The Collective Delusion Called Money. Nobody complains about gravity, but everyone complains about money.

Money has always been a psychological, tribal consensus, a shared belief at a point in time, not an undisputable scientific fact.

Yesterday’s money feels bizarre today, and today’s money will be worthless tomorrow.

Why?

Let’s start at the beginning — the history of money.

Before money, humans bartered. You could trade berries for fish, but how many berries for one fish? And what if it wasn’t berry season but you still craved fish?

The Birth of Money

Around 9,000 years ago, humans found a solution: "Cows".
The first currency. Cows were the unit of exchange, Money with legs.

They met two essential conditions for money:

1. Universal consensus within the tribe as a store of value.
2. Transportability — or what we’d now call cross-border payments.

In this case, the money quite literally walked itself to the new owner — with zero transaction fees and no banks involved.

Over time, money kept shrinking in size for convenience. Valuable stones, seashells, and even Parmesan cheese were used as currency. (In medieval Italy, some banks accepted Parmesan as loan collateral — talk about liquid assets.)

In the ancient kingdom of Lydia (modern-day Turkey), the first metal coins were minted around 700 BC — a mix of silver and gold.

In Japan, coins had holes so they could be strung together as belts, the original wearable wallet.

Unsurprisingly, China pioneered paper money around the 7th century. Another 600 years later, during the Ming dynasty, paper replaced coins almost completely.

Fast Forward Today,

Physical money is vanishing.
No cows in the backyard.
No coins on a belt.

Just glowing numbers on a screen, moving across borders after a Face ID check.

Now imagine travelling back 7,000 years and telling the richest man that all his wealth — his cows would someday live inside a phone. You’d be labelled a lunatic.

And if we time-travelled 7,000 years ahead, our “money” would probably be a worthless lunatic idea.

So perhaps it’s worth pausing to appreciate this grand, shared illusion we call money — a collective delusion that somehow keeps the world spinning.

As I write this, I can hear an elderly visitor from India talking to my wife in the background:

“You can feed someone until they’re content, but you can never give them enough money to make them content.”

Mic drop moment, my entire blog summarised in a few words.

Take it easy until next time.

Blogging is something I enjoy, and I share my thoughts on my blog most weekends. Explore all my blogs at https://lnkd.in/ejq7CWaQ.

Views are my own.

Blogging is something I enjoy, and I share my thoughts on my blog most weekends.

Read all my “Notes to Self” at view all blogs.