I agree with almost everything you wrote. I disagree about wanting to live in a “nice” area being due to status. I don’t care about status in regards to housing. Heck, if i didn’t have a dog, I’d probably live out of my vehicle.
But there are a lot of negatives that come with living in a poor part of town. Noise, crime, etc. In poor neighborhoods, people are outside a lot, and they’re quite noisy. When I was a kid, my dad told me there was a difference between being poor and being low class. But there are no poor but not low class neighborhoods.
Fair point. But you could move to a small town in the middle of nowhere. Very quiet there. And safe. But most high-status people do not want to do that. My guess is that this has a lot to do with status, but I could be wrong.
You're right. I think most of the time it is due to status. Occasionally, it is due to wanting a safe, quiet space.
I remember when I was younger and really into frugal living. I thought, "If people who had high-paying jobs were frugal, they could retire early. Why don't they?" And status would be the reason.
Is money ultimately about status, or is it about control? "Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes it's laws" stated Mayer Amschel Bauer Rothschild. By controlling the printing of money via the central banks, one can direct the flow of that money which in turn is ultimately about control and modification of human behavior.
Sure, but in order to control human behavior, you need to have something humans want. Status is one of the biggest things humans want. Also why would anyone want to control human behavior? Because such control is called dominance, and it’s a form of status.
I have written on how expressing compassion for others’ suffering can be bullshit in my post “You Actually Want to Suffer.” But nothing on compassion itself being bullshit (not sure if it is). I do think empathy is bullshit, though, and recommend Paul Bloom’s book Against Empathy.
This implies that if people want higher social spending, they can make it look more attractive if it is not cash. Free school meals are a good example. I think Walz came up with it as a trap and Vance absolutely walked into it - it just looks very callous to oppose *feeding kids*. Half a century later people still mention Thatcher ending free school milk. This is very much cartoon supervillain territory. Cash transfers are easier to oppose, because cash is cold. This explains food stamps - it is not only about not being able to buy alcohol and drugs with it, but rather in people's minds it is associated with food, not money. It is hard to oppose that, especially hard if you are courting the Christian religious vote.
I think a lot of people know it on BOTH sides of the issue. Consider Milton Friedman's idea of replacing welfare with a Negative Income Tax. I think he knew that if that happens, it becomes much easier to argue against it. Simply because it is a very ugly sounding expression.
I think this used to be true, but not anymore. In the 1980's driving an expensive car was high status. It is today increasingly not so - people are seen as resource-wasting, planet-killing assholes for it. Riding a bike is cooler. When did wearing golden jewelry stop being cool? I think about thirty years ago.
I think today education is status, and expensive cars or golden jewelry have an uneducated vibe. Money still matters, but it has to be signalled in a hidden, furtive, deniable, none too obvious ways.
Money is a (prestige) status memory that evolved from gifts. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4832622 Why so cold? Because it evolved for immediate repayment of gifts from strangers. You don't need money to repay gifts from people in your community with whom you will have repeated interactions. So the use of money implies an impersonal, stranger-on-stranger relationship.
Great post! I especially liked the section on "Money is about coldness". Alan Fiske's relational models theory explains it in a similar way. He says all relationships correspond to one of 4 types: Communal Sharing, Authority Ranking, Equality Matching, and Market Pricing. What Tooby and Cosmides call "explicit contingent exchange" is equivalent to market pricing. We engage in communal sharing with close friends and family because of our fitness interdependence with them.
Thanks. Yea, I'm familiar with Fiske's work but don't think it quite carves things up the right way. Like wouldn't "explicit contingent exchange" be a kind of turn-taking and thus equality matching? Or if you're paying for someone's labor, is that market pricing, equality matching, authority ranking, or all of the above? How do you know which one it is? Can you use more than one? Are there more than four? I just don't find it very predictively powerful or insightful compared to just straightforward game theory and evo psych, but your mileage may vary.
Here's my bullshit: money is a proxy for whatever deeply ingrained psychological need, want, or fear you cling to as a way to explain the world: achievement, respect, control, stability, love, or freedom. The danger is, the deeper the need the deeper the bullshit.
Long before the strong hierarchies of agriculture, generalized reciprocity got us to group sizes of 200 - 300.
This represents the bullshit threshold. You needed to pull your own weight in a group of that size or get ostracized. When groups grew to a larger size, they fissioned but often maintained ties.
