Money Is Meaningless

What?

How often do you see someone pay for groceries with physical cash? Now how often do you see someone tap their card or their phone on a screen?

When money is ones and zeros it’s abstracted away from what it really is. When it’s abstracted we lose our concepts on what we’re actually spending. This is why every website lets you save a card, why casinos use poker chips, or why Dave Ramsey has a rule to never ever use a card.

Reasoning

There’s a reason why in school you’re supposed to take notes on pen and paper and not a computer. By writing down on paper, you activate parts of your brain that create neural connections that would have not have been created by typing on a keyboard. These neural connections make the information more real and therefore have more connections in your brain. Much like learning is a combination of as many senses that you can use, the spending of money is all about the senses too. People often pay for experiences. They pay to feel good. Then we remember these experiences for long after they’ve happened. But do you remember the transaction that took place for payment? It’s become a routine. The biggest companies of the world want to abstract that payment away as far as possible so we lose our concept of money and spends more in the moments without thought of the transaction that’s taking place to gain more of your money. This puts an ultimate burden on the consumers that are racking up unprecedented amounts of credit card debt. It’s concerning how much little thoughts goes into purchases nowadays, but that is by design. If you go back to making transactions with only physical money, albeit cash or check, you will retrain your brain to make a more value-based decision about the transaction you’re about to incur.

Your responsibility

We owe it to ourselves as consumers, and to our children as parents to retrain our thought processes about money to secure our futures and our children’s futures. While the design may be to have money be abstract, the consequences are not. It will have a life of misery if you cannot make proper value-based and affordable decisions at each transaction. Instant gratitude has become the norm, because the consequences are abstracted away by the abstract transaction. It is on us now to take our future and give our children the knowledge to do the same.