What is Money?

A Complicated Story About How Money Went from Serving Us to Controlling Us

“Money is the most acute point where fear shows up.”

A friend said those words to me a few months ago. I think about them nearly every day.

No big surprise given that my Heart-Strong Adventure has me looking at everything through the lenses of love and fear. And the fact that money likely occupies more mind space than anything else for humans in the so-called civilized world.

So many of us are consumed by it. It drives our decisions. The funny thing is, money is a social creation. It’s a shared agreement between humans. We don’t need money to survive. Ask most survival experts and they will tell you the 4 pillars of survival are shelter, water, fire, and food. I would add a 5^th to that, human connection.

Now, I can buy the idea that money made survival easier. It made exchanging the things we need more efficient. It was serving our human needs. That’s a good thing.

But somewhere along the way we stopped using it and started serving it. The servant became the master. And I’ve come to believe that master instills great fear in us. That fear limits our freedom.

Thinking beyond survival, you can argue that you need money to thrive. In a healthy relationship with money, that might be true. But in a fear-based relationship, the kind many people have, money limits freedom. It can prevent us from discovering and embracing our true selves. It can prevent us from being pulled by love and keep us in a dangerous cycle of fear-based living.

I wanted to explore this more deeply, so I decided to research the history of money. How did we go from money serving us to us serving it? How did it go from a tangible unit of exchange to an abstraction? How did it become something we give value to simply because those in power tell us it has value?

This is my attempt at telling that story.

It’s complicated, dense, and very long. If you want to geek out on the history of money, you can listen to the audio below or click below to read The History of Money: The Long Story.

If you want to jump to a short summary and my reflections on what this means for living in the system, continue on.

The History of Money: The Short Version

In the ancient world, money was real. The thread connecting all these ancient systems was their physicality. Money existed as object. You could see it, touch it, weigh it. Physical limits held everything together. You could only debase (reducing the precious metal content while keeping the coin’s face value the same) a coin so much before people refused it. You could only mine so much silver before the veins ran out.

Money’s tangible nature imposed natural boundaries. Those boundaries were frustrating to emperors and merchants, but they prevented certain kinds of excess. When money was real, physical weight equaled power limits. That tangibility created constraints, but that would slowly dissolve over the next thousand years.

The Paper Revolution was the start of money becoming increasingly abstract. From bills of exchange to bank ledgers to paper currency, money moved further from physical commodity. But a physical anchor remained. Whether silver reserves backing Song jiaozi, metal deposits backing Bank of Amsterdam money, or gold backing nineteenth-century currencies, paper promises stayed tethered to something tangible.

Banking families and institutions concentrated power through their control of these systems, but limits persisted. You could only issue so much paper before people demanded the underlying metal, and then the system would correct. That correction could be catastrophic for those over-extended, but it couldn’t be endlessly postponed. The rope still held.

Then came the Great Untethering. When money was anchored to gold, there was a physical limit to how much could exist. You could only have as much money as you had gold to back it. Once that anchor disappeared for good in 1971, money could multiply with no natural ceiling.

Money became fiat currency, backed by government decree rather than precious metal. It was money because the government said it was. And as long as people believed in it, central banks could create as much as they wanted. The constraints that used to exist vanished. Money became numbers on balance sheets, expandable at will by those controlling the creation systems.

Something else shifted too. Money stopped being primarily a tool for exchange and became the primary measure of human worth. Ask someone “How much are you worth?” and they’ll tell you their net financial worth, not their contribution to their community or their kindness.

The Digital Age accelerated the abstraction of money to blinding speed. And the crisis of 2008 exposed something unsettling. Money in the digital age had no natural limits. Derivatives could expand infinitely. Leverage ratios could reach absurd heights. As long as everyone believed the system was solid, it was solid. When belief cracked, everything could evaporate.

When money was physical, there were natural stopping points. You could only stack so much gold in a room. Digital money has no such limits. The number on the screen can always get bigger.

A rebellion against fiat currency emerged from genuine crisis of confidence. The 2008 collapse showed that a monetary system built on nothing, but collective belief could nearly disintegrate. But the attempted alternatives have recreated the same dynamics on new technical foundations. Cryptocurrency exchanges blow up through leverage and fraud. The promise of decentralization gave way to new forms of centralized control. The institutions cryptocurrency sought to displace are now adopting the technology to strengthen their own positions.

Living Inside the System

For me, the history of money tells a clear story. We went from controlling it to it controlling us. From tangible commodity to pure abstraction. From natural limits to infinite expansion. From a tool for connection to an engine of separation.

But history is one thing. Living inside that system is another.

When I decided to take a year for this Heart-Strong Adventure, money was the first obstacle that appeared. Not lack of resources. I had savings. I had enough to get by for a year without income. And our retirement account is strong. The money was there. But the fear was there too.

Even now, months into this adventure, the fear still shows up. Am I being stupid? I am at the peak of my earning potential. Shouldn’t I be focused on making money and investing in my future? These questions arrive uninvited, even when the numbers say I am fine.

The strange thing is this. In many ways I feel like what I am doing is investing in my future, and more importantly our collective future. It is just not a financial investment.

Outside of Heart-Strong I am doing quite a bit of “work”. I put work in parenthesis because most of what I am doing is unpaid. And this work I am doing without an exchange of money feels more meaningful than most of the work I have done for money. I help people I want to help. I work on things I believe matter. Money does not get in the way of that. And that freedom has brought a fullness to my life I did not expect.

I have been thinking about why that is. Why does money create such distance between us and what matters?

