What Money Really Is — Connecting People

A Sense of Unease About Money

Ever had that feeling where “earn more money” sits on your todo list, but you can’t quite explain why — beyond the obvious?

“Money solves problems.” “Getting rich is the goal.” Lots of people say it, and I used to nod along without examining the idea. Money felt like a kind of authority — power in numeric form.

Then a book rearranged my view of money from the ground up. This article gathers the three insights that hit hardest.

Insight 1: Money Is Powerless

Money itself has no value. Money is just paper (or digital numbers) — it carries no inherent power.

The most vivid historical receipt for this: Zimbabwe’s hyperinflation.

What Happened in Zimbabwe

In the 2000s, inflation gripped Zimbabwe. Citizens wanted money. The government responded by printing it — massively.

Things got worse, not better. Why?

If money itself had value, printing more should solve everything. It didn’t. Which means money has no inherent value of its own.

The real problem was never “lack of money.” It was “lack of goods” — production was collapsing. The actual fix would have been securing workers and restoring production, not running the presses faster.

Insight 2: Increasing Money Supply Doesn’t Increase Society’s Value

When money supply rises but goods stay flat, enormous sums chase a shrinking pool of products, and prices launch (hyperinflation).

Look at the “people who make things,” not the money. Money is a means. When the means gets overvalued, the whole society distorts.

Insight 3: Money Is Paid to People, Not to Things

In everyday life: “I bought bread = I paid money for bread.” Easy. But zoom out and the picture changes:

Customer → (money) → Clerk → (money) → Baker → (money) → Farmer
Customer ← (bread) ← Clerk ← (bread) ← Baker ← (wheat) ← Farmer

The money I paid doesn’t stop at the clerk. It flows to the baker behind them, and the farmer behind the baker.

In other words, money isn’t paid for goods or services — it’s paid for the labor of the humans who created them.

Which redefines what money even is:

Money is a means to connect people.

What This Means for Engineers

Payment Is for Problem-Solving, Not Code

Clients don’t pay for lines of code. They pay for the business problem the code solves — for “making someone’s work lighter.”

Looking back at my track record, the 90% regression-test reduction and the 40-hour-per-month RPA automation — at their core, those were really “reclaiming people’s time.”

The Value of Spending Your Time for Others

As I wrote in the article about effort and luck, effort spent for others accumulates. If money is “a means to connect people,” then time has the same shape. Code reviews, mentoring juniors, writing documentation — none of these spit out revenue on their own, but they lift the team’s overall productivity, and that does come back around.

In Closing

Money is powerless. Increasing supply doesn’t increase social value. Money is paid to people, not things.

After those three insights, my answer to “why do I work?” shifted by a quiet degree.

Not working to earn money. Solving someone’s problem with my skills, with money flowing as a consequence. I want to keep the order honest.

If “make more money” sits on your todo list right now, you might try rewriting it as “solve a more meaningful problem.” The money question often answers itself once that part lands.

“No Effort Goes Unrewarded” — How the Concept of Accumulating Luck Changed My Work — The value of spending time for others