We have become so accustomed to money that most of us stop questioning what it actually is.

We say:

“I bought this.”

“It cost me £20.”

“I earned £500.”

“I spent £100.”

“I can’t afford it.”

And because these phrases are so normal, we rarely stop to examine the reality underneath the language.

So let’s take money apart for a moment.

Not financially.

Conceptually.

Because perhaps one of the biggest misunderstandings we have about money is that we have gradually started speaking about it as though money itself is value.

It isn’t.

Money does not feed you.

Money does not shelter you.

Money does not keep you warm.

Money does not educate a child.

Money does not produce a meal.

Money does not build a house.

Money does not transport oxygen through your body.

Money does not do anything by itself.

Put a banknote on a table.

Leave it there.

It will not make you food.

It will not heat your room.

It will not repair your car.

It will not care for you.

It is simply an object containing information that a particular society has agreed can be used within a particular system of exchange.

And that distinction matters.

SO WHAT IS MONEY?

Perhaps the simplest way to understand money is this:

Money is a mechanism for representing and facilitating exchange.

It allows us to separate the moment of contribution from the moment of receiving something in return.

You might contribute today and receive something tomorrow.

You might contribute to one person and receive something from another.

You might contribute labour, but instead of receiving food directly from the person you worked for, you receive money and later exchange that money for food.

That means money introduces a kind of delay into exchange.

You contribute.

A monetary representation is issued or transferred.

You keep that representation.

Later, somebody else accepts it in exchange for something they have available.

And we call that money.

Which means that when I hand over £20 for something, I am not handing over £20 worth of food, warmth, shelter or anything else.

I am transferring a socially recognised representation of purchasing or exchange capacity.

The actual thing I want remains the thing itself.

The money is the mechanism that gets me to it.

THIS IS WHERE LANGUAGE CHANGES EVERYTHING

Notice how differently we normally describe that interaction.

We say:

“I bought food.”

That sentence makes money feel like the thing that acquired the food.

But perhaps something more accurate is:

“I exchanged for food.”

Now watch what happens.

The food is the thing being transferred.

The money is the mechanism facilitating the transfer.

That sounds like a small linguistic adjustment.

It isn’t.

Language gives the human mind a framework through which it organises information.

Our logical thinking constantly categorises, identifies, compares, sequences and contextualises information.

So the words we repeatedly use don’t merely describe our environment.

They help determine how we conceptualise it.

“I bought it” carries a very different conceptual structure from:

“I exchanged for it.”

The first places emphasis on purchase.

The second places emphasis on movement and exchange.

And suddenly money becomes less like a mysterious thing that possesses value and more like a tool we use to navigate relationships between things that actually have practical, material, experiential or human significance.

MONEY DOESN’T HAVE VALUE BY ITSELF

This is where another distinction becomes important.

We often say:

“Money has value.”

But does it?

Or does money carry a projected value?

A £20 note doesn’t intrinsically contain twenty pounds of anything.

There isn’t twenty pounds of warmth inside it.

There isn’t twenty pounds of food inside it.

There isn’t twenty pounds of electricity inside it.

There isn’t even a universally applicable quantity called “twenty pounds” outside the system that recognises that representation.

Its usefulness comes from the context in which it can be exchanged.

That is why money can be better understood as representing a concept of value or an expected exchange relationship, rather than being value itself.

The projection is:

“This representation can currently be exchanged for approximately this amount of recognised economic activity, goods or services within this system.”

And that distinction becomes obvious the moment context changes.

Take money somewhere that doesn’t recognise the currency.

The paper still exists.

The numbers still exist.

The object still exists.

But its ability to facilitate exchange can disappear.

So the physical object did not contain the value.

The context created the utility.

LOOK AT FIRE

This becomes clearer when we compare money with something that actually has multiple direct physical functions.

Take a flame.

A flame can heat you.

It can cook food.

It can ignite another material.

It can destroy something.

It can sterilise something.

It can create light.

