Dear Money,
You are not what people think you are.
Despite your staggering power, Money, you are one of our greatest fictions.
To buffer that reality, we house you in imposing stone buildings flanked with ornate columns. Inside, well-dressed people speak in hushed voices about what you’re doing and where you’ve been. You’re surrounded by imperative papers. Things are notarized and kept in special Safety Deposit boxes. There are vaults and cameras and security guards.
Your minions monitor your every burp and hiccup on CNBC with undivided attention. The Money Show—your show—however, isn’t limited to cable television. It plays out in high rise offices wherein Serious Men sit at mahogany desks and stroke their chins while reviewing your inscrutable figures and diagrams. Meanwhile, regular janes and joes hunch over their kitchen tables inspecting online statements and scribbled ledgers inside checkbooks.
Americans are divided!
So exclaim our leaders, our educated commentators, our neighbors, and even ourselves. While our divisions are undeniable, Money, we all agree on one thing.
A dollar is a dollar.
That may sound ridiculously obvious, but it is one of the most important agreements we have.
Four dollars, give or take, will buy me a cup of coffee at Starbucks. A loaf of bagged grocery bread will run me about $3.29 (not so long ago, it was $1.99 for the store brand, maybe even $0.99 on sale), and a blue check over at Elmo's place is eight bucks a month.
As for life on the other side of the coin, Beyoncé and Jay-Z paid $200 million for their Malibu house earlier this year, which you would hope comes with ample garage space for their $28 million Rolls Royce. Whether Queen Bee wears that $30 million necklace when they take it out for spin is anyone’s guess, but for the fun-loving and budget-conscious luxury seeker, a Judith Leiber Hello Kitty Candy Bar clutch can be had for just $4,695 at Saks.
A thousand cups of coffee = a silly pocketbook. Who knew?
Wealth starts with a single dollar bill, and baby, no matter what you think of yourself, that bill is just a piece of paper. Now dig this—most of your dollars don't even have that to call their own, let alone a spot of gold to back ‘em up. Most of your dollars are just electronic credits like the ones that scream DING DING DING from blinking slot machines at the JACK casino downtown.
But your modern manifestations, Money, are so baked into our lives and culture that when we check our online balances or pull a monthly statement from the mailbox and see a mere figure on a screen or paper, we exhale a sigh of relief: My money's fine …
Actually, Money, you are not fine. You’re never fine. You’re never anything. You’re always everything. You’re angry. You’re happy. You're stone cold. You’re on fire. You’re sad. You’re silly. You’re serious. With very few exceptions, you are a blurry reflection of the person holding you in their hand or the person looking to get their hands on you.
Your entire existence is made possible on account of a squishy human phenomenon known as belief. Without it, Money, you are nothing.
A person waits tables for a living. A person washes windows, another teaches kindergarten, yet another delivers mail. A person in a spangled gown performs before thousands of fans. A person takes the dollars they earn and buys a Starbucks coffee or a Rolls Royce. Everyone, including you, understands this system. And despite the arguments around your edges, we all pretty much agree on it.
But these days, Money, you've gotten a little big for your britches–and I’m not just talking about this horrendous inflation.
When the boss makes ten times as much as the folks on the line, that’s one thing; when he’s making 400 times as much, it’s quite another. When people can barely make rent no matter how hard they work while the world's five richest investors make so much money, they round it off to the nearest billion, things start to get dodgy.
That belief I was just talking about? Our fragile collective belief in you? I hate to break it to you, Money, but it has nothing to do with you. Our belief in you is really our collective belief in each other.
Don’t believe me? Then believe George Bailey.
However imperfect, that belief says a person trusts the guy next to them in the elevator to do his part as a matter of course. Same goes for the guy swabbing down the restrooms and the one sitting in the corner office on the top floor.
Pro tip: The stronger our belief is in each other, the easier it is to swallow the inequality you engender.
There’s another part of the bargain slipping away. We’ve all been told that if we work hard enough we can get into that corner office. But that’s getting harder to believe every day. As that portion of the belief game erodes, people are getting desperate. Some are even willing to carpet bomb entire hospital systems to get a bag of your fictional dollars (notably without an ounce of explosive, or for that matter, a bag).
Now, Money, I’m diluting this complex phenomenon down to a few glistening drops, but dark forces are working overtime to crush our belief in, well, everything. To achieve their nefarious endgame (absolute power), they endlessly foment chaos and denigrate our every institution. None of which bodes well for you.
Yeah, yeah … you’ll survive, although you may not outlive the cockroaches.
Where’s the tipping point? I have no idea, Money. But before our belief in you slips away entirely (and I hope it never does), can I buy you a cup of coffee?
Lemme know.
Love, Erin
ps: You think Janet Yellen will read this?
pss: I swear Imma cry.
psss: I’m not crying you’re crying.
pssss: If you wanna send this to Janet Yellen, I’m totally fine with it.
My mother had a little magnet on her fridge that said, "I don't like Money, but it quiets my nerves." I grew up wondering why Money was capitalized like that. Yep.