The Cost

What's the most expensive thing in the world?

I give you hours of my life; time I’ll never get back. Hours and hours, memories forever lost because I missed them. I give you hours of myself for little pieces of paper, numbers with commas. It’s so common today that no one seems to notice that we’re all selling our lives for these tiny things. How did we all get tricked into giving away our lives?

It’s suicide by choice, without notice. Please, take my life. I’ll give it to you. Just give me the green in return. We spend more of our waking hours with people who don’t care than we spend with the people we care about, doing anything that makes us happy.

How did we all become sheep? We sell every part of ourselves for those numbers. We celebrate the exchange rate; one hour of my life for $20? That’s an insane trade. But, we happily accept it. Why?

Money is the most expensive thing in the world. It costs more than love, more than hate, and more than war. But we all pay for it, and do so willingly. Please, take my life and give me money.

Reviews

[CthulhuTheDread]

Money, in its basic sense, is just a uniform standard of work. You work as a carpenter, in the early days of humans. You build houses, additions, sheds, barns. You need things to live. Food, water, love, living space. You want things in your life. A wife, a home, children, small things you can enjoy. But you're a carpenter, you can only solve a handful of these wants you have. You can build yourself a house. Maybe even build a place to grow food. But you must trade with others who specialize in other things to get those things they have that you need. Well, at this point, the only thing you can do is trade something you have, or they give it to you for free. Well that man worked hard to grow his food, the other worked to carry the buckets of water from the river, others worked to extract iron so that others could work to mold it into tools for your building or farming. You need these things to live. They may be small, hammers, nails, axes. But they make it easier for you to live your life. If you had to build a house with no hammers, nails, or axes, you'd be royally F'ed. You can't build houses for all of these people. They probably already have houses. Or you build for them and then they won't need your services anymore. This poses problems for you in your existence. Without these things, you must struggle more than you would otherwise. To grow your own food, gather your own water, find your own crops and farm them. If you're lucky, you'll find a woman and have kids and have them help. All of you working, dusk til dawn, to maintain your lives. Money allows you to work for those who you have nothing physically to gain from. They can't give you food or iron tools or animal pelts or what have you. Money allowed you to work for people who needed your services, but whose services you did not need in return. Instead giving you currency for the jurisdiction you reside in. Rewarding you for your work, but not forcing you to accept what they have in trade. Allowing you to then trade that money, which has no useful value in and of itself, with others whose services you need, but who don't need your services. Thus, allowing you to have an easier life, not working tirelessly just to survive, but instead to work and transact goods and services more easily. Allowing you to be more productive with your work, others with theirs, and giving you more time for yourself and your endeavors. You may or may not know all these facts I just presented. But now, in the modern day, we have a far more complex system of this. And I wouldn't say our problem is with money, in and of itself. Money has helped us advance and has given us more of our lives. The problem is, those who gain money that isn't somewhat equal to the work they did to get it. Some people work tirelessly, and receive very little. While others move their fingers with a few keystrokes and make outstanding amounts of money. The effort put in, and the money that comes to them in return isn't equal. And that is where our problem lies. Not with money, but with work not being rewarded fairly and equally. Which goes against the purpose of money. A man does nothing for six, seven, eight figures, and a man does everything for $20 every hour. If we base these men on money, as we do with many people these days, the first man does a lot of work, does a lot of good, has become wealthy and is, in our definition, successful. While the second man is a failure. But if we measure these two men by what they did for the world, and the work they accomplished, (this is not always the case, keep in mind), but many times the work put out is higher with the second man, or they are roughly equal. So we, as a society, shouldn't fight money, as you've somewhat suggested, but instead fight the unfair rewarding or work. But even then, my final point is, money has given every person in this world, more of their life, than you would have trying to survive on your own (plus has allowed us to lengthen our lives, improve our quality of life, and enhanced technology astronomically). It's just, those in more unfortunate situations (me included) tend to blame money, when really we're trying to measure ourselves with others by money, like most of the world does. When really, it's an arbitrary measuring tool. It's like measuring someone's worth on how many breaths they take per day, how many steps they walk, or their skin color. None of it accurately reflects a human's worth, so we cannot use these to judge human worth. But money has done more to help you than you realized