Generalized reciprocity was the behavior that allowed us to evolve, but it only works when you can keep tract of the the relationships. I suspect that this is a proxy for status, or more accurately it is "standing". In any event, the number of two way relationships grows roughly with the square of the population and the number of three way relationships grows roughly with the cube. Technically its n!/((n-3)!*3!) and so on. The total number of relationships grows very quickly!
Our numbers have grown to the point where we invented money to ease the calculations of keeping track.
I appreciate the just so story, it makes it easier to talk about some things, but I think something more basic is happening. Our population growth limited our ability to meaningfully track relationships and what we owe to each other. We evolved in groups. Only functional groups survived and we developed the ability to form functional groups. Since functional groups can exist with a wide range of behaviors, even the behaviors are learned. The innate part here is the drive to form relationships. I think that this is different from bullshit.
Yea agreed money also has important tracking functions. It’s mainly how we talk about money—the way it’s interweaved with our social and political lives—that I’m calling bullshit on. Not economics or anything like that.
The “economics” are bullshit too, just slightly more insidious. Money, in its “current” form, is an IOU that is only redeemable for… for more IOU’s. It’s right there on the good ‘ol greenback: “this note is legal tender for payment of all debts—public and private.”
Prestige status acquisition and competition is an equilibrium selection mechanism for altruism (Hardy, Van Vugt, 2006).
Signaling status through giving is adaptive for the entire human species because it provides incentives for able individuals to continue working even after they have provided for themselves and their families, reallocates available resources to individuals in need, reduces waste, and provides insurance. Giving allows the same environment to support a much larger human population.
Gifts spawn webs of reciprocity that encourage cooperation among individuals.
Gift bonds, opens up debt relationships with credit risk.
Gift giving involves significant transaction costs because of the need to mentally account for all claims, liabilities, and the value of goods and services provided by various individuals.
Gift exchange can be a substitute for some functions of money in small, not very specialized populations (Araujo, 2004). Gift-giving creates the potential for future cooperation, but is limited to people who know each other and interact regularly.
......
Monetary economies are not merely “large interlocking networks of gifts” (Kocherlakota, 1998). Money improved the exchange of gifts (Duffy and Puzzello 2014). Money made gifts impersonal.
Money solves for the lack of formal or informal enforcement and disincentivizes free riding. Money is a form of private decentralized enforcement of gift contracts. Using Leeson’s terms (Leeson, 2003), we can rephrase: money is a non-coercive third-party gift contract.
Without money, it is not possible to sustain cooperation among strangers (Bigoni, Camera and Casari, 2015), (Camera, Casari, Bigoni, 2013).
Money, as opposed to gifts, creates a positive feedback loop among helpers. At all times, someone has a positive cash balance and thus a potential to get help from other willing helpers.
I agree with you that the emergence of money enabled reciprocity with strangers in non-repetitive interactions because it eliminated the need to keep track of debt relationships created by all the giving. When the gift is followed by payment, money immediately closes the debt relationship. Thus, "giving" becomes more common and present even among strangers.
One concern I continue to have is equating money with status. I won't deny the correlation nor will I affirm the equivalence.
We have formal debt protocols so we don't forget out obligations, which are often to faceless institutions. This has much to do with writing. In Yap they had money with tokens so big they might not be moved. Debts were tallied with some kind of marker.
Even with the existence of money, close personal debts are still tracked in the normal human way - tit for tat.
Money is funny. It's not exactly real and it's not bullshit either. It does fit into the sapiens propensity to keep track of things.
How would you then explain the various puzzles I explain in “money is about status”? Do you have a more parsimonious explanation for all those puzzles?
Social learning. Primates vie for status, physically and with largess. We have learned to value largess or the possibility of it over raw physical power.
I'm probably misguided for doing this, but I like to think of the simplest behavior/pressure that can support the learning of a physical skill or social trait (also a skill).
Insider status - trading value person-to-person
Outsider status - Largess, potential largess, the possibility of becoming an insider, or balanced trade
For the evolutionary pressure point, consider a group faced with dwindling food resources. This was a constant cycle. Groups that prioritized the feeding of the young, the pregnant, and the presently weak as resources dwindled would be rewarded with greater population health and population growth. During the journey to new digs all the other able-bodied could suck it up for a few days. There's pretty good research showing that going without food for the formerly well fed is not a bad thing. I'll give you a citation if you like.
We went along this way (moving from place to place) as genus homo for a long time and as sapiens for 90+% of our specific time on the planet.
Early human groups were not exclusively familial. Groups traded partners or else died out. Treating the additions to the group differently would have been non-optimal.
