It is time to move past money. Money is not the savior. Money does not lead us toward anything worthwhile. Money has been a tool up until now but people have made it such that life is about the tool itself. They have forgotten that the purpose of the tool is to enable life, and they have decided that life is itself the tool.
Imagine life is about building tree houses and we need lumber and screws to make it. The more lumber and screws we have, the more tree houses we can build, but everyone started focusing on getting lumber and screws, saws, and tools rather than building. Now, very few people are building tree houses any longer. We all have the capacity to build many and yet we sit around admiring our piles of tools and wood as if that commodity is itself the same thing. It is not.
What, then, is life if not money? Life is intended to be lived, enjoyed, and shared with others. It is the moments, the laughter, the peace. And while money can enable that in this current arrangement, money is continually mistaken as if it is that. But it's not. Obtaining a larger house, a TV, or a gaming system is not joy. They are not life. These objects could enable such things, but we're so focused on accumulating the things themselves and the money to get them that we've forgotten that the joy comes from sharing them with others. Without the community, the objects themselves are only partially useful. They are just enough to relax us temporarily to go out and gain more money. They give us just enough peace to get more money and toys while we continue to forget the grander function they could serve. They've become personal relaxation devices to continue productivity rather than devices for experiencing life.
Even in spiritual communities, they teach love and community, but they make the same mistakes. They teach manifestation and non-scarcity, but those who find their way, what is the first thing they do? They make a business out of their enlightenment. It becomes about the money. Sure, they help others in the process, but it's still a business, and those who need the help the most can't afford to pay. The life aspect continues to be hidden as the spiritual leaders accumulate wealth and become untouchables that can't even truly live. The students then lose their way and think that acquiring mindsets and teachings to gain more money is the goal while the living is continually lost. We must find our way back to life again. Back to living for the purpose of living: shared creation, joy, and laughter with others. Not everyone can be a high-paid spiritual guru and that mindset is so limiting.
We continue to fit joy and life into the margins of our work. We schedule things out weeks or months in advance because we have so much work to do gaining the money in order to do them. But life doesn't need as much money as we continue to posit. Life can be had making skits with neighbors, playing horseshoes, or seeing how many times we can skip a rock. Cumulatively, we have so much stuff and entertainment that if we all just came together with our stuff, we could keep each other entertained for the rest of our lives. And yet, we don't. We continue to act as if we must accumulate more all while shunning the greedy as if we're not guilty of it ourselves.
Life is not accumulation. Life is in the now. It is in the enjoyment of things with others—creativity with what is present. Our jobs should not be what we spend most of our time on just to obtain more money. We should spend the majority of our time on the things that bring us joy while necessities of life continue to be background tasks. Cleaning up after dinner should be a small task while making the dinner with creativity with others to see what we can make, how much we can enjoy it, how creative and delicious it can be, should be the point. But even food, we turn to business. How much money can we make? Will it scale? We dilute creativity to ensure we make more money.
Imagine a world where we did things for enjoyment. We wouldn't need competition and multiple companies competing for better things, because we'd do it for the challenge and for the amazingness of creation. How cool to make cars drive themselves for the sake of doing so? Who wouldn't want this? But then we so quickly get stuck on asking who will get the electric cars? How are they made and distributed if not based upon money? And this line of thinking is so backward. People immediately move to socialism and communism and consider forcing people to do things and setting prices because our entire worldview is entirely money oriented.
We don't need government for this. We need people. People who simply want a better way of life. A life that is not organized around money, but one organized around enjoyment with others. If a few people wish to make a car, that is exciting. And their friends can then use the car as needed for mutual fun and enjoyment. If more people think a car is a useful thing to have, then more people will want to pitch in to make more cars, perhaps to race. If other groups or societies wish to make their own car, they can speak to those who made the car in this group and learn the ways. It will be fun for them to share what they've learned and to mutually benefit one another.
We don't need the entire world to shift to this for it to be viable. The rest can come along as we prove how real this is. Living a life in joy is quite enticing in comparison to living in miserable accumulation. We simply need small groups to decide it's time to start living this way. It's time for people to stop living in a scarcity mindset where we must charge outlandish prices for our skills. Instead, we take joy in giving to those within our circles. If our skills are useful, then teach others to gain those similar skills so that the load isn't filtered by money, but is freely and exponentially available.
This is my vision.
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