I really didn’t feel like writing about money after the events of this past week. It felt hollow.

But there has been a big question on my mind for a while about this stuff we call money. Maybe this is as good a time as any for me to see if I can make sense of it by sharing it with you. Think of it as a therapy session for me. You can send me a bill at the end!

This stuff we call money is just a medium of exchange. We use it to trade. The biggest trade in the world is the one where each of us swaps a bit of our lives, in the form of time, for money, in the form of wages.

The equation looks like this:

[Life] = [Money]

Then we take that money, and we trade it for what I am going to call stuff. That can be food, bills, unnecessary plastic crap and experience with loved ones. Beyond funding the necessities of life, I’m assuming that we buy stuff because we think it will add value to our lives. We believe all this stuff will make us happy.