In reading the book, The Life You Can Save by Peter Singer, I came across some research that helped me understand something I was already feeling. Kathleen Vohs, Nicole Mead, and Miranda Goode, researchers working in marketing and psychology, conducted experiments that revealed something striking about how money changes us. They primed people to think about money in subtle ways. Some unscrambled phrases about money. Some saw piles of Monopoly money nearby. Some looked at screen savers showing different denominations of currency. Then they observed how these people behaved.

The results were interesting, to say the least. Those primed to think about money literally created physical distance from others. They positioned their chairs farther away when told to talk with someone. They took longer to ask for help when they needed it. They were less likely to help others. When asked to donate money, they gave about half as much as the control group. When asked how long they would help someone with a task, they offered 25 minutes compared to 42 minutes from those not primed to think about money.⁴⁶

The researchers concluded that money enhanced individualism but diminished communal motivations. An effect that is still apparent in how people respond today.

Money was designed to make exchange easier, to help us connect and exchange with people we did not know personally. But over time it has done the opposite. It has become a tool of separation rather than connection. Karl Marx called it the universal agent of separation. He was onto something.

I keep coming back to this idea. Money went from something that was supposed to serve us to something we serve. The servant became the master. And that master runs on fear.

Look at retirement savings. We accept it as normal and responsible to hoard resources for our future selves. The underlying fear is clear. If I do not save, no one will take care of me. But that fear only makes sense in an individualistic system. In more communal cultures, the orientation is different. You take care of others when you have resources. When you need help, the community takes care of you. That seems like a much more interconnected way of living. It feels more love based.

But can we shift back to that? Are we too far gone? Are we too controlled by money to even see other possibilities?

I think about the power dynamic. We went from controlling money to money controlling us. And I do not think most of us recognize that shift. This inanimate object, whose value only exists because people in power tell us it exists, we let it control us. And by letting it control us, we let a very small number of people maintain control.

As Marjorie Kelly said:

“In a democratic society founded on the truth that all persons are created equal, we have permitted in our midst an economic system based on the directly contrary principle that wealthy persons matter more than others. Deserve greater rights. Justifiably wield greater power. Rightly enjoy greater voice. Are due greater deference. And possess a limitless right to extract from the rest of us.”

We have come to measure human worth by what you extract rather than what you contribute. When money was scarce because of physical limits, maybe that made some twisted sense. But in a fiat system with infinite expansion capacity, it is just a choice. We are choosing to measure value by accumulation rather than contribution.

And I think that choice hits men particularly hard.

There is still a deep societal expectation that men are primary breadwinners. That expectation is changing, but it persists. And mate selection patterns reinforce it.

In 1989, psychologist David Buss studied mate preferences across 37 cultures. Women in 36 of those cultures rated good financial prospects significantly higher than men did. Three quarters of women said economic viability was important in a partner. Only one quarter of men said the same.⁴⁷

That pattern still holds today. A 2024 study of online dating behavior found that women of all income levels showed more interest in male profiles with higher incomes. Male profiles with the highest incomes received ten times more visits than the lowest.⁴⁸ Studies from 2022 through 2024 continue to confirm that women place more emphasis on good provider traits than men do when choosing long term mates.⁴⁹

At the same time, University of Connecticut sociologist Christin Munsch studied 15 years of data from married men and women and found something striking. As men took on more financial responsibility in their marriages, their psychological wellbeing and health declined. Men were at their worst when they were their family’s sole breadwinner. In those years, they had psychological wellbeing scores 5 percent lower and health scores 3.5 percent lower than in years when their partners contributed equally. Munsch attributed this to men approaching breadwinning with a sense of obligation and worry about maintaining that status, rather than as an opportunity or choice.⁵⁰

Yet many men have not found a deeper purpose beyond provider. Earning money becomes their measure of worth. Their identity gets wrapped up in extraction rather than contribution.

In a recent conversation with Elmer Moore, the CEO of the Wisconsin Housing and Economic Development Authority, he said, “ Unfortunately, men out there have been told that, we’ve been oversold this idea that we all have the same purpose. Which is provider protector, hunter, defender. And all those things are, they’re all positioned in the binary. And they’re all, I won’t say they’re wrong. I’ll just say they’re. Not quite right.”

Later in our conversation, Elmer spoke about his confidence in his purpose. However unsure he might be about information or skills, his confidence in his purpose is unshakable. That kind of groundedness does not come from a number in a bank account. It comes from knowing what you are here to give, not what you can take.

I look at my own situation, and I recognize the complexity. On a global scale, I am among those who have. I benefit from this extraction economy whether I want to or not. That position comes with responsibility. But what does responsible action look like in a system designed for extraction?

I do not have clear answers. This exploration has mostly generated more questions. But I am learning to think about money differently. I am trying to see it as an exchange of energy rather than a measure of worth.

I put energy into work. That work gives me money, which is stored energy. I can then use that stored energy in two ways. I can use it to get more energy for myself, buying food or rest or experiences. Or I can transfer that energy to others, funding work I believe in or supporting people who need it.

When I think about money that way, it feels less like extraction and more like flow. The question becomes not how much can I accumulate, but how can I flow this energy in service of love rather than fear? How can it increase connection rather than separation?

I am still figuring that out. The fear still shows up. But I am learning to notice when it appears and question what it is protecting. Usually, it is protecting some story about my worth being tied to a number. That story feels less true the more I examine it.

So, I hold both things. I hold hope that we can create more love-based relationships with money. And I hold honest uncertainty about whether we are too far captured by the current system to make that shift. I am an optimist at heart, so I cannot help but believe change is possible.

But belief is not enough. We have to practice differently. We have to choose contribution over extraction, connection over separation, generosity over hoarding. We have to measure our worth by what we contribute rather than what we accumulate.

That practice is hard in a system designed to reward the opposite. But maybe that is where the adventure leads. Into the hardest questions. Into the spaces where love and fear both show up, demanding that we have to choose.

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