alt Hacker NewsMoney should only have the purpose of realizing ones goals, it has no purpose in itself.
The whole society has lost its goal when the only target is to maximize money.
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When I do volunteer career mentoring for an early career group, money concerns are always a topic.
It's really bad in tech right now because the college students have been reading Blind and levels.fyi for years and think that if they're not making $500K TC they're never going to afford a house. They hit a very harsh reality when they graduate and realize their degree from an average state school and job search in a city that isn't the Bay Area, NYC, or Seattle isn't going to give them those $200K starting salaries they expected with a CS degree. Lately there's another sad discovery when they realize that nobody wants to hire a junior with no experience into a remote FAANG job.
Social media doomerism is also convincing a lot of them that everything is impossibly expensive. You wouldn't believe how many young people I've talked to who have household incomes in the $200 to $300K range who tell me they'll never be able to afford a house or to have kids. When you're immersed in doomer headlines you can lose track of the reality that people are raising families on much less than that all around you.
I see it money as a wall. Without it, me and my family are defenceless. My goal is keeping us safe.
Popularize the notion of chrematistics.
It was inevitable as soon as enough people believed that spending money is necessary to live. Money is the next stage of life. As individuals, people's only truly limited resource is their attention, their time, and so the same is true of Humanity as a singular whole. Money is a way to coerce another person's attention toward an endeavor that benefits the spender, like paying the chain of farmers/pickers/processors/distributors to grow and ship my food to me instead of having to do it all myself. And so people say Time = Money.
As a commutative operation, then, also Money = Time. Humanity and Money are both driven to create more of themselves, but as long as the growth of money is allowed to outpace the growth of Humanity, money will become the dominant life-form once there is more of it than there are humans to be the Time-unit. The only thing keeping it from happening before now was the lack of an instantaneous global means to transact.