money and trust

Money itself isn’t trustworthy or untrustworthy. It’s a symbol, and symbols don’t have ethics. What is real is what it represents:

someone gave up time, attention, energy, sometimes health, sometimes dignity to get it. In that sense, money is condensed life.

So when you exchange money, you’re really trading sacrifices. Yours, or someone else’s.

That’s where the distrust creeps in—not because money is evil, but because it abstracts the cost. It hides the human toll behind a clean number. A dollar doesn’t tell you whether it came from joyful craft, quiet desperation, exploitation, or love. It just says “value,” stripped of context.

Time is the honest currency.

Money is time that’s been anonymized.

Can you trust it?

Only as far as you trust the systems and people that assign meaning to it—and those systems often reward efficiency over humanity.

That’s why it can feel like selling a piece of your soul: not because work is wrong, but because when time is coerced, misaligned, or drained of meaning, the sacrifice stops being voluntary.

Money is useful and powerful.

But it’s never neutral.