“All the money you made will never buy back your soul.”-Bob Dylan
I sometimes wonder… what if there was no such thing as money? I realized after pondering over the matter that, a lot of things can change when money doesn’t exist. So in this blog I am going to take you through an amazing journey of pure imagination. No plagiarism in this blog… I promise.
Right. Let’s get right in to it. So, first of all, let’s talk about when money originated. No one knows for sure, (thanks, ancient people, for not leaving any evidence!) but coins were the earliest form of money. There also used to be the ‘Barter System’ (goods in exchange of goods). But now let’s talk about poverty first. What is poverty? Poverty is basically the shortage of money. You are in a state of poverty if you don’t have enough money or no money at all (let’s hope that we never face it!). Homeless people, beggars, are all facing poverty. Take this pandemic, for example. People have not been given salaries for one and a half year now! Some have even lost their jobs! As a result, people have not been able to pay for necessities like groceries and stuff. Phew! So if these people ever need anything, don’t hesitate to help them. Basically, this is where I thought of this insane idea about the concept of money.
Anyway, now let’s get into the good, non-boring stuff. So when you think about a world without money, what will be the first thing that will come to you? Perhaps it can be, “Oh, I can get all the toys I want, for free!” or “Oh, I can get food for free!”. Since money wouldn’t have existed, and we wouldn’t have to buy anything, we won’t have to worry about shortage of money or where we buy things from.
What is more, we won’t have to go to school! Yay! How? Simple! We all go to school to study and basically have a career. And why do we need career? Three words: TO MAKE MONEY (you already knew that. Like, duh). So there. Since there will be no money, we won’t need a career to earn it, and that’s why we don’t need to go to school!
Another thing that will not exist is disparity. Now you’ll be like, what the heck is this disparity thingy? Well I’ll give you an example. Mukesh Ambani has 168 cars in his car collection, as he is so rich. But a poor man doesn’t even have food let alone a car. Basically, this is called disparity.
Another good thing is that farmers won’t have to worry about paying taxes and stuff. Nearly all farmers in India lose their agricultural land just because they can’t pay their taxes and enough people buying their stuff. But they can’t just sit and do nothing either. They have to provide good crops so that we have food on our plates. But what will they get in return, after doing such hard work? Since there will be no money, they won’t be paid. Usually we buy vegetables and stuff from merchants, who buy them from some other merchant, who buy them from some other merchant, and so on. But the first merchant buys it from the farmers. So what will they eat? I suppose they can keep some of the harvest for themselves, or just go and eat in a restaurant for free as there is no money. But the whole human management system will be super messed up if that happens.
But one of the major problems that we will have when there is no money is that people will be careless and lazy. We work in our offices today to earn a living, but if there was no money, we won’t work hard but instead sleep all day or chat on WhatsApp or something. People will not do anything useful, and Earth will be a lazy planet, with no joy or happiness or satisfaction. So in a way, money is a good thing. Money has always been a reason, a drive to keep us on our toes (thanks, ancestors, whoever you were, for inventing money!).
So those were my thoughts on how our world would have been without money. I hope that we will work hard in whatever we do and earn lots of money, and help the poor if need be. So farewell, until the next aventure.