Nothing Is Truly Serious in the Man-Made World of Abstraction

We are creative but by no means serious creatures

Photo by Nguyễn Thanh Ngọc

I recently reignited my love for economic science, which was my passion for a few years around my early 20s and even led to my studying the subject in college. My academic journey didn’t last long for many unrelated reasons. Still, my love for abstractions, such as money and its flows, remained despite my even greater love for philosophy and spirituality.

However, after years of listening almost exclusively to philosophical and spiritual lectures, it’s fascinating and terrifying to rediscover economics and money content on the Internet. It’s crazy how popular most of this stuff is — and how silly it is. The most ridiculous is the stock market and all the sweating to calculate and predict the correct numbers to get more green numbers on your screen.

But what fascinates me the most is that people consider topics like economics, money, or politics serious. I even encountered conversations like, “Oh, you’re finally back to important and serious stuff after this weird journey.” Uh.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to write that money is an irrelevant abstraction because we indeed live in a money world. However, every economist knows that our modern, mostly digital, money and the whole…