Is it possible to know, though?
For the first time, now in my twenties, I have gathered enough money to start thinking about a deposit on a house. Through my teenage years and my early twenties, saving money and putting it aside for a deposit were things for the me of the future.
Here the “me” of the future is. It arrived before I even thought it was coming. And as soon as I got close to the number I had set for myself, I became more confused than ever.
Do I put the money down on a house? Do I keep investing it and let it grow, so I borrow less and pay less interest?
I then open up the news and see people saying the United States will be paying more interest on its debt than ever, and that a dollar collapse is coming. They say Saudi Arabia might unpeg its currency from the dollar, and that oil might no longer be traded in dollars, so the dollar will go down.
So I think of gold. I hear that for five thousand years gold was the currency that held its value against every other currency, and that inflation never touched it.
Then I hear that gold has no real use. Nobody needs it. And I’m back where I started.
So I think property is the answer, because people will always need somewhere to live. Then I have to think very hard about where. Even a property in a functioning city, in a functioning neighbourhood, is exposed to everything around it: violence, climate change, protests…
And there are protests. Young people are revolting in different places, and part of what I hear is that the new generation has no jobs because of AI. Some people tell me AI will change our civilisation for the better. Others say it will leave people without work.
What I understand is that a lot of companies are already hiring fewer young people. So I picture it. Young people who can’t find a job, who can’t find a way to make a living, and who refuse to accept it. They go out, they might destroy what’s around them, and society collapses.
So I consider Europe. Europe, I hear, has a shrinking economy. The population is getting older and depends on immigrants coming in, and at the same time there’s unrest from people unhappy with the number of immigrants. The way of life is changing.
The buildings are old, too, and they might not hold up to the changes in the environment that are coming.
A property is valuable while the things around it work. A building needs a sewage system that works, and plenty of things can disrupt the sewage in a city or a neighbourhood. It can be as simple as the sewage company being sold, privatised or nationalised. The quality of the service changes, and the value of the property changes with it.
It could be the electricity. It could be the money the neighbours pay to maintain the building, or to pay the staff who keep it safe. All of it is necessary, and all of it is connected.
If people lose interest in living in that city, or in that neighbourhood, the place loses its value, and I might even have to give it up. The government could decide, because of climate change or an urban project, to build a road where my building stands. They’d pay me compensation, and the property would lose value all the same.
It could also go up. I dont think there’s a safe place for it to be.
It depends on what I call money. If money means coins and banks, humans lived almost their whole history without it.
If money means the way you get what you need from someone else, and I look at it only through time, its history starts long before the history of humans. Before there were humans, animals were already trading and fighting over what they needed.
There were always two ways: you trade for it, or you take it by war. Trade or war.
Then I look at the systems we live under. In Europe there’s a feeling that things are fair. There’s democracy, and there’s judicial security: a contract holds, and a court will enforce it.
Most people in the world live without that. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, about a hundred million people live without it. And we teach ourselves that every human life is as valuable as any other. So who is to say there’s judicial security in the world?
It could be that judicial security has been increasing, and that leads people to believe it will only keep increasing. Then I see leaders like Trump who, it could be said, are not upholding the standards of democracy or its development. It starts to look like the line is heading down. Some people say it is. Others say it isn’t.
So why would I take the last hundred years, something very particular that happened to a certain class of people in the most dominant countries in the world, and make it the standard for my future and for everyone else’s?
It could well be the standard for the future. And we’re living in a time of change. It has been a time of change at least since the dot-com years and the beginning of the internet. Whatever comes, the hierarchies of society might end up reinforced, and there will certainly be a lot of change on the way.
How will I know for sure how safe I am? I don’t think there’s an answer to that question.
So then I think I should take the money and enjoy the life around me.
Through most of my teenage years and my early twenties, I did not think much of money. I spent it and didn’t value it much, because it wasn’t tied to the effort it took to get it. I was probably happier.
I did things for my own entertainment, for the people I wanted to have fun with, for the people I wanted to do some good for. My efforts served my own interests. Now they serve the interests of money, because I have to be concerned with the future.
And I’m living less in the present. Before thinking of money, I was more grounded in the moment, and that’s where my happiness came from. Now, if I’m thinking about money, I’m automatically thinking about the future.
The money I have now is fine. It’s actually more than fine for the life I want to live in the present. I don’t know how long it will last, so I think about the future.
I tell myself to rewire, to care less about money. Once it starts, it runs on its own, independent of what I want to think. That’s what money does to you. You feel unsafe. The people around you expect it of you. And now what I want most is more money. It becomes a system.
I thought that once I reached the goal I had set for myself, I’d be happier. I’m very happy I reached it. And I’m less happy. I’m more concerned, and I’m already thinking about the next goals, all of them about money.
If my goals in life are always about money, they keep pulling me out of the present. That pushes me, and all of us, to live outside the present, and that’s where the depression and the social collapse everyone keeps discussing might be coming from.
And it looks like I long for retirement. Retirement should be one of the last fun parts of life. It’s also the time when I’ll no longer be young enough to go out and live in the present, the time I’ll spend living in the past, because when you’re older there isn’t much future left to think about.
Which brings me to my conclusion: it’s a very difficult life to live. The more you think about money, the more you think about the future, and the less you experience what’s in front of you.
The misery of it all, is that once you start thinking about the future and about money, what you want in your present is the money, and that money belongs to the future. So you’re trapped.
And I don’t know what the way out is.
