The Human Relationship With Money and Its Meaning

Recursion into The Depths of Money, Value, and Love

When you spend several years doing private research for no pay, money starts to creep into your mind pretty frequently. And it was this incessant creeping that eventually led me to the crazy idea of trying to understand how money actually works. What it actually is. Money is a regular part of any life, even when you don’t grow up with much of it. When my parents explained to my brother and I why we couldn’t go to Chuck E Cheese anymore, the only thing I heard was ‘something something no money’. Regardless of if that was true, something about this green paper made it okay for my parents to walk out of a grocery store without going to jail, and made it not okay for my brother and I to go to finish the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle game. Money was a sort of ticket then in my mind and for a lot of people, money feels this way often. A ticket to peace, vacations, stability, freedom, leverage, even partnership.

In the economic world, which I should preface and say I am only a spectator to the sport, Money is commonly thought of as a ‘Store of Value’. While this seems a satisfactory definition at first glance, without knowing what ‘Value’ is, one might as well have said ‘Money is a warehouse.’ Now, no one just says Money is a store of value so I am swinging on a straw-man here. However, that simple definition is the relaxing balm to lull you into complacency. The phrase ‘Money is a store of Value’ carries with it several assumptions about value that is unintentional. But to see how, let’s just examine the way we usually use money. As a caveat, I should add that the distinction between Money vs Currency is quite important but for the sake of simplicity we will treat them as the same thing for now.

Money In Motion

First, a quick run down of how we use money:

• You can earn money in exchange for a service or a good. Everything I could think of that can be turned into money, falls into those two categories. Entities like businesses or organizations simply scale up the production of a good or service in exchange for greater amounts of money. Even governments charge a service fee in the form of taxes. Just about any being, living or otherwise, plays around with this thing we call money.
• You can spend money on just about anything you want or need these days. Food, water, shelter, electricity, transportation, internet, entertainment, and more on top of that. These, too, all amount to what is essentially a good or a service.
• Prices communicate information about how you can or should behave in relation to a good or service. Income communicates information on how much a person (or their parents), or an entity contributes in goods or services to the economic system.

With all this in mind, I think of Money a lot like bits to a computer system, blood in an animal system, and air in an ecological system. A fast moving medium, easily accessible to more sedentary units, to communicate and exchange things of Value. Technically, the money stores the stuff of value, yes. However, it more accurately, ‘disassembles’ the value of anything into something transportable, at least until it gets transformed back into a different good or service. It’s similar to water vapor in the air, a disassembled mass, waiting for the right conditions to collapse into a cloud, then rain, and then Value for a thirsty tree. The value isn’t in the money but rather in what the money can collapse into. That is why your money would instantly be valueless if no one was willing to take it in exchange for a good or service. Money’s mobility and value is dependent on the collective promise that it can be collapsed into other valuable things.

So if money collapses into goods and services, and expands out from goods and services, then goods and services are where the actual value is. All things of Value are a store of Value, not money. Think about all the things that are valuable but are not paid for. For example, the care that comes from a close friend or loved one isn’t something that is priced into the market. Yet, if you were to lose such a person, it would likely effect your behavior in the market. Things like love, intimacy, and loyalty are extremely valuable but we have yet to be able to disassemble it into the rapid moving form of money. In other words, Love is Value that is hard to boil. In addition, you can try to buy friendship but money just can’t quite collapse into the pure value of love. At best, one can only purchase the performance, a service. Since love is so hard to forge yet difficult to price, it makes it a great bench to engage with what value is later on in this essay.

What’s in a Price?

We can now chip away at the idea that a price tag tells you what the value of something truly is. But I would be remiss to not replace a price with a meaning more accurate. Price and Income are two sides of the same coin. The amount is, in reality, a measure of Force required to move something from one state, to another state. The force needed to beat the inertia of stability. When you see a stack of apples in a store, they are in a stable state, under the watchful eye of the store owner, and within his or her field of influence in the store. For you to push one apple out of this stable state, you must apply the monetary force listed on his sign, for him to give up his apple. Price is a measure of the force required to cause someone or something else to enter your field of influence. Income (or pay) is a measure of the force required to cause you and your product to enter someone else’s field of influence.