Its usefulness changes according to context, but the flame itself has direct physical effects.

Now take air.

Air can cool a room.

It can transport oxygen.

It can move pollutants.

It can ventilate a space.

It can sustain combustion.

Again, context changes what it does, but there is an actual physical process occurring.

Money is different.

Money’s function is overwhelmingly relational.

Its usefulness depends upon the existence of people, systems, agreements, markets, institutions and circumstances that recognise and accept it.

Take the money away from the context and its economic function can collapse.

That doesn’t make money useless.

It makes money something different.

It is an exchange instrument, not the thing being exchanged for itself.

AND THEN WE GET TO “FREE”

Now we can return to a rather strange idea:

What if everything is actually free?

Not “free” in the sense that everything requires no labour, no resources, no responsibility and no consequences.

Obviously it does.

Rather:

What if the things we describe as being bought are actually things that already exist within the human world of available resources and production, and money is simply the mechanism through which access and exchange are coordinated?

The food already exists.

The house already exists.

The clothing already exists.

The service already exists.

The knowledge already exists.

The labour already happened.

Money simply creates a mechanism through which the exchange can occur.

So perhaps the thing we commonly call a “purchase” is actually:

an exchange with a monetary delay attached to it.

I contribute.

I receive a monetary representation.

Later, I transfer that representation.

Another person transfers something else.

The chain continues.

Money circulates.

Resources circulate.

Labour circulates.

Knowledge circulates.

Products circulate.

Human capacity circulates.

And underneath all of that is movement.

PERHAPS WE HAVE CONFUSED THE RECEIPT WITH THE EXCHANGE

This is where the language becomes particularly revealing.

Imagine you provide something to someone and they give you a receipt acknowledging what happened.

Would you say:

“The receipt is the exchange”?

No.

The receipt records or represents something that happened.

Money can function similarly.

It is not necessarily the underlying thing of significance.

It is the record, representation, medium or claim used to facilitate further exchange.

And once we understand that, we can stop treating money as though it were some magical substance that humanity produces in order to create wealth.

Money doesn’t create the food.

People do.

Money doesn’t create the house.

People do.

Money doesn’t teach the child.

People do.

Money doesn’t cultivate the land.

People do.

Money doesn’t care for the elderly.

People do.

Money doesn’t invent the technology.

People do.

Money helps us coordinate, measure, transfer and delay exchanges involving those things.

That is a very different way of looking at an economy.

THE LANGUAGE WE USE CAN CHANGE WHAT WE THINK WE ARE DOING

So perhaps we should experiment with our vocabulary.

Instead of:

“I bought it.”

Try:

“I exchanged for it.”

Instead of:

“I spent money.”

Try:

“I transferred my recognised exchange capacity.”

Instead of:

“I earned money.”

Try:

“I received a monetary representation of my contribution.”

Instead of:

“It costs £50.”

Try:

“The current exchange requirement is £50.”

Instead of:

“I can’t afford it.”

Try:

“I do not currently have enough recognised exchange capacity to obtain it through this system.”

Notice what happens.

The object hasn’t changed.

The price hasn’t changed.

The transaction hasn’t changed.

But the relationship between your mind and the transaction has changed.

“Cost” can imply loss.

“Exchange” implies movement.

“Debt” can become an identity.

“An exchange obligation” describes a relationship.

“I can’t” can sound absolute.

“Not currently” introduces time.

And this is why language matters.

Because the human mind is constantly taking information and turning it into narratives, categories, expectations and rules.

Eventually, those narratives become the reality through which we operate.

SO WHAT IS MONEY FOR?

Perhaps we don’t need to make money into something it isn’t.

Perhaps money doesn’t need to be called wealth.

Perhaps it doesn’t need to be treated as the physical embodiment of value.

Perhaps we simply need to understand what it is doing.

Money is a language of exchange.

It gives us a way to represent an economic relationship.

It allows an exchange to happen across different people, places and points in time.