Sorry, I've rambled, and I also do not present a linear argument, but there is definitely some non-bullshit to consider regarding how we trade with each other and practice practical altruism. Money fits into the socially reinforced framework but it only has a reason to exist because of our earlier environment and selection experience.
money evolved from proto-money, which were status objects, shells, or beads worn as jewelry or on clothing. every debt carries credit and duration risk. if someone provides services or goods to a non-kin or risky counter party, it makes sense to settle the debt immediately with payment of money (prestige status). even on yap the stones changed hands, though with the larger ones not literally only figuratively (the diameter varies from 3.5 centimetres (1.4 in) to 3.6 metres (12 ft), but most are between 30 and 50 centimetres (12 and 20 in). another thing to consider is that money is at least a few hundred thousand years old and thus precedes writing by a huge margin.
Naturally, I left out a whole class of status markers such as the ability coach a group to consensus, or good storytelling or to give good counsel. These things are still valued but they are hard to parallel with money as status items. I could say leadership but that's a basket of skills. Also, what about the old person who knows where to find food when times are lean?
We casually equate things that are not the same all the time.
There's another type of status that is sort of contrary to money. Qualities like toughness, going without food, endurance vs speed, fearlessness and flexibility in the face of the unknown. Money doesn't directly parallel survival raw survival skills where making do with little is a sign of a competent member of a group (money parallels frugality but it's not the same). I like to think that status started out as a kind of measure of fitness in the sense of improving everyone's chances of survival in the group. A parallel to measures of emotional importance we feel individually as we take stock of our state.
Now, here we are talking about money. Money might enhance survival now, and it is a sign of adaptation that we generally recognize money as a means of survival, but money is far from the measures of status we evolved to embody.
Our social learning skills always have us on the edge of our social systems. Always we strive. Status isn't slippery. It's always about survival in the present circumstance. Money is a factor.
I'm wondering what we would have owed to each other in an egalitarian group that travels from place to place to survive. Maybe a point here, a scraper there, a hide, or a woven bag another time. We all owed these debts? Beads were hard to make and probably someone made them for themselves first. Decorative or commemorative, sure.
So you're saying that money started out as a fad, as a coveted item?
I'm contending that status came first because of skill and the accoutrements came later. The skilled traded with each other, perhaps?
When we can only keep what we can carry, when our status is our skill set, we might have a medium of exchange in special objects that can be traded and easily carried, okay.
It's sort of shitty, but you can't be too shitty because if you are, the group dies.
It also implies that the favors can be transferred intergenerationally. So unearned status might be a thing, if the deceased wasn't buried with their items, everybody would know whose beads they were. If they did die with their status, then there would be no intergenerational transfer or grave robbing. I suppose an out of group member of a multi-group trading collective could ransack a grave, but if the status item was unique enough and the taboo of upsetting the dead was strong enough, that could reduce it.
So it becomes money when the status items become indistinguishable from each other.
But then it's not status any more. Yap stones are in between. I'm leaning to money is bullshit more now. How did bullshit become so important?
Call it what you will but, the more freedom, the better. I grew up in a broke household ( no freedom) and worked like a dog to never be in that position again. Freedom is fabulous. I COULD purchase a fancy car but meh….knowing i could, priceless. Call it what you will.
Definitely agree that money is about status, but one of your examples has me a bit confused. Yams are about status too, right? So why is it okay to bring yams to parties?
Yea that's a neat way of breaking it down, though there may not be anything in the need/cold category, because satisfying others' needs is sort of by definition warm.
tbh i always saw money is a part of resources of this life but it was never a purpose of life for me. i don’t like material stuff and i can’t, for example, kill, cheat or sell someone for the “green papers”. for me it just a papers. yes, i need it to eat, to live, i know. but for me it’s always is going to be a just papers
i can’t believe that a lot of people sees a money as a purpose of their life
Brilliant. As usual
🔥
David "THE SAGE OF OUR TIME " Pinsof
I agree with almost everything you wrote. I disagree about wanting to live in a “nice” area being due to status. I don’t care about status in regards to housing. Heck, if i didn’t have a dog, I’d probably live out of my vehicle.
But there are a lot of negatives that come with living in a poor part of town. Noise, crime, etc. In poor neighborhoods, people are outside a lot, and they’re quite noisy. When I was a kid, my dad told me there was a difference between being poor and being low class. But there are no poor but not low class neighborhoods.
Fair point. But you could move to a small town in the middle of nowhere. Very quiet there. And safe. But most high-status people do not want to do that. My guess is that this has a lot to do with status, but I could be wrong.
