Priced In Eggs

What would you do?

— Klondike

Addison Wiggin Dear Reader,

Humor me for a second… What would you do for an egg?

Would you work for an hour? Probably not.

Now riddle me this: what would you do for a dollar? Ten dollars? One hundred thousand dollars?

Dollars are way more valuable than eggs; we’d do almost anything for a lot of them.

What I’m getting at: money is what Mark Moss calls a “language of value.” Click here to hear him break it down.

Like a word, money is a vehicle. It represents something.

For example, you can buy a carton of eggs for $1.83 in the United States. In exchange for my money, I can hold an egg in my hand, crack it in a pan and fry it for breakfast. Or vice versa… If I have a bunch of eggs, laid by my chickens in their coop, I can get money for them.

This idea – the science of exchange – is at once the simplest thing (everyone does it) and the most esoteric (nobody really knows why). All we know is that we use money all the time. It makes the world go round. And it drives us crazy.

Without getting too metaphysical… I just wanted to remind us of the importance of understanding the real, tangible value of our dollars.

We forget that each dollar actually represents something, because the act of exchange is so commonplace in our everyday lives. We use money all the time and don’t think about what it means.

This week’s Session with Mark Moss and Aleks Svetski is all about why “money is fundamentally misunderstood.” It was an interesting discussion. We touched on some really key principles.

And by thinking about what money actually is, it puts us in a better position to do what we really want: get more of it. You can watch the Session by clicking here.

Follow your bliss,

Addison Wiggin