Blair Cottrell (@RealBlairCottrell)

Lately I’ve been looking at society through a new lens. I was never an economist. I always felt that money was associated with pain but I didn’t think much about the details, I just got busy thinking about people and politics irrespective of money. Knowing what I know now, that was probably a mistake. But over the past year or so I’ve had the opportunity to spend time with a few people who understand money better than I ever did, specifically how to make money. I’ve previously heard a lot about money being debt and illegitimately invented by banks through loans, and while that’s all probably true it doesn’t change the fact we all use money everyday and most of us don’t know how to live without it. We also don’t really understand how it works. We don’t learn about money in the schools and financial reports usually look like intimidating mathematics, so no one gives it much thought because it all seems too difficult to follow. But the reality of money is staggeringly simple and when you understand how people get rich, you start to see one central cog in the money machine which literally runs the entire system. That central cog is problems. Keep reading, this is very simple and it’ll all make perfect sense by the end. Money is made by solving problems or at least temporarily keeping a problem at bay. That problem could be existential, physical or personal, it could be buying food because hunger doesn’t feel nice and starving to death represents a bit of a problem too. You might have a leaking tap you pay a plumber to fix, or an aching knee you buy medicine to alleviate. You probably bought a Netflix subscription to stave off boredom or loneliness. The point is: The more problems you have (or the more you think you have) the more money you spend. People with fewer problems spend less money; it’s harder to get rich in a society if it doesn’t have a lot of problems. Understanding this I began to see why everybody was so sensitive or unwell: Because their vulnerability to insult or disease was extremely profitable. If people pay to alleviate pain, then it makes sense to produce a society where the people are experiencing more pain. This has completely transformed my view of how things work and pretty much explains everything. Why for example would a government running a system like this have any interest in actually solving problems? If an authority structure exists on the basis of taking your money in the form of taxation to solve society’s problems, wouldn’t it make sense for that authority to make the problems bigger? It’s of course important to act as though solutions are coming, but they never do and they never will, because in order for the money to keep “moving up” problems need to remain and there’s plenty of incentive to deliberately make the problems worse. This is really worth thinking about.