It allows contribution and receipt to be separated.

It allows exchange capacity to be transferred.

It allows an enormous number of people to coordinate activities without having to directly exchange their labour for the exact thing they want.

That is extraordinary.

But extraordinary does not mean that the instrument becomes the underlying reality.

A map can help you navigate a country.

The map is not the country.

A receipt can record a transaction.

The receipt is not the transaction.

A number can represent something.

The number is not necessarily the thing itself.

And money can facilitate exchange.

Money is not value itself.

It is a human-created language for navigating our ideas about value, contribution, entitlement and exchange.

And once we recognise that, we can start asking a much more interesting question than:

“How much money is this worth?”

We can ask:

“What is actually moving here?”

Who contributed?

What was produced?

What was transferred?

What resources were used?

What was created?

What was received?

What was promised?

What was represented?

What was delayed?

And what meaning have we attached to the symbols we use to describe all of it?

Because underneath the money, underneath the prices, underneath the transactions and underneath the receipts, there is something much more fundamental happening.

Things are moving.

Resources.

Energy.

Labour.

Knowledge.

Care.

Attention.

Materials.

Human capacity.

And money is one of the languages humanity invented to keep track of that movement.

Perhaps the problem was never that we created money.

Perhaps the fascinating part is what happened when we began confusing the language used to describe the movement with the movement itself.

And perhaps changing the language is one way of beginning to see the system again.

….

Let’s entertain each other for a second. When you think of everything that we quote-unquote buy, right? If you choose to see it as everything is free, really, there’s just a delay in between that’s called money, which is just the concession of exchange. It’s like the receipt of exchange. Money is the receipt, just like it was at the beginning where we would put, like the original IOUs was like receipts of exchange, right? But everything is free. It just happens that we need a receipt in order to exchange, in order to attain it, you know? And money is just a receipt, a receipt of purchase, a receipt of labor, a receipt of earning, whatever. But that is a different way of looking at money, economy, finances, and everything. It just brings in a whole different perspective, a more holistic perspective, a more humane perspective, that it’s rooted in humanity. Everything is free. It just happens that we have a delay in between: entertainment. Humor me.

…

And that’s great, because now we’re looking at things being just the, what’s it called, being not just the energy moving around, but we’re looking at how language actually dictates our reality. Because at the end of the day, everything is language, right? Our language does so much to our mind because our logic mind is based on language. It’s based on translating information, translating data, putting specificity to data, putting details to data, context to data. That’s the logic mind, and that’s the only reason why everything that is circulating in society is just language and data, you know? Nothing else to it. And saying, I bought this, it’s a language that comes with so much more than just the word to it. But saying, I got, or I exchanged, that now starts creating a different neurology within our brains that allows us to also release the control, the pressure, the attachment, the weight of what money is, and it makes it more rooted in actual just movement. Because at the end of the day, everything is just energy moving around, and the ways in which we do that, the ways in which we articulate that matters, especially because it then creates the narrative that we then go and live by.

…..

Well, actually I’m gonna edit what you said, because here you’re saying that money has value, but money doesn’t have actual value on its own. Money isn’t valuable. So we cannot say I exchanged value. We must recognize that we exchanged a projected value. We exchanged a concept of value, but it’s not value on its own, because again, money on its own does nothing unless there’s the context through which we then bring it into context, meaning that money on its own cannot make you food, or cannot give you warmth. If you take a flame, a flame can do so much. It can burn something that needs burning, and it can also ignite something that needs igniting, but it can also keep you warm, you know? And it can also burn. When you take air, air allows, depending on context, air can move toxic airs, it can clear out a room, it can, it transfers, sorry, is a transport transportation to oxygen, you know? But money on its own doesn’t actually have value. So what I want you to do now is to fix it on what I said about the language part, write a blog about it, a post about it, and reassess yourself, because you’ve taken things out of context. Write it in an educational and highlighting perspective, as if teaching to people what moneg is for the first time