You're right. I think most of the time it is due to status. Occasionally, it is due to wanting a safe, quiet space.
I remember when I was younger and really into frugal living. I thought, "If people who had high-paying jobs were frugal, they could retire early. Why don't they?" And status would be the reason.
To be honest, if I had a remote job, that would be the first thing I would do.
Is money ultimately about status, or is it about control? "Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes it's laws" stated Mayer Amschel Bauer Rothschild. By controlling the printing of money via the central banks, one can direct the flow of that money which in turn is ultimately about control and modification of human behavior.
Sure, but in order to control human behavior, you need to have something humans want. Status is one of the biggest things humans want. Also why would anyone want to control human behavior? Because such control is called dominance, and it’s a form of status.
Very good. Have you written on how compassion is bullshit?
I have written on how expressing compassion for others’ suffering can be bullshit in my post “You Actually Want to Suffer.” But nothing on compassion itself being bullshit (not sure if it is). I do think empathy is bullshit, though, and recommend Paul Bloom’s book Against Empathy.
This implies that if people want higher social spending, they can make it look more attractive if it is not cash. Free school meals are a good example. I think Walz came up with it as a trap and Vance absolutely walked into it - it just looks very callous to oppose *feeding kids*. Half a century later people still mention Thatcher ending free school milk. This is very much cartoon supervillain territory. Cash transfers are easier to oppose, because cash is cold. This explains food stamps - it is not only about not being able to buy alcohol and drugs with it, but rather in people's minds it is associated with food, not money. It is hard to oppose that, especially hard if you are courting the Christian religious vote.
I think a lot of people know it on BOTH sides of the issue. Consider Milton Friedman's idea of replacing welfare with a Negative Income Tax. I think he knew that if that happens, it becomes much easier to argue against it. Simply because it is a very ugly sounding expression.
Dear David,
I think this used to be true, but not anymore. In the 1980's driving an expensive car was high status. It is today increasingly not so - people are seen as resource-wasting, planet-killing assholes for it. Riding a bike is cooler. When did wearing golden jewelry stop being cool? I think about thirty years ago.
I think today education is status, and expensive cars or golden jewelry have an uneducated vibe. Money still matters, but it has to be signalled in a hidden, furtive, deniable, none too obvious ways.
I completely agree. Check out my post “Status Is Weird” for an explanation of this phenomenon.
Money is a (prestige) status memory that evolved from gifts. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4832622 Why so cold? Because it evolved for immediate repayment of gifts from strangers. You don't need money to repay gifts from people in your community with whom you will have repeated interactions. So the use of money implies an impersonal, stranger-on-stranger relationship.
Cool, this paper looks interesting--and convergent with the ideas presented here. Thanks.
Great post! I especially liked the section on "Money is about coldness". Alan Fiske's relational models theory explains it in a similar way. He says all relationships correspond to one of 4 types: Communal Sharing, Authority Ranking, Equality Matching, and Market Pricing. What Tooby and Cosmides call "explicit contingent exchange" is equivalent to market pricing. We engage in communal sharing with close friends and family because of our fitness interdependence with them.
Thanks. Yea, I'm familiar with Fiske's work but don't think it quite carves things up the right way. Like wouldn't "explicit contingent exchange" be a kind of turn-taking and thus equality matching? Or if you're paying for someone's labor, is that market pricing, equality matching, authority ranking, or all of the above? How do you know which one it is? Can you use more than one? Are there more than four? I just don't find it very predictively powerful or insightful compared to just straightforward game theory and evo psych, but your mileage may vary.
Here's my bullshit: money is a proxy for whatever deeply ingrained psychological need, want, or fear you cling to as a way to explain the world: achievement, respect, control, stability, love, or freedom. The danger is, the deeper the need the deeper the bullshit.
Provocative, as always.
Another Gem 💎
Like the picture inserts. 🐣
I was very pleased with myself for finding three Keanus that worked as a progression.
Picking up the altruism thread -
Long before the strong hierarchies of agriculture, generalized reciprocity got us to group sizes of 200 - 300.
This represents the bullshit threshold. You needed to pull your own weight in a group of that size or get ostracized. When groups grew to a larger size, they fissioned but often maintained ties.
Generalized reciprocity was the behavior that allowed us to evolve, but it only works when you can keep tract of the the relationships. I suspect that this is a proxy for status, or more accurately it is "standing". In any event, the number of two way relationships grows roughly with the square of the population and the number of three way relationships grows roughly with the cube. Technically its n!/((n-3)!*3!) and so on. The total number of relationships grows very quickly!
