Letter to Ansh — 5
Dear Ansh
It is almost 3pm on a hot Sunday afternoon on the 3rd of February. You are visiting your mothers nani and mama’s family. I am told it is a bit cool there, but Ahmedabad is not known to be a cold city. On the flip side, Australia is known to be a desert country, but Melbourne is one of the cooler cities. January does get a bit hot, but it will start cooling down soon enough.
One of the most important reasons of writing these letters to you is to ensure you know the things I did not while growing up. I had to learn the the hard way through trial and error. You do not have to lose the same amount of time as I did to learn certain facts about life. You should absolutely test what I say and determine if it meets the benchmarks of absolute reason before you decide whether or not they are true. But when you do and they pass the test, grapple them with hoops of steel.
I wish to talk to you about a very important matter, its money.
Most people do not understand what money is. They think it is something evil, they attribute it evil powers and will claim that it is the root of all evil. You will hear banalities like the earth has enough for man’s need but not enough for man’s greed. You will also hear some people declare that money cannot buy you happiness.
Steer clear of such people and avoid them like the plague.
More often than not these are people who have failed at earning money, and 100% of the time they do not understand what money fundamentally is. They will often project their own failures into high sounding philosophy. In the best circumstances it is a case of sour grapes, in the worst this kind of thought is far more dangerous and corrodes the human spirit.
Money is a bit like petrol in your car. It lets you be able to drive your car around to wherever you want to take it. By itself it does not dictate where you want to go. But it does make it possible for you to go the place you want to, and its absence means you do not get to do what you want to. In that spirit, yes money cannot buy you happiness, but not having money can be a sure fire way of being unhappy. Unless you are a lone camper in the woods who lives off the land money is the fuel which is necessary to get around in human civilization.
Having Money is having freedom, it is the ability to control your own life. Money is the tool which allows you to live your life on your own terms. The first step to taking control of your own life is to understand this powerful tool called money.
So what exactly is money?
Man is a social animal. Unlike elephants we are not the largest or strongest, unlike lions we are not the most fierce, and unlike birds we cannot fly by ourselves. Man is an unlikely apex animal. This happened because of our superior intelligence, but it also happened because we learned to cooperate with other men and women and achieve things that one person could not do through teamwork and collaboration. The stonecutter would focus on building the best stone tools which could then be sold to the hunters who would pay the stone cutter part of their catch. Not having to spend time learning the tricks of the trade of stone cutting allowed the hunters to use that time to become the best at hunting. By trading the products of their specialized labour with each other both parties were able to gain benefits they would not have been able to achieve on their own.
Trading is one of the most important behaviour man has and it has led to astounding progress through the cumulative gains over centuries.
However man soon realized that trading one good for another is not an efficient way. If you are a chicken farmer and wanted to buy bread, you would have to carry your chicken to the baker to see if he would want to do a swap. Say he did not want chicken that day, and he wanted some chairs instead. You would then have to go see the carpenter if he would swap the chairs for chicken instead, and then go swap the chairs for bread. And what if one chicken was worth ten loaves of bread, and you wanted only one and the baker did not need the whole chicken. It just becomes way too tedious and leads to difficulties in trading and transactions end up not happening.
To solve this money was born, it was a new universal product that everyone would use as a medium of exchange. Instead of taking your chickens everywhere, you sell them for money and money would be then accepted as a means of payment by everyone. Which means you only need money to buy anything.
Money became crystallized value, something that everyone would agree to accept in exchange of other valuable goods and services or items. Because of money now more transactions were possible, it lubricated the cogs in the great machine of human civilization.
So how do you get money?
There are a few different ways
- Steal
- Rob using force
- Emotional blackmail
- Give someone else what they want in return of money
I will let you think through which of these ways is the best one. Think about the repercussions from an ethical perspective but also from a logical objective angle.
I will write to you again on this matter in the coming days.
Your loving father
Moresh
