our greed that fuels our desire and our habit of consuming for the sake of having. This is the world we are told is real. We grow up trusting the value of money. It is this trust that we measure our own standing in the world. According to what we know about our community/peers we judge if we are better off, or broke.
We buy in to the power of money.
We drive this money game. Money alone is worthless. Scraps of precious metals and bits of printed paper are truly nothing. If we all agreed that noodles were the new currency money would cease to matter. In fact, if that happened, money would lose all of it's perceived value because it is us that give it that value. We would then give value to noodles, and noodles would then have power. It's our acceptance of money that makes it useful. We give it power through our motives to improve our lives. Unfortunately, money seems to be the only accepted way of exchanging valuable things.
Money is a way for us to agree on a standardization process. Money is not necessarily a way to agree on value, although that is the by-product of our exchanges. Money is a way to get us to standardize our exchanges. It's the exchanges that are important. However, today, noo money, no exhange, unless you have something else equally as valuable to the other party.
This proves that money doesn't matter. We believe that it does because we accept the lie that money is important, when the truth is it's only important because we believe it's important. We are caught in a circle of using money, which in turn fuels the belief that we need it. We don't. But we continue to believe that we do, and so, it turns out that we do need money; that it is truly important.
We will only ever be free from money by severing that connection, that reliance, on it.