When you think of it this way, it makes it very interesting to think about what it means to earn money and the ways in which we do it. Essentially, in an exchange, you and the other party are setting a price, a measurement, on something of value to both of you, a good or service.

• A good is an “object of value” between two parties
• A service is “time spent in a valuable way” between two parties
• Money is medium used to apply a “persuasive force” to relinquish or acquire Value in one’s field of influence.
• Price & Pay is a measure of this persuasive force.

Underneath the Hood of Value

This leaves Value itself as the last illusive variable to the simplification we are doing here. Objects of value and time spent in a valuable way have a measurable price tag. But something like Love and Intimacy is not quite an object or a time spent, even though it can be expressed with those things. Love is something that sits ‘behind’ the valued thing. To me, I believe this has to do with this idea of “Field of Influence” that I mentioned earlier.

Fields of Influence

The field of influence is an interesting thing because it does not need to have a physical form. If you look around your room, many of the objects you cherish are in your own field of influence. But you can leave your home and still know that these objects are gathered due to your field. This tells us that the field of influence has some sense of ownership. However, even deeper than that, it is a sense of responsibility. The objects that you cherish and consider in your possession, are yours to organize, preserve, use, and design in accordance to your desire and ability. If some stranger were to come in your home and simply redecorate everything and leave, there would still likely be a deep sense of violation. The objects were not removed from your field of influence but someone enacting their will on to them instantly feels like a disruption to your field.

In addition to this, time seems to have a relationship to this field as well. Your home is a home because you can spend time ‘as you are’ in it. You can let go of effort and still maintain your field of influence. You are most vulnerable when you sleep because it is a state where time is spent without your direction or awareness. The fact that you could let go of these two critical things at all, make your home particularly valuable. But there are many other ways that you let go. The feeling of decompression and rest in your home after a long day of exchanging goods and services, is actually the feeling of not having to protect your field of influence. Your time can be spent in a way more harmonious to your field and as a result passes more quickly than it would at your job where your time is spent in a particular way.

Love and Value

Love, then, is something like the harmonious sharing of a field of influence. Time spent harmoniously or objects shared harmoniously. In this sense, the reason why love is hard to boil into fast moving money is because love is the state of harmony itself. You can spend money to bring any object into a field, and you can spend it to have someone temporarily enter your field and spend their time doing something in it. But, you cant spend money to create authentic harmony. Either they are harmonious with you, or they are not. This is why you can love a job, a store, a person, an object, a restaurant. But you cant buy a love for them. You can only choose to be harmonious or naturally be harmonious. And in doing so, that thing amplifies your field of influence.

The value behind all goods and services extends from a thing’s ability to amplify your field of influence. By this I don’t mean an increase in power and potency in the world, per say. Rather, I mean the ability for something to allow you to BE what you truly are more fully. Remember all the things you spend money on. *Flashback noises*:

You can spend money on just about anything you want or need these days. Food, water, shelter, electricity, transportation, internet, entertainment, and more on top of that. These, too, all amount to what is essentially a good or a service.

All of these thing amplify your field of influence. They allow you to be a greater expression of yourself, more than you could without them. If you starve, it’s hard to be you. If you can’t sleep peacefully, then its hard to be you. without fun, it’s hard to be you. But even in regards to things that don’t cost money, the value is still the same. Love, intimacy, loyalty. All three are things that can’t be bought but they all are harmonious states of being that allow you to feel safe enough to be you.

Value = The amplification of your field of influence. Your ability to be yourself.

This pursuit of greater expression of selfhood is all there is to us humans. Money simply makes it easy for us to change our mind about what that looks like with others.

That’s all for now. In future parts, I will probably talk about:

• Further extrapolate on Fields, Energy, and Wave forms
• how our Currencies actually work practically
• the real meaning of Time at every universal scale
• Introduce Existential Density

Let me know which one’s appeal to you, and share any questions, comments, or inspirations you have from my essays! All these ideas are a work in progress, so think of this more like a journal of that progression as I figure out the true Universal.

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this check out my other Socials. I hop between them with different vibes: