Every choice gives you something and costs you something else.
I've always wanted to argue that nothing exists in isolation. Every gain, improvement, or advantage comes with a corresponding cost, sacrifice, risk, or foregone alternative.
This is a reality that a lot of people are not comfortable with. One can easily come to this conclusion because everyday we find people talk about how the world is too fixated on "money" and "social status" — which itself is a currency, that they don't realize that their annoyance is illogical.
Trade offs, opportunity costs, zero-sum, these are all phrases that points to the reality that every interaction leads to loss or gain to the parties involved.
When you optimize a system for speed, you risk accuracy. When you prioritize security, you sign up for inconvenience. When you chase more profits, you take on significant exposure to losses. When we want decentralization, we tend to forget that this will mean embracing inefficiency.
The reality is that although every choice seems isolated, it's often two or more realities being accepted, voluntarily or otherwise.
The central cause of this reality is that there's a mismatch between natural human wants and available resources.
The resources in mention here is time and labor. This is what sits between everything we do.
We may have some unlimited natural resources, but it takes time and labor to turn those into something we can collectively make use of.
Now, I know it's tempting to ask how a world of 8 billion people is lacking time and labor force, well, it isn't necessarily that it isn't there, but that most are unwilling and capacity varies.
People won't collectively work a farm and share the proceeds with everyone equally because some are likely to not work at all, while others will work at a different capacity than others, leading to the question of fairness in rewards distribution.
Why should John, who works with the capacity of five men, accept an equal sum with people who barely have the capacity of one?
There's bound to be conflict because some will give more for less with a system that prioritizes equal share of generated value.
If you spend 4 hours watching videos, the cost is not just 4 hours. The real cost is what those 4 hours could have become. Maybe you could have learnt a skill and increased your social value or built a business that serves the public or simply worked a role that brings you income.
And all these various alternatives leads to money because that is where trade settles. It is the most important thing in the world because it is the measure of value in every exchange or interaction.
Not because it is, in itself "valuable" but because it's the best way to avoid or resolve the conflicts that exists without it in the picture.
When you buy a good, you bought labor and time you didn't directly spend. Someone lost a limited resource. At some point, you will also lose that limited resource to someone else.
In both cases, money is where the trade settles because both parties agree to accept it as the medium of trade.
The world loves money so much because it's the only means to acquire something that would otherwise cost them several hours of labor.
It isn't fundamentally greed, it is simply a necessity because it all comes down to a trade.
