When I was a kid, I had a feeling that money was not that important, but the majority of people around me kept saying the opposite. So I thought that I just did not understand them. Now that I have grown up, have a career of my own, have a family of my own, and understand the world much better, the feeling remains within me. I still struggle with the question why do people see money as an element of life rather than a tool to support life.
This feeling of mine keeps coming back when I see any of the following:
- People do their work just for the money.
- People who work in the education or medical areas that help others to improve or even save life do not earn nearly as much as others who work in e-commerce.
- Women in professional work areas seem to have lower value because they can get pregnant and give live to the new generations that will support our lives in the future.
- Companies on stock markets only focus on financial growth to keep stakeholders happy while this can mean that the ways to reach that financial growth are harmful or even dangerous for human life.
Based on my search to understand more of how people perceive money, I have found that:
- People use money as the unit of measure of commodity value.
- People use money as the data to keep track of who created value and who is due value in a monetary system.
- People use money as storage to save value.
In these definitions I cannot really see the reflection of value of life. So it seems to me that people often only value commodity/products/belongings, and they do not put explicit value on life or the quality of life. But the way our society thinks is by having a higher value of income/saving our quality of life is higher. This does not sound right at all.
My gut says that we are missing something here as a human race. We miss the tool to measure the value of human life. So we need to create a measurement tool to measure the value of life and the quality of life. Money needs to have more visible dimensions. The number on money should not be the only thing that reflects value.
But I am not sure how to do this. So any thought?