3 Weird and Mysterious Things About Money

Think about that. Money can be anything. Money is anything we exchange for something, a product or a service, we want or need. Money can be the obvious paper we use (which is really not paper, but linen...that's why dollar bills survive the washing machine) or coins. Money can be gold, silver, copper, alloy, or any other type of metal, and those coins can be any size, with any design. Money has been, and probably still is in some parts of the world, chicken, sheep, goats, cows, and other animals, but it's much easier to carry a plastic card in your wallet than a hoofed mammal, so money can be plastic too. Native Americans in the past traded tobacco...it was part of their monetary system, not printed notes or coins. Now, most money is not even tangible. it's just digital 1's and 0's floating around in the air and passing through cable. It's crazy when you think about it. Money can be anything.

Most of our money today comes in five forms:

1. Linen dollar bills in various denominations
2. Coins
3. Paper (checks and money orders)
4. Plastic (credit and debit)
5. Electronic

None of these materials have very much intrinsic value: There is no nutritional component in any of them in case you get hungry. You cannot build shelter from those things (the raw materials they are made of can be used for construction, but in the form of money, those materials are useless to meet any human need for shelter).

Moving up Maslow's hierarchy, can any of these materials contribute to your health, well-being, or happiness? No. The only reason these things we use for money have any value, is because we say they do. Let that sink in for a moment: we just appoint or believe those things have value as money, so therefore, they do. Our money really has no value other than what we collectively place upon it. How's that for weird?

You may be thinking, when we used the gold standard, our money was worth something because we had gold backing it. My response is, so who says gold is worth anything? Refer back to the last point. Gold has no more value than paper, plastic, or coin. Gold's "value" probably comes from (I'm completely speculating here to make a point) an old king 10,000 years ago that liked the shiny metal's color and thus decreed taxes be paid in gold or else he was going to have your head! Now then, it's not the gold, but your head, that held the actual value. Get it?

Do not think that I have anything against money. I'm just pointing out some oddities related to it to stretch your thinking.

This last one, to me, is the most mysterious thing about money: the system works. To say the system is not perfect is to grossly state the obvious. Something that is perfect never needs change or improvement, but our money is always evolving. Still, the system works. Large (even world wide) corrections and shifts occur, but we as a people (in any culture) never scrap the system entirely. We can't. A world without money is a world without wants or values placed on anything.