Every day billions of people go to work. A majority of them don’t want to be at work. They work not because it brings them pleasure but because it allows them to trade their time/effort into money. That money allows them to buy things they want and to live the lifestyle they desire. Although people know how/why they make money, they seem to misalign their individual beliefs with their global beliefs.
Money is a Natural Outcome of Exchange
It’s much easier to trade goods when you don’t have to barter. Before money, a farmer, who produced milk, would have a hard time going to the barber for a haircut without a form of currency. What if the only barber in town was lactose intolerant? Who would the farmer get a haircut from? On top of that, how would the barber specialize into his industry? How lucrative is it to trade a haircut for groceries or rent?
I think we all agree barter isn’t the solution to exchange. Instead, we developed currency as a means of exchange. This allowed us to produce milk for the lactose lovers, provide haircuts to those who desired a haircut most and pay bills like rent without having to find the landlord willing to accept a lifetime of haircuts. All of this happened naturally out of the need to exchange.
We Work for Money
In a similar sense, the reason we go to work is for income. Some of us might love it, some of us might hate it, but we all have to work for a living. The return on our time and effort is currency, which we can then exchange for desirable goods. Although we live in a world where everybody is participating in a free market exchange people seem to question the viability of free market exchanges as a whole.
Misaligned Beliefs: Individual vs Global
We are all humans and we all have self-interests. No matter the work we partake in, and the means we use to make our livelihoods, we can only think on our personal levels. We are independent. There doesn’t exist another one of us in the world. We are unique. Yet, when it comes to global issues, we try to impose our minds on others, on the globe.
Even though each of us individually exchanges in markets, and we evolved currency, we forget that individuals make up each interaction. Whether a company sells to one client or one million, it’s still a one-to-one exchange. The size of the sale doesn’t matter, what matters is the individuals that went into the transaction, all of whom turned their time/effort into currency.
The problem is a misalignment of beliefs. If everyone took a step back to see the world we’ve created, each and every one of us, we should be pretty impressed with our developments. All great accomplishes have been spurred by individual voluntary exchanges. The world isn’t made up of 7.4 billion dots on a globe, but 7.4 billion individual human beings trying to better their own lives, and in turn, are benefitting the remaining 7.399999 billion of the population.