Who Needs Money?
This article in Outside the Lines suggests that the end of money as we know it might actually be a good thing. Given how hard most of us work to get that money, it seems absurd. But isn’t it sort of absurd how we exchange pieces of paper with dead presidents pictures on them for goods and services? Of course most of us don’t use the paper, which is probably less valuable than the paper that comes on a roll to be used in the smallest room in the house.
The prospect of the end of money is terrifying, but the indigenous people who live on this land before it became a country thrived for thousands of years without it. They learned to take what they needed, without destroying their environment in the process. Yes, life was much harder and unforgiving, just as it will be for us when we have pulled the last fossil fuel out of the ground, and mined the last ton of material to make more stuff. At that point life is going to get very local. We’re going to be dependent on one another, even those weird neighbors down the street that we’ve never met. Many of us may not survive. Those who do will learn to do without the Internet, social media, and all the other things we view as necessities now. In finding the basics of food, clothing, and shelter we will once again learn to live in harmony with nature, and hopefully each other.
Jim, I absolutely love your theory. It's interesting also because I've been reading up on forest schools and trying to connect my daughter to nature, and it's been my primary concern with her (other than health and nutrition, of course). It's almost as if I'm instinctively feeling what you're describing here. We must get back to nature... Do you have any books/articles you can recommend on the topic?