Do you ever get a weird feeling when you reflect that money isn't actually 'real'?

[iloveeverykindofcat]

Okay, I know its 'real' in the sense of how it functions, but do you ever reflect how strange it is that we do all this work, make all these exchanges, do all this saving of something that doesn't actually exist? People I've mentioned this to IRL don't seem to share this feeling that its actually a very strange system - maybe I'm not explaining myself very well. But the money in my bank account, for example. Its just a number. I go to work in order to make the number go up, and almost everything else I do makes it go down. If someone went into the system and added a few zeros to it, my life would change beyond recognition...yet it doesn't actually exist? What is it?

Same kind of feeling I got when I was watching Brian Cox talking about the Milky Way, how vast is the universe? Does it have an edge, what was there before and why? I read about it all evening but it didn't help. It just doesn't make sense.

@Ifailed I know it's simple in its concept and I understand how it 'works' in the way you have described it. But it still seems like a kind of sorcery to me that you and I as complete strangers are sat here in our homes or workplaces communicating about it

Which probably explains why the wealthiest tend to be treated like gods, and often have vast power to do their will in the world, whether we like it or not 🙄

Yes I totally get this and was really trying to explain this to someone when we moved house. We were at the bottom of the chain, then our vendors, then their vendors and then the final vendor at the top of the chain. Ultimately, we all just swapped houses and the numbers on the screen changed.

I was watching the Brian Cox series Universe this week and quite honestly everything about earth and the way we live and behave is just utterly ridiculous. Our one chance at this miracle of life and look at what we’ve done with it. My DH doesn’t understand why we have money at all but I think it comes down to one thing - we are just never bloody content with what we have.

I think like this about presents, especially for people you don't know well enough to know what will truly make them smile. Gift vouchers especially beyond childhood. Never quite understood why some families exchange gift vouchers which are like the concept of money but slightly worse. Still conform to the norms and give out presents.

Gold ceased to underpin currencies ages ago. Most are Fiat, ie they are not backed by any commodity but rather on future earnings, and are purely based on trust. A £`1 coin is acceptable in exchange for goods or services solely because both parties trust it to be worth £1.

Yes, it's odd how many people don't realise this. It's money 101, but 'oddly', they never teach it in schools or talk about it to the public. Isn't something like about 3% of all 'money' actually what we would recognise as tangible money, but the rest is just theoretical?

It makes it even more outrageous when you think that banks clamp down so harshly on people who can't 'repay' them, when what they 'lent' just came out of thin air in the first place. You 'borrow' £200,000 from them and it's your act of borrowing that 'authorises' them to create that 'money' out of nowhere - but then you're in hock to them for 25 or more years to 'repay' it. You're actually doing them a colossal favour, but they always treat it as the exact opposite.

If anybody hasn't come across it before, I'd heartily recommend looking up 'Money As Debt' and checking that out.

Things like property 'values' are all part of it as well. Everybody loves the idea of how much their house is 'worth' - and constantly rising; but the only real winners are those who inherit, move from a very expensive to a much cheaper area and, of course (as always), the bankers.

If there were a sea change and the 'average' family house were now worth £50K, people would be beside themselves at how much they had 'lost'. Obviously, there would be one or two generations still with the current-value mortgages who would really suffer, but after that, once it became commonly understood that your average house was 'only' worth £50K, BUT that meant you could get yourself a modest starter-home for £25K, upgrade to a 5-bed detached for £75K or an actual mansion for £100K - everybody apart from the money-lenders would be far better off overall.

The thing that always makes me stop and think is when you look at the world of billionaires. Surely the one overall advantage of being a billionaire is that you can have absolutely anything that you want and never have to think about money ever again; but most of them seem to spend their every waking moment agonising about money - and how to make the next billion - far more than anybody else apart from the very poor who are forced to live hand to mouth.

