Still unable to imagine a world without money? You’re being inefficient to the point of destroying the world. Here’s the proof.
As much as this article tries to distract you into looking at differences – those between nations or genders or both – the real issue is that money provides more stress in people’s lives than anything else, but #2 is the state of the world.
We can easily take stress as a proxy for both what people care the most about and, secondarily, what they are putting the most effort into. There’s no point in being stressed about something one doesn’t care about and presumably one ruminates for lengthy amounts of time on something that offers stress.
So money is the only thing standing between us and a primary focus on improving the state of the world. But because of money, we instead focus on how to get more cash in our individual wallet than how to make the world a better place.
This is hardly a surprising discovery for anyone who understands money, but it is somewhat impressive to see it put so starkly in an article published in the mainstream press. It’s almost as though money were a deliberately created system put forth to distract people into competing and worrying about their own individual standing rather than working with others to improve the state of everything. Almost.
If you’re one of those types to wonder what the alternative is, keep in mind that you’re talking about the alternative to the single thing most responsible for distracting people from the real problems the planet faces. It’s like looking at a world where everyone is infected with some deadly degenerative disease and musing on what an alternative world might look like. “How could we possibly devise a system for societal operations where not everyone has hepatitis C?” would be an equally good question to your query.
The answer, of course, is that anything would be better. But for starters, why don’t we just say that everyone has a right to food, clothing, shelter, education, health care, and a reasonable degree of discretion over the use of their time, without fear that they will somehow lose one of these because of inability to collect an arbitrary set of pieces of paper?
That’s not so hard, is it?
