I’ve never been driven by money. I was driven by what interested me, in what brought me joy, and by curiosity. I was not well-to-do but I was doing alright.

Then I moved to a country in which people’s value was solely determined by how much money they had in their bank accounts. At least, that’s what I thought at first. Then it dawned on me that there are now two groups of people in western countries, namely those that put money in their own pockets and those that put money in the other people’s pockets. (Let’s forget about people who live outside of this dynamic, for now, because that has a lot to do with the specific country such people happen to be in.)

The second group is much larger and it means that the people in that group are easily replaceable. They donate their time to put money into other people’s pockets and in return for that, they are rewarded with a smaller amount of money. They are required to put that money, the money that they receive, into other people’s pockets in return for housing, utilities, food, healthcare and other necessities.

(No, this is not a zero sum game, but it comes ridiculously close. Particularly the part where so many people sacrifice their time and joy and freedom is really strange. It’s an oddly punitive system that doesn’t make much sense, particularly if you consider that this same system is essentially also putting our future on the planet in danger. This is essentially the western capitalist system that I seem to be describing. It’s not how for example a kibbutz works or a Buddhist convent or a community deep in the Amazon or on an isolated Pacific island, but it is the only system I know from my personal experience.)

We are increasingly living in a world in which people’s value is determined by how much money they put into other people’s pockets. I was self-employed for a long time, but I still was putting a lot more money in other people’s pockets than into my own and as soon as I stopped doing that, I lost my value in the eyes of those other people.

I just watched part of a documentary about ex-influencers. Some now have courses about how to stop being an influencer, but all the content that they created made them enough money so that they no longer need to worry about supporting themselves. That is how AI will eventually somehow put money into our wallets. A lot of influencing is a lot like AI content creation. It has little real meaning.

Friendship too seems to have become a hollow concept, mostly. An old-style friend is now like a handbag or a car, isn’t it? New-style friends are people who follow you on social media because they like your content. That content does not have to have anything to do with who you really are as a person.

In my self-employment, I used to say that if anybody could do the job, they didn’t need me, but that changed at some point – because of circumstances that made it harder to do certain things such as travel to my clients. It made me replaceable, first by other humans and then by AI.

Now AI is taking over the roles of many other people, too, and what we all do is increasingly dictated by the requirements of technology, not the other way around.

Where is this going?

This morning I watched an artist very skillfully create a wonderful painting and it was with some horror that I realized that AI is doing these kinds of things too. All it needs to do is study this artist’s work and extract what exactly leads to the end result. I can’t do that. AI can.

There is very little left for us humans to do. This means that the economic system is collapsing. Governments will have to start paying everyone a certain monthly amount that covers their monthly costs for housing, food etc. Oddly enough… I suspect that this will actually be far cheaper for governments because it would erase the need for the huge machineries that are currently in place to check and double-check and control and monitor us and punish us for silly typos.

The alternative is that everything becomes free, but I can’t see how that can be sustainable unless AI starts replacing governments and administrations too. Wait a minute… If you go back to what created money in the first place, well, it was the exchange of favors and skills and goods. If all those things are taken over by AI, would there still be a need for money?

Why can’t housing be simply free after all? Why can’t food simply be free?

If everyone receives enough money to be able to support themselves, there is no longer a real need for people to put money in other people’s pockets (other than the latter’s greed) after all.

This is an interesting conundrum.

Does it mean that most people simply would not know what to do if they had to stop donating their time toward putting money into other people’s pockets? No, they could then do more meaningful things, such as go for walks with people who have Alzheimer’s, maintain local parks (gardening and painting and carpentry) or provide free healthcare. The biggest expense in any larger undertaking is always staff cost.

It was the “tit for tat” attitude, the accounting, the bookkeeping, that caused the need for money. Where is it written that a person cannot maintain a thousand apple trees whereas someone else who may be less strong, physically, or who looks after a chronically ill relative or who tells stories to kids, only looks after ten apple trees and is equally secure? Why is the former more valuable than the latter? Can AI take care of this for us?

I can’t change any of the above, including the crazy fact that employees now can be required to go on courses where they can learn how to appear more authentic without being genuine, but I would love to find a way to shift the balance a little.