Would The World Be a Better Place if There Was No Such Thing As Money?

Last updated on July 3rd, 2022 at 01:31 pm

Two recent and apparently unrelated events converge in this installment of my Dream Quest for Personal Financial Mastery –

Event #1

Involves two other female dreamers, with whom I recently had lunch. One made a very wise comment:

The trick is not just to talk about your dream, but to actually DO something about it.

Gulp.

This dreamer is too kind to have been directing that at me personally – she meant it as commentary for all of us would-be dreamers who don’t make the progress we crave. Still, I have to admit I’ve done some pretty extensive talking about personal financial mastery, and not much doing. Je m’accuse.

For those of you who don’t speak French, that means: I feel guilty. I need to get on the stick!

Event #2

A recent Best Buy window shopping tour with my younger son, also known as O Psychic One, for reasons to be disclosed in a minute.

My son “O Psychic One” has been bugging the hell out of me since November to get him a tablet computer. He has done his Internet comparison shopping homework and e-mailed me multiple consumer reports, feature lists, and price comparisons. I keep saying I don’t have the money for this purchase right now, and he keeps finding cheaper versions, all the way down to $248 or something.

By the way, can I just say – this modern life, who would have thought? That a mother and son can now communicate across the vast distance of five feet via the magic of e-mail.

That O Psychic One can now in the blink of a digital eye send me a footnoted essay with a bibliography begging me for stuff, and I can just as instantly write back that money doesn’t grow on trees. Why, back when Hector was a pup, I had the inconvenience of having this same conversation in person, face to face, with my own mother.

It’s a miracle, I tell you. A miracle of the modern age.

Anyway, finally, I broke down. Well, not all the WAY down – I did not buy O Psychic One a tablet computer. I simply agreed to take him to Best Buy to look at some tablet computers. I had an ulterior motive. I knew that he did not have an accurate picture in his mind’s eye of just how tiny a tablet computer is, especially one that is priced at $248. It’s like a slightly enlarged Nintendo DS. I mean, it’s little. I figured he’d see one and decide he wasn’t that interested anymore.

My plan worked, but not correctly.

If you’ve been to Best Buy sometime during the last decade, you can guess why. Best Buy does not devote much display space to the small low-margin items. Where they really commit their real estate is to the large high-margin items. The new MacBooks and such with the big yellow and blue $2000 and $3000 price tags.

“You were right, mom”, says O Psychic One. “Those tablets are pitiful. Can I get one of these MacBooks instead?”

In this way, we accelerated from $248 to $3000 in less than 60 seconds without me even realizing what happened.

However, this is just set-up, not the actual point of event #2. But I’m getting there.

In the car on the way home from Best Buy, I began to ponder the topic of this post in light of Catherine’s wise observation plus my inability to purchase a MacBook for O Psychic One, who actually has some defensible reasons for owning one. I was thinking about what my next (er, first) step towards personal financial mastery needs to be.

I had decided to take my inspiration from Simon Sinek and his book Start with Why. The point of this book is that people who achieve lasting dream-worthy success do it on the strength of knowing why they’re doing it. I mean why with a capital WHY – like, they have a passion, a mission, and a coherent philosophy that carries them over the rough spots.

Watch this guy’s video below on How great leaders inspire action to see what I mean. It’s worth the 19 minutes, I promise. I’ll wait for you to be done –

So, inspired by Mr. Sinek, I was thinking, that my first step to achieving my dream, with all its potential obstacles and rough spots, is to answer the question once and for all:

1. What is the role of money in a person’s life?
2. What role should it have?
3. Why do so many of us seem to act like infants, or Neanderthals, when it comes to money?
4. Why should anyone care about becoming a personal finance master, anyway?
5. Really, and this is the deeper question – would our world be a better place if there were no such thing as money?

Here’s the psychic part. Just as I had finished framing my question, which I am positive I did not utter aloud, O Psychic One says to me:

“Mom, do you think the world would be a better place if there were no such thing as money?”

Well, I’m not done thinking about that one yet, as I am still recovering from the fact that O Psychic One heard me thinking it. So there’s going to be a part 2 to this post, wherein I hope to have settled on my personal answer to that question.

In the meantime, what do you think, dear World of Dreamers? Would the world be better if there were no such thing as money?

Leave a comment. Love to hear your thoughts.

Jayne Spiech

Jayne Speich is a small business coach/consultant who writes, thinks, and coaches extensively on customer service, business finance, and ways to thrive in the new economy. You can find her at theselfreliantentrepreneur.com. Jayne’s post day is Saturday.