Why do we focus solely on this one aspect of life?

  • Potatos_are_not_friends@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Simpsons meme aside –

    Those with currency can have significantly more options than those without it. I’m of a privileged state where if I wanted to drop everything and visit another country for two weeks, there’s nothing stopping me financially. Not many people have that luxury.

    • otp@sh.itjust.works
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      8 months ago

      Your comment made me realize that OP wasn’t asking about why we need currency as a society, but why people keep trying to get more money.

      I hate when the post title and post content ask two seemingly different questions, lol

        • otp@sh.itjust.works
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          7 months ago

          Providing clarification is important…but to me, it seems prudent to just ask what one actually wants to know in the first place.

          • Potatos_are_not_friends@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            Honestly XY is hard to put into practice.

            It wants the Asker to elevate themselves to the level of thinking as the Answerer and also have the forethought to ask “the right question”.

            But it lacks the perspective of what it means to be new at something. When you’re new, you have no context of what the hell anything is. So you throw spaghetti at the wall and ask is this how you make pasta.

            If it’s a culture where stupid questions are allowed and people are willing to be mentors… Just ask your question.

            • otp@sh.itjust.works
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              7 months ago

              I think in this case, the OP should’ve just chosen one question and put it in the title, then left the post text blank.

              If the question they wanted to know didn’t get answered, they could’ve had conversations with the commenters where they gave more detail about why they asked the question.

              A post consisting of two different questions in two different places (and nothing else) just seems counterintuitive to me.

              • Daft_ish@lemmy.worldOP
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                7 months ago

                Whoa dude, just answer the question. If answering or asking doesn’t appeal to you just move on.

                I thoroughly enjoy all the answers I’ve received and the discussion around it. Sorry I don’t live up to your “no stupid questions” question standard.

      • Daft_ish@lemmy.worldOP
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        8 months ago

        It’s a hard question to ask. I’d rather pin down why it’s essential then ask why it’s deemed the only thing that is essential.

            • Potatos_are_not_friends@lemmy.world
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              8 months ago

              No not really.

              Buddhist scripture believes in achieving enlightenment, yogi aim for inner peace, all sorts of subgroups and cultures like indigenous people put family first.

              You’re not providing a source to where this is truth, so it seems like you’re putting this pressure on yourself. And you need to dig into yourself why YOU believe currency is all that matters.

              • Daft_ish@lemmy.worldOP
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                8 months ago

                Even if I were “putting pressure on myself” your inclination is that I’m the one who has deemed money the most essential thus providing you with your sought out evidence. Now kind sir, I say good day.

                • Potatos_are_not_friends@lemmy.world
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                  8 months ago

                  That’s fair.

                  Hope you discover other alternatives because there’s a wide world/groups of people out there that don’t believe money is the sole focus of life.

      • xmunk@sh.itjust.works
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        8 months ago

        Lemmy supports editing posts, deleting posts and making new posts - if a question is obtuse the author can always take it down and post something more precise and less open to misinterpretation. Of it’s a language barrier issue I’m sympathetic but this just seems to have been a needlessly clickbaity title.

  • canadaduane@lemmy.ca
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    8 months ago

    Here’s my take:

    1. We’re built for about 150 relationships max (Dunbar number), and yet we benefit from cooperation above that threshold. Rather than make it so we have to have a personal relationship with everyone who could possibly benefit us, we accepted a ramped down version of relationship we call “transactions”. This is a very weak replacement for a relationship, but it is a sort of “micro-relationship” in that for a brief moment two people who don’t know each other can kind of care about each other during an exchange. Through specialization, we can do something well that doesn’t just benefit the handful of friends and neighbors we have, but tens of thousands and possibly millions of people via transactions (e.g. a factory, starting an Amazon business, etc.)

    2. There is a process called “commensuration” in the social sciences, where people start to make one thing commensurate with another, even in wildly different domains. For example, to understand the value of a forest and to convey its importance to decision makers we might say “this forest is worth $100 billion”. It’s kind of weird to do this (how do leaves and trees and anthills and beetles equal imaginary humoney?) But slowly, over time, we have made many things commensurate to dollars at various scales. (I don’t think this is a good thing, but it does have benefits). In short, more and more things that were part of an implicit economy of relationships (e.g. can the neighbor girl babysit tonight?) have entered the explicit domain of the monetary economy (e.g. sittercity).