Our numbers have grown to the point where we invented money to ease the calculations of keeping track.
I appreciate the just so story, it makes it easier to talk about some things, but I think something more basic is happening. Our population growth limited our ability to meaningfully track relationships and what we owe to each other. We evolved in groups. Only functional groups survived and we developed the ability to form functional groups. Since functional groups can exist with a wide range of behaviors, even the behaviors are learned. The innate part here is the drive to form relationships. I think that this is different from bullshit.
Yea agreed money also has important tracking functions. It’s mainly how we talk about money—the way it’s interweaved with our social and political lives—that I’m calling bullshit on. Not economics or anything like that.
The “economics” are bullshit too, just slightly more insidious. Money, in its “current” form, is an IOU that is only redeemable for… for more IOU’s. It’s right there on the good ‘ol greenback: “this note is legal tender for payment of all debts—public and private.”
Prestige status acquisition and competition is an equilibrium selection mechanism for altruism (Hardy, Van Vugt, 2006).
Signaling status through giving is adaptive for the entire human species because it provides incentives for able individuals to continue working even after they have provided for themselves and their families, reallocates available resources to individuals in need, reduces waste, and provides insurance. Giving allows the same environment to support a much larger human population.
Gifts spawn webs of reciprocity that encourage cooperation among individuals.
Gift bonds, opens up debt relationships with credit risk.
Gift giving involves significant transaction costs because of the need to mentally account for all claims, liabilities, and the value of goods and services provided by various individuals.
Gift exchange can be a substitute for some functions of money in small, not very specialized populations (Araujo, 2004). Gift-giving creates the potential for future cooperation, but is limited to people who know each other and interact regularly.
......
Monetary economies are not merely “large interlocking networks of gifts” (Kocherlakota, 1998). Money improved the exchange of gifts (Duffy and Puzzello 2014). Money made gifts impersonal.
Money solves for the lack of formal or informal enforcement and disincentivizes free riding. Money is a form of private decentralized enforcement of gift contracts. Using Leeson’s terms (Leeson, 2003), we can rephrase: money is a non-coercive third-party gift contract.
Without money, it is not possible to sustain cooperation among strangers (Bigoni, Camera and Casari, 2015), (Camera, Casari, Bigoni, 2013).
Money, as opposed to gifts, creates a positive feedback loop among helpers. At all times, someone has a positive cash balance and thus a potential to get help from other willing helpers.
Money is Status Memory https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4832622
How does this comment on money and status relate to my suggestion about generalized reciprocity?
Do you even recognize generalized reciprocity as a concept?
How does this comment tie to my suggestion about the capacity we have to track relationships in groups?
I agree with you that the emergence of money enabled reciprocity with strangers in non-repetitive interactions because it eliminated the need to keep track of debt relationships created by all the giving. When the gift is followed by payment, money immediately closes the debt relationship. Thus, "giving" becomes more common and present even among strangers.
Thank you for clearing that up.
One concern I continue to have is equating money with status. I won't deny the correlation nor will I affirm the equivalence.
We have formal debt protocols so we don't forget out obligations, which are often to faceless institutions. This has much to do with writing. In Yap they had money with tokens so big they might not be moved. Debts were tallied with some kind of marker.
Even with the existence of money, close personal debts are still tracked in the normal human way - tit for tat.
Money is funny. It's not exactly real and it's not bullshit either. It does fit into the sapiens propensity to keep track of things.
How would you then explain the various puzzles I explain in “money is about status”? Do you have a more parsimonious explanation for all those puzzles?
Social learning. Primates vie for status, physically and with largess. We have learned to value largess or the possibility of it over raw physical power.
I'm probably misguided for doing this, but I like to think of the simplest behavior/pressure that can support the learning of a physical skill or social trait (also a skill).
Insider status - trading value person-to-person
Outsider status - Largess, potential largess, the possibility of becoming an insider, or balanced trade
For the evolutionary pressure point, consider a group faced with dwindling food resources. This was a constant cycle. Groups that prioritized the feeding of the young, the pregnant, and the presently weak as resources dwindled would be rewarded with greater population health and population growth. During the journey to new digs all the other able-bodied could suck it up for a few days. There's pretty good research showing that going without food for the formerly well fed is not a bad thing. I'll give you a citation if you like.
We went along this way (moving from place to place) as genus homo for a long time and as sapiens for 90+% of our specific time on the planet.