Money is just a tool, like a screwdriver, washing machine or car. Life is much easier if you have one, and you might find it even easier and more convenient if you have a few of them; but if somebody asked you if you wanted or needed 500,000 screwdrivers or 800 washing machines for your own personal use (not allowed to sell them!), you'd look at them like they'd gone absolutely insane.

It's not real in that it's not backed by anything
It's real in that it controls how we operate

In economics money is really like oil in an engine.it does not power the car or do any of the work but it smooths the cogs and makes the connections easier
Without money we would be poorer not because our accounts would be empty but because fewer trades, hires and economic connections would be able to occur.
Without money you can only trade if there is a "double coincidence of wants" you want something that I have and I want something that you have.
Trade or exchange is what creates wealth. Think about a clothes swap everyone leaves being better off

There is a chapter in the book Sapiens that’s all about this, it is weird, it works because it’s in our collective imagination

My town is the opposite, several places I know only take cash. One garden centre doesn't so I don't shop there.

It's just a way of putting an accepted, shared value on metho of exchange for goods and services that is all.

So I am selling my workplace my time and intellectual skills in return for somr credit that I can then swap with the supermarket for food. It makes sense as I, my work place and the supermarket all agree that this credit is a fair way to represent the value of my work and their food.

It all falls apart if we beging is disagree on the value of those credits or doubt it has any value at all. See countries with hyper inflation for a demonstration, when people have wheebarrows full of notes that isn't worth enough to buy them a small amount of food.

@drwitch indeed.

My workplace vlaues my skills and has a need for them. Sainsbury's doesn't . So without a shared method of exchange I would struggle to swap my skills directly with Sainsbury's for food.

I think it works because there are laws around it that if you disobey you get literally locked up.

This is why Walking Dead and Surviour type shows are so interesting, because in an apocalypse type scenario suddenly it all means nothing

I think about this all the time!!!

i think this about house prices. We bought our house 2 years ago and since then it has 'gone up' in price by about 70k - partly because we have done it up nicely but also because of local prices going up.
to me it is just make believe money - the house is still the same house so if we did sell it now - that extra 70k or whatever has come from nowhere really. it is insane.

I've thought about this a lot. It's all made up, that's the crux of it.

Yes I think this all the time

Hahaaaaa! No there is not!!

I've always felt like that. It seems strange to me the lengths people will go to to get a thing that doesn't really exist. This probably explains why I am fifty with not much money in the bank and no pension! 😂

Think of it this way. My mum had loads of debt, about £10k. I spoke to the bank, the guy clicked a few buttons and it was gone. That’s how real money is 🤷‍♀️ Money is like a promise, some people have just got a lot more promises than others! And yes, DH and I have had the exact same conversation about money and how weird it really is.

@Ginmonkeyagain your post is probably one of the most helpful in that it explains in today's scenario why we needed a commonly understood and exchangeable entity.
If you imagine a really simplistic scenario when money was first created it is also easier to understand, so when literal exchanges on a local level were possible and.people didn't travel outside of their local area money wasn't needed, but as soon as the world became more complex - say spice routes where you could buy spices from a travelling merchant but they couldn't carry anything useful home with them in return, food would spoil, furniture would be too heavy, so they needed to be able to take something exchangeable and portable that would get them what they need at home - something that said this thing holds the value of the goods = money.

However it all sounds so much more complicated now in the world we live in! The web of promises and interconnections are definitely mind-blowing.

Yes, I have felt this. DS mentioned it first, as a questioning-everything teen and it took years to dawn on me that he was right.
It has a similar feel to religion, or how religion used to be, when intelligent men and women would be martyed for it. Or kings would be made by it.

Large organisations may have numerous bank accounts for different arms of the business, one of which will be for collecting payments from their customers. They can then transfer that money elsewhere, to another bank account, and pay their own bills out of that.

Yes, they will have direct debits going out for their bills, just like any other business, and the bigger you are, the more properties you have, the more phone lines you have, the more staff you have, the higher your costs.