A question that made me anxious when I was a teenager is “where does money come from really?”

Most people tend to be satisfied with something like, “well you get a job, and jobs pay money” – but I’m still anxious. Where do jobs get money? Mostly (but not only!) customers. Where do customers get money? Mostly (but not only!) jobs

A Paul Graham essay about wealth relieved a substantial amount of anxiety. Without referring to it, my recollection is: money is a proxy (imperfect) for what people want. Get good at making or doing what people want, and you’ll be OK

That’s good enough to function, but still…

Pause. Let’s switch up to an interesting fact. Some of the biggest sources of money in the world are “investment funds”. Saudi Arabia’s investment fund, which I assume is made primarily of oil money, invests billions in proxies that invest in tech, construction…

These hallowed portals of money are so massive and opaque, I’m not sure it’s possible for outsiders like me to develop an accurate model of them or how they work over the course of an entire lifetime. They’re almost like gods, or the high priests of the church of the $$$ god

Pause. Switch back to jobs. A job is a role in an organization. My favorite fun example of an organization is a bank heist – the getaway driver gets paid even though he isn’t “directly” involved (depends on how you see it). When the heist is simple, every job clearly “matters”

The scary thing to me as a teenager m was the prospect of working a bullshit job in a bullshit organization, cranking widgets that nobody actually cares about, nobody actually wants outside of the bizzaro context of the organization itself

It’s interesting to reflect on this now – why was I so averse to this? Seriously, I was constantly nauseous in junior college because I felt like everyone around me was hallucinating and I was given a placebo or something. Everyone marching in lockstep to a beat I couldn’t hear

Some time, space, reading & reflection has made it clear: school isn’t about education, school is part of an economic-industrial complex mass-producing interchangeable widgets for the capitalist meat grinder of humanity. Annoying wokebros whining about this doesn’t make it untrue

Parents and teachers and peers all unwittingly conspire to create this mass hallucination where people collectively mutilate, cauterize and brand their minds in service of The Economy – and not The Economy itself, but their imperfect, vague and detached conceptualization of it

The prospect of it always seemed hideously bleak to me. The prize for doing well in school, it seemed, was that you get to win one of the higher paying jobs in one of the more prestigious organisations, meaning you get to crank high-prestige widgets instead of low-status widgets

It’s interesting to reflect now how kids of different socioeconomic status would’ve interpreted the received wisdom differently. 🤔 kids from wealthy families surely know certain things about the nature of wealth that kids from poorer families don’t, and perhaps never will

A thing that must’ve shaped my worldview, that I never really thought about: my dad ran his own business for the entirety of my childhood. It was an industrial waste disposal business – blue-collar work. Mr. Veerasamy was literally the founder-CEO of a garbage company

I had to navigate this weird space:

– we were better off than a lot of families in SG; we lived on landed property rather than a HDB flat

– my parents were not-very-smart about how they managed their money. They were always *stressed* about money while we lived in a big house

– I had many friends who were significantly “poorer” but clearly happier and better adjusted, and even more… classy? My dad drove us around in a rickety pickup truck with garbage in the back 😂

– I went to school with kids who were *incredibly* wealthy, top 1%

So I have always had this really feral attitude towards money. And towards everything, really 😂 I was volunteering with prisoners, hanging out with migrant garbagemen, playing in a band, organising gigs, working at a hotel, speaking at rallies and talking with Ministers

It was interesting, I guess, to know that my uneducated dad was making more money hauling trash than several of my friends’ parents who had degrees and so on. I suppose it meant I never quite bought into certain assumptions people have about status

That said, I think my parents had all sorts of personal demons & bugbears about status & wealth that I wasn’t entirely conscious of. My mum still asks me when I’m going to university 😂 when I see it in them now, I find it a little sad. It’s child-like, like worrying about prom

When I was 17, I was trying to save up money to record my band’s music – and so I worked part-time banquet staff at Shangri-La hotel. It was one of the most interesting experiences of my life (lol at potato quality 2007 camera phones)

My dad always told me, “I want you to study hard so you don’t have to struggle and suffer like me”. 

But working hard manual labor at SL was *incredibly* satisfying to me. It was the opposite of school. Everything I did *mattered*. I felt real kinship with everyone I worked with

I get that I was working only for a month or so, and it’s a sort of “blue collar tourism” – life is different for people who have no choice. I know. I spoke with them, worked with them, ate with them, smoked with them. It was the realest experience of my life until then

So like… maybe what my dad was trying to say with “I don’t want you to struggle like me” is, “I don’t want you to feel low-status like me”, in which case I have already succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. But I don’t think he sees it 😂 yet, anyway. Asian parents need proof

I think what I’m circling around to is… my experiences with lots of different people have taught me that there’s something unjust about the way money is distributed. (Just observing my own feelings; I’m not advocating for redistribution or anything. Just trying to understand)

And I think maybe the secret is buried in the phrase “money is debt”, which is an idea I’ve encountered several times but I’ve never quite properly investigated 🤔

Before I get down to reading the Graeber book I think it’s interesting to just reflect and riff on the idea. 

Money is debt. 

Money is a promise. 

Money is a piece of paper representing the promises people have made each other

We pay each other with other people’s promises.

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“One can divide political twitter into people who think wealth is created and people who think poverty is created.” – Ben Evans

I find myself thinking about some interesting things that happened with Paul Graham…

What’s the fundamental difference between a Republican and a Democrat? What’s the difference in the core belief? There was an interesting bit from Horace and Pete… Liberal vs Conservative.

“You’ve got that eternal idiotic idea that if anarchy came it would come from the poor. Why should it? The poor have been rebels, but they have never been anarchists; they have more interest than anyone else in there being some decent government. The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn’t; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all. Aristocrats were always anarchists.” – The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare by G. K. Chesterton

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Thinking now about some conversations I’ve had about Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, and the morality of holding on to wealth. What does it mean, to hold on to wealth? I have a small business. What happens if it gets bigger?

I’m thinking also about the Elizabeth Warren quote about helping the next kid.