Money is just misplaced effort.
Most of my waking hours are spent working on things which are not part of my long term goals in life. There is a implied social contract that if I turn my hours into money, there's some way to use it to accomplish those goals much more efficiently than if I worked on the goals on my own in those hours.
I've been thinking about where all I misplace my efforts, but for extremely good reasons.
Some of these are collective efforts - things that only works at scale, like having plumbing, cell phones or traveling over paved roads. Others are purely about an experience encountering a small time period, where I wouldn't learn enough about caring for a new born in the period in which the child remains a new born. Though in some cases, it is entirely unclear where that line is - buying fresh vegetables and cooking them is only a tiny shade more independent than sitting down to eat them at a restaurant. Whether I fix a leaky tap or change a tire, those seem a bit more relevant to my life, but that is certainly at a balance of interdependence - if it takes someone two days to show up to fix either, I'd better know the basics at least.
There are other factors as well - there are skills which I do have, which do not help me towards my direct goals at all. I can sit and reason through probabilities & causalities. This is not a general talent, but something which has been nurtured into life by constant practice. I spend my days debugging badly structured code that already works well enough to keep. Arguably, in a world where that is of little value, I might not be doing this, but that is besides the point.
Sitting and thinking is an activity I can transmute into food, shelter and clothing - without knowing how to grow, build or weave. Getting better at thinking clearly is obviously helping me live better, but there's a certain emptiness is striving to be better at something that is indirectly linked to your life with a giant lag.
Money is necessary to this process, because I don't really interact with a fixed number of people. The people who benefit from my bit-twiddling aren't the same people who will give me food - money is an exchange of value, but one which is meaningful only because of the transaction.
The only true purpose of money is to be spent in return for someone else misplacing their efforts to my benefit. And to spread that across time - to be able to utilize your future effort today by borrowing or to plan for a period of time when you might be incapable of significant effort.
Adam Smith said it much more clearly about the pinmakers, but sometimes you want to do more than just make pins cheaper every year?
The reason I had to write this down is because I'm getting unmotivated about working on these misplaced non-goals in my life, which I have to do just so that I could meet the actual goals, through this long chain of people who are also here for the same reason.
--The most pitiful among men is he who turns his dreams into silver and gold.
-- Khalil Gibran
posted at: 01:39 | path: /observations | permalink |