Early human groups were not exclusively familial. Groups traded partners or else died out. Treating the additions to the group differently would have been non-optimal.
Sorry, I've rambled, and I also do not present a linear argument, but there is definitely some non-bullshit to consider regarding how we trade with each other and practice practical altruism. Money fits into the socially reinforced framework but it only has a reason to exist because of our earlier environment and selection experience.
money evolved from proto-money, which were status objects, shells, or beads worn as jewelry or on clothing. every debt carries credit and duration risk. if someone provides services or goods to a non-kin or risky counter party, it makes sense to settle the debt immediately with payment of money (prestige status). even on yap the stones changed hands, though with the larger ones not literally only figuratively (the diameter varies from 3.5 centimetres (1.4 in) to 3.6 metres (12 ft), but most are between 30 and 50 centimetres (12 and 20 in). another thing to consider is that money is at least a few hundred thousand years old and thus precedes writing by a huge margin.
Naturally, I left out a whole class of status markers such as the ability coach a group to consensus, or good storytelling or to give good counsel. These things are still valued but they are hard to parallel with money as status items. I could say leadership but that's a basket of skills. Also, what about the old person who knows where to find food when times are lean?
We casually equate things that are not the same all the time.
There's another type of status that is sort of contrary to money. Qualities like toughness, going without food, endurance vs speed, fearlessness and flexibility in the face of the unknown. Money doesn't directly parallel survival raw survival skills where making do with little is a sign of a competent member of a group (money parallels frugality but it's not the same). I like to think that status started out as a kind of measure of fitness in the sense of improving everyone's chances of survival in the group. A parallel to measures of emotional importance we feel individually as we take stock of our state.
Now, here we are talking about money. Money might enhance survival now, and it is a sign of adaptation that we generally recognize money as a means of survival, but money is far from the measures of status we evolved to embody.
Our social learning skills always have us on the edge of our social systems. Always we strive. Status isn't slippery. It's always about survival in the present circumstance. Money is a factor.
I'm wondering what we would have owed to each other in an egalitarian group that travels from place to place to survive. Maybe a point here, a scraper there, a hide, or a woven bag another time. We all owed these debts? Beads were hard to make and probably someone made them for themselves first. Decorative or commemorative, sure.
So you're saying that money started out as a fad, as a coveted item?
I'm contending that status came first because of skill and the accoutrements came later. The skilled traded with each other, perhaps?
When we can only keep what we can carry, when our status is our skill set, we might have a medium of exchange in special objects that can be traded and easily carried, okay.
It's sort of shitty, but you can't be too shitty because if you are, the group dies.
It also implies that the favors can be transferred intergenerationally. So unearned status might be a thing, if the deceased wasn't buried with their items, everybody would know whose beads they were. If they did die with their status, then there would be no intergenerational transfer or grave robbing. I suppose an out of group member of a multi-group trading collective could ransack a grave, but if the status item was unique enough and the taboo of upsetting the dead was strong enough, that could reduce it.
So it becomes money when the status items become indistinguishable from each other.
But then it's not status any more. Yap stones are in between. I'm leaning to money is bullshit more now. How did bullshit become so important?
All true but i love having money, and a good amount of it. It’s freedom.
Freedom is status.
Call it what you will but, the more freedom, the better. I grew up in a broke household ( no freedom) and worked like a dog to never be in that position again. Freedom is fabulous. I COULD purchase a fancy car but meh….knowing i could, priceless. Call it what you will.
When I realized that paper money is stupid, I was young but not high... although I do often say I have a "high personality" :D
Definitely agree that money is about status, but one of your examples has me a bit confused. Yams are about status too, right? So why is it okay to bring yams to parties?
Yea but yams aren't about coldness (as far as I'm aware). Money is about both. It's the coldness that makes it rude to bring money to a party.
Nice. So maybe we could categorize party gifts in four quadrants based on these two dimensions:
Status/Cold: money
Status/Warm: yams/wine
Need/Cold: labor? (like setting up chairs?)
Need/Warm: food?
Yea that's a neat way of breaking it down, though there may not be anything in the need/cold category, because satisfying others' needs is sort of by definition warm.
tbh i always saw money is a part of resources of this life but it was never a purpose of life for me. i don’t like material stuff and i can’t, for example, kill, cheat or sell someone for the “green papers”. for me it just a papers. yes, i need it to eat, to live, i know. but for me it’s always is going to be a just papers
i can’t believe that a lot of people sees a money as a purpose of their life