Frank Yan on Imagine If There Was No Money

Frank brought up an exercise of trying to visualize this world without money or even the concept of having any money. Imagine if there was no more money at all, not a word for it, and no emotional or physical reference to it. The entire whole the idea of money simply doesn’t exist.

Why did Frank Yan have us thinking like this? Because there is so many people that spend the majority of their life in the pursuit of this “manmade” invention. For the most part money is really a necessary, yet it is an insidious detour away from everything that really matters.


Like a bottomless abyss in the sea, there’s money smack dab in the middle of almost everything meaningful that you want to do. You can’t ignore it at all and it’s almost impossible to get anything done without it, so you are forced to deal with it.


Does Money call all the shots?


In the name of money and the careers, we may invest years of our lives on specialized education and training we may seek. Why is that? So we can spend another 30-50 years earning a living here in Sacramento. What’s really at the end of our rainbow? The hope of being able to retire with enough money to enjoy whatever time and health we have left.


It does become especially challenging to maintain a balanced view of money when we are confronted by economic hardship. The lack of legal tender can corrupt our sense of self-worth, and even threaten our sense of security. Not any inanimate object is more emotionally charged. That is a tremendous amount of leverage for an artificial commodity we call money, don’t you think?


Can people really imagine if there was no more money?


It is going to be difficult to wrap our minds around this concept of no more money because it is bound to be outside the realm of our experience. How would our Sacramento city society be structured if there were no such thing as money anymore? What would we all focus on and how would we make value comparisons?


We do not really know because it has never been tried on such a large scale. One thing is for sure; is most people’s lives would probably be a lot more true and realistic without it. Maybe we should just abolish the stuff and start focusing on things of real value.


Frank Yan asks: What’s your take on money today? Are you able to imagine no more money anymore?