everybody owes each other stuff, we call this society

then people invented coin to represent this debt and trade it around, we call this money

the trade of debt ebbs and flows in massive and complex global patterns, we call this the economy

✱

Re: inflation, I’ve told this story a few times – when I was about 10yo I learned in school about hyperinflation in WW2 Singapore and it freaked me out horribly. It shocked me that nobody else seemed to care- not the teachers, not the students. Money is sentiment and can go mad! It can become worthless! Everyone around me seemed to gloss over it, but I was like- wait… guys… money is fake, fictitious, a house of cards

I agonized about this all my life. What is money really? How do we trust it? People were during themselves during the Asian Financial Crisis in ‘97. Why? How did it come to that? Again, weirdly, nobody around me seemed to really care. “Go to school,” they said. “Get a good job…”

How can we trust money when money doesn’t care about us? I did a lot of reading relieved some anxiety, but I’m still suspicious of money & it’s part of why I’m so obsessive about cultivating relationships.

money… just, layers upon layers of “polite fictions” and social bullshit, a house of cards in a hall of mirrors, and they’ll call you the crazy one for asking questions… oh yea so anyway where I eventually ended up is: money is just a representation of debt, anyway, so I might as well go to the source and do favors for people. The favor economy predates the cash economy and you can’t tax friendship

favors are in some way less reliable than cash, because people are finicky. but if you patiently build a network of people who you trust, suppose even if 80-90% of them are fair-weather friends who abandon you, there’ll be *some* people you can count on. I get very dramatic…

but history is dramatic!! shit gets real wild real fast “out of the blue” and lots of people wail that they didn’t see it coming. I wouldn’t call myself a prepper or survivalist per se, but relative to people just bumbling about I suppose yea, I optimise for not dying