    .

    IMO, in order to participate in the huge value generated by this monetary economy, people sometimes lose the forest for the trees (so to speak) and forget what really matters (e.g. excellence of character, deep relationships, new experiences, etc.) because it seems like we might be able to put off those things until “after” we square away this whole money thing first. But maybe “after” never comes–and the hollow life of a consumer capitalist drains the inner ecological diversity of a soulful life.

    • TokenBoomer@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      This kind of thoughtful introspection is the only reason to get out of bed in the morning. That, and dogs. Dogs are wonderful.

  • ThatWeirdGuy1001@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Because it gives the ruling class something to hold over the poors so the rest of society is so terrified of becoming poor they forget that they’re being used as literal slaves for the state

    • Daft_ish@lemmy.worldOP
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      7 months ago

      This is the crux of it. Currency is essential because it allows people to exchange goods and services in a timely manner. What it is used for today is not essential to the individual.

      Today 100 different people could think up a 100 different ways to streamline the exchange of goods and services without using fiat currency. The reason we don’t is because it would take power away from those who covet it and most people don’t understand they are being used.

      • ThatWeirdGuy1001@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        Step 1: Hoard a bunch of stuff no one really cares about.

        Step 2: Wait until you’ve hoarded the majority of that stuff in your local area.

        Step 3: Start telling people how important the thing you’ve been hoarding is.

        Step 4: People are dumb and actually start believing the useless thing you’ve hoarded is actually important.

        Step 5: Enjoy your new status as the man who convinced everyone something completely useless was important.

  • morphballganon@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    People want purpose. Most people are too inept to grasp greater purposes, so rewarding them with ornate paper slips keeps them placated.

      • morphballganon@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        Oh absolutely. Consider how inflation and the cost of living rise faster than the minimum wage, or even the median wage.

        • Daft_ish@lemmy.worldOP
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          7 months ago

          So how do reconcile most others peoples answers knowing what you know? Money is needed to enhance the exchange of goods and services but, as you said, also is used as a tool for controlling prople.

  • fossphi@lemm.ee
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    8 months ago

    Maybe it’s not as essential as one is led to believe. The book Debt by David Graeber deals with the very question you asked. I highly recommend you check it out.

    I can’t really summarise it well since I haven’t finished it myself, so maybe peruse the Wikipedia entry. But the first couple of chapters try to answer your question

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years

  • BrikoX@lemmy.zip
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    8 months ago

    Consider what we used as currency before it was currency. You would have to barter before, which was inefficient. Common currency saves you and everyone involved time. Instead of having to barter for every item, which would also require you to do carry all of those items, you can just pay with currency now.

    • SlopppyEngineer@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      That’s not exactly true. Barter was never used like that in the past. People used gift giving systems or other trust based systems in daily life. Barter was only used with strangers and that was not a common occurrence. These trust based systems do work in smaller settings but break down in large settings where interacting with strangers is the norm.

    • rufus@discuss.tchncs.de
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      8 months ago

      Idk why the correct answer always attracts several down-votes on Lemmy. This is literally it… Money is useful because it can be used as payment, it can be exchanged for goods… The reason why our whole lives revolve around it is because we have shaped society to be that way… We call that capitalism.

      (And with knowing the proper term for it, everyone can just look it up on Wikipedia and learn about the history and how it’s all linked.)

  • neidu2@feddit.nl
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    8 months ago

    Because they represent a resource, concrete or abstract. Currency is easily exchanged, either for other currencies, or for goods and services. This allows for a lot more opportunities than hauling around a swarm of sheep for bartering at the car dealership.

    • Sethayy@sh.itjust.works
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      8 months ago

      On one end carrying sheep would be annoying, but so is a credit score; arguably both are sources of noise distracting humanity from actually improving at all

      • xmunk@sh.itjust.works
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        8 months ago

        We had currency without credit scores for about three thousand years prior to the first credit score agency (1841 from what I found). Having credit score agencies is just a modern problem and their prevalence in the past fifty years is a demonstration of how shitty our capitalist system has gotten.

  • moog@lemm.ee
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    8 months ago

    Modern society is only possible because of global trade networks. Global trade networks would never work without currency. If a person spends all their day fabricating metal sheets they need a way to buy bread to feed their family. Otherwise we’d all be back to farming our lives away.

