Thanks Elly.
Vivify Mariposa
This is a long read. It is supposed to be. The system that owns you was not built in a paragraph. You will not understand it in one either. Take your time. Read it twice if you have to. Some of what you find here you already knew. You just never saw it all in the same room.
Every time you receive a paycheck, you are collecting what your ancestors once received in mineral form.
The word salary comes from the Latin salarium. Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century, recorded that in former times soldiers were paid with salt. Whether it was literal salt or an allowance for purchasing it, the word that crossed two thousand years of language to land in your bank account statement traces directly to sodium chloride. The thing your body cannot survive without. The substance that every civilization on earth eventually discovered could preserve food, cure disease, and be traded for anything else.
Before anyone decided what money was, the world already knew what it couldn’t live without. And money became that thing.
Your body contains 250 grams of sodium. It circulates in your blood, fires every nerve impulse, powers every muscle contraction, including the one happening in your heart right now. The minimum your body needs to survive is 500 milligrams daily. Below that, your system collapses. One quarter of your tongue’s taste buds exist specifically to detect it. Your biology built a sensory organ dedicated to locating what it cannot function without.
This is not a metaphor for value. This is the origin of value. Money, at its most foundational level, is whatever society cannot function without. For most of human history, the answer was not gold or paper or digits on a server. It was a mineral.
Continue reading …
Vivify Mariposa
This is a long read. It is supposed to be. The system that owns you was not built in a paragraph. You will not understand it in one either. Take your time. Read it twice if you have to. Some of what you find here you already knew. You just never saw it all in the same room.
Every time you receive a paycheck, you are collecting what your ancestors once received in mineral form.
The word salary comes from the Latin salarium. Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century, recorded that in former times soldiers were paid with salt. Whether it was literal salt or an allowance for purchasing it, the word that crossed two thousand years of language to land in your bank account statement traces directly to sodium chloride. The thing your body cannot survive without. The substance that every civilization on earth eventually discovered could preserve food, cure disease, and be traded for anything else.
Before anyone decided what money was, the world already knew what it couldn’t live without. And money became that thing.
Your body contains 250 grams of sodium. It circulates in your blood, fires every nerve impulse, powers every muscle contraction, including the one happening in your heart right now. The minimum your body needs to survive is 500 milligrams daily. Below that, your system collapses. One quarter of your tongue’s taste buds exist specifically to detect it. Your biology built a sensory organ dedicated to locating what it cannot function without.
This is not a metaphor for value. This is the origin of value. Money, at its most foundational level, is whatever society cannot function without. For most of human history, the answer was not gold or paper or digits on a server. It was a mineral.
Continue reading …
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