Money isn’t real

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Hey, Creator.

Recently, I bought a home.

In preparation for this, I also rewatched The Big Short.

And here’s what I now know: money isn’t real. Or rather, it’s not “real” in the same way that the chair you’re sitting in is real. It’s not real in the sense that your skin is real or last night’s meal still sitting in your stomach is real.

​Money is an idea. It’s real in the sense that when you feel something strongly enough, it seems to take over your entire being. It’s real in the same way that the government is real or freedom is real. These concepts are abstractions; they become real when we get enough people to believe in them.

Yuval Noah Harari talks about these kinds of realities in his bestselling book Sapiens, wherein he argues that what made the human race succeed is three stories: the story of God (religion), the story of empire (government), and the story of money (business). These three stories have created our entire modern world, whether we recognize this or not.

What Harari means when he calls these concepts “stories” is that these are ideas that human beings have collectively believed in so strongly and with such conviction that they become real and help shape our world in legitimate and significant ways.

But they are not physically real. Money is a concept, a way of exchanging value for services and goods. Government is not a building or even a group of people; it’s something greater than the sum of its parts. The same goes for a business: you can create an organization that is separate from the person who owns it, and that organization (which is something more than a building or group of people) can operate independently as its own entity.

As I wrote in Real Artists Don’t Starve, talking about the myth of the starving artists, some stories become true when we believe them. In fact, much of the world is created this way. A good deal of how we interact with our reality is based on ideas and concepts that are not objectively true or even real; but when we get enough people to believe in these ideas, they frame how we live our lives.

Last week, I shared how “trickster makes the world.” This is true. And one of the great “tricks” we can play on the world and use in our own lives is to understand that money is a man-made concept. There is not a finite amount of money in the world, as far as I can tell, and it rarely (if ever) correlates to some physical reality.

Money is not real. Like any idea, it is not bound by reality, but instead helps expand reality.

I learned this most recently when I was strapped for cash and wanted to buy a home. After nine months of trying to find a house for my family and failing, I finally decided to go all in on making the purchase of a home possible. Before, I’d gone about 80% of the way, then gotten scared or intimidated and backed down. I was tired of doing that.

Instead, I focused on what I wanted, shared that desire with others, and didn’t waver from making it happen. The long story short is that I made an offer on a home that I technically could not afford, then found a way to afford it.

I worked hard and got creative and was surprised to see where the money came from. Maybe it was luck; maybe there’s some privilege at play there as well. But what I was amazed by was how this seemingly impossible thing that I’d been trying to do for the greater part of a year felt relatively easy and effortless.

People came out of the woodwork to help me. They were eager and excited to see a dream come true. And I didn’t make enough money to cover the down payment on our new house. I made more than double what I needed, resulting in the best month of business I’ve had in ten years.

This, I think, is the magic of thinking and acting like a creator. We creative people spend all day playing with ideas, taking mere concepts and pulling them out of the ether and into existence. Could, I wondered, money be the same?

I am still new at this, still exploring what all this means for me, but I believe it’s possible. If money, emotionally charged as it is, is something human beings invented, maybe I, as a human, can just make more of it when I need it?

Then again, maybe I’m wrong.

But even that, it turns out, is just another idea.

How have you seen something seemingly solid, like money, become much more malleable once you realized it was merely yet another idea?

I’d love to hear about it. Shoot me a reply.

Best,

Jeff

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