    • Sethayy@sh.itjust.works
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      8 months ago

      God? Jesus is that you? Or at least someone omnipotent

      You know with absolute certainty the only way people can trade is capitalism?

    • Daft_ish@lemmy.worldOP
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      7 months ago

      Im being obtuse, for sure, but why does your land lord need to extract value from you? I know it’s to pay for the property but that’s just another exchange of currency.

      • classic@fedia.io
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        8 months ago

        Going back far enough, scarcity is the answer. We technically live in a post-scarcity world now. But we are bound by the models we developed when it existed.

        • bobs_monkey@lemm.ee
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          8 months ago

          I wouldn’t say we are completely post scarcity, but enough of the producers of goods create enough artificial scarcity in order to keep prices high and the train moving. Unfortunately, I don’t see the paradigm changing until we have a major altering event in which many people perish.

          • classic@fedia.io
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            8 months ago

            There is definitely human induced scarcity. I debated including that distinction.

            • bobs_monkey@lemm.ee
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              8 months ago

              No worries. I do think that a major tipping point towards true post scarcity will be when we can figure out and deploy nuclear fusion, though we’ll still be mired by price gouging until we demand better.

              • CookieOfFortune@lemmy.world
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                7 months ago

                I’m not certain near infinite energy will solve scarcity. Humans will simply use up all the available energy anyways until we eventually run out of whatever previously “infinite “ resource we’re using. We’re very good at this type of optimization.

                • bobs_monkey@lemm.ee
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                  7 months ago

                  I don’t think it’ll solve it either, but it’ll certain help. The beauty of fusion is that it can and will produce, at scale and maturity, more than we can consume, leading to an unprecedented technological revolution.

          • VindictiveJudge@lemmy.world
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            8 months ago

            We’re only post-scarcity for certain things in certain geopolitical regions, and even then, logistics of distributing those things is a problem. Computers, for example, will always be scarce in their current form because the raw materials to build them are naturally scarce, can only be extracted so fast, and have a limited ability to be recycled. We have a shit-ton of them, but they’re still scarce.

            • classic@fedia.io
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              8 months ago

              I hear you on the resources needed for computers being scarcer. But this might still fall overall under human induced scarcity. If we lived in more communal ways, the whole approach to personal computers could change, for instance, in a way that increased access in a more sustainable way. In no way do I believe that will happen, ofc. Just as we’re not likely going to go from every household owning one or more televisions to having, say, a shared theater in every neighborhood

      • FaceDeer@fedia.io
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        8 months ago

        You answered your question in the sentence right after your question. The landlord owns the property and so he can do what he wants with it. He’s letting you live there but has decided he wants something in exchange for letting you live there. If currency didn’t exist he’d want something else in exchange.

        • Sethayy@sh.itjust.works
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          8 months ago

          Making the assumption ownership is a valued currency of course.

          Which is arguably a bootstrap-paradox; we need capital to participate in capitalism, for which we need - cause without capitalism what would we do with our capital.

          • FaceDeer@fedia.io
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            8 months ago

            Are you suggesting people shouldn’t be allowed to own stuff? There are very few economic systems where people aren’t allowed to own stuff and they tend not to be popular. Most of the people who are complaining about landlords and rent and whatnot really just want to own their own houses.

            • Sethayy@sh.itjust.works
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              8 months ago

              I mean like owning things is a human concept not a physical law, so yeah I can imagine a society exists where nothing is owned

              Can’t say if it’d be better or worse than our current cause were not trying it, but tbh I’d be happy if instead of solely me being able to use ‘my’ drill for example, the whole community can whenever they require.

              Sounds a hell of a lot more efficient to me if we work together not apart

              • CapeWearingAeroplane@sopuli.xyz
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                7 months ago

                I mean, in a perfect world, yes. The issue comes up when someone wears out or breaks the drill, and it needs to be replaced or repaired. Whoever spends time and resources ensuring that we have a drill needs to be compensated somehow, because that’s time they’re not spending on making sure they have food and shelter.

                Follow along that line of reasoning for a couple steps, and you end up with some kind of economic system, and likely some kind of enforcement system, so you’re suddenly back at an early stage proto-state/government.