Why is currency so essential?

Simpsons meme aside --

Those with currency can have significantly more options than those without it. I'm of a privileged state where if I wanted to drop everything and visit another country for two weeks, there's nothing stopping me financially. Not many people have that luxury.

Your comment made me realize that OP wasn't asking about why we need currency as a society, but why people keep trying to get more money.
I hate when the post title and post content ask two seemingly different questions, lol
- The XY problem is asking about your attempted solution rather than your actual problem. This leads to enormous amounts of wasted time and energy, both on the part of people asking for help, and on the part of those providing help.
- Lemmy supports editing posts, deleting posts and making new posts - if a question is obtuse the author can always take it down and post something more precise and less open to misinterpretation. Of it's a language barrier issue I'm sympathetic but this just seems to have been a needlessly clickbaity title.
- It's a hard question to ask. I'd rather pin down why it's essential then ask why it's deemed the only thing that is essential.
God, that was such a funny joke back in the day. One of the moments where the writers were at the top of their game.

Makes it easier to buy food and pay for rent.

My landlord doesn't want to barter for goods and services on a monthly basis.

Im being obtuse, for sure, but why does your land lord need to extract value from you? I know it's to pay for the property but that's just another exchange of currency.
- You answered your question in the sentence right after your question. The landlord owns the property and so he can do what he wants with it. He's letting you live there but has decided he wants something in exchange for letting you live there. If currency didn't exist he'd want something else in exchange.
- Going back far enough, scarcity is the answer. We technically live in a post-scarcity world now. But we are bound by the models we developed when it existed.
- It's nice to have something to eat.
- Landlords exist to extract value.

Can be exchanged for goods and services

But I wanted a peanut!
- $20 can buy many peanuts

Because it's very difficult to get things you need to live solely through barter. Many trades are very niche, and an economy that uses money allows those trades to continue being viable parts of society.

Like, think of plumbing. If everything goes well, you don't need a plumber. But when you do...you really need it. Now imagine being the plumber who wants some bread and eggs but the farmer has no problems currently that needs the plumber's skills. Plumber can't eat, leaves profession, there's now no plumber when the pipes do break.

Obviously, the next thought here might be, "Well, why doesn't the plumber say if they get eggs and bread now, they'll come and fix your toilet later if needed?" But that sort of re-invents credit, right? "I'll trade 3 future plumbing problems for 3 boxes of eggs now." If you have that, why not money?

So basically, money is very useful. It can be traded for many things you otherwise wouldn't be able to get if you were only able to offer as barter a specific item that might be rejected by the other person you want to barter with. Money is a "universal" trade good, and it's also easy to store (you don't have to have lots of physical room to store your Universal Trade Good).

The BEHAVIOR of people surrounding this very useful thing can absolutely be suspect, depending on the person (greedy sociopaths hoarding wealth)--but that's a human thing, not because money is innately a bad thing. It's a social problem, not a technology problem. You could totally have a greedy hoarder storing up a non-money trade item too...see people and toilet paper/sanitizer during Covid.

Here's my take:

We're built for about 150 relationships max (Dunbar number), and yet we benefit from cooperation above that threshold. Rather than make it so we have to have a personal relationship with everyone who could possibly benefit us, we accepted a ramped down version of relationship we call "transactions". This is a very weak replacement for a relationship, but it is a sort of "micro-relationship" in that for a brief moment two people who don't know each other can kind of care about each other during an exchange. Through specialization, we can do something well that doesn't just benefit the handful of friends and neighbors we have, but tens of thousands and possibly millions of people via transactions (e.g. a factory, starting an Amazon business, etc.)
There is a process called "commensuration" in the social sciences, where people start to make one thing commensurate with another, even in wildly different domains. For example, to understand the value of a forest and to convey its importance to decision makers we might say "this forest is worth $100 billion". It's kind of weird to do this (how do leaves and trees and anthills and beetles equal imaginary humoney?) But slowly, over time, we have made many things commensurate to dollars at various scales. (I don't think this is a good thing, but it does have benefits). In short, more and more things that were part of an implicit economy of relationships (e.g. can the neighbor girl babysit tonight?) have entered the explicit domain of the monetary economy (e.g. sittercity).

.

IMO, in order to participate in the huge value generated by this monetary economy, people sometimes lose the forest for the trees (so to speak) and forget what really matters (e.g. excellence of character, deep relationships, new experiences, etc.) because it seems like we might be able to put off those things until "after" we square away this whole money thing first. But maybe "after" never comes--and the hollow life of a consumer capitalist drains the inner ecological diversity of a soulful life.

This kind of thoughtful introspection is the only reason to get out of bed in the morning. That, and dogs. Dogs are wonderful.

Consider what we used as currency before it was currency. You would have to barter before, which was inefficient. Common currency saves you and everyone involved time. Instead of having to barter for every item, which would also require you to do carry all of those items, you can just pay with currency now.

I'll trade you 6 lima beans for a salt packet.
- No, I need this salt for lima beans.
We can think of it as a universal language for trading. It doesn’t matter what item you eventually want, you can trade money to get it.
- Extrapolating, want, or greed, is what gives money its value?
That's not exactly true. Barter was never used like that in the past. People used gift giving systems or other trust based systems in daily life. Barter was only used with strangers and that was not a common occurrence. These trust based systems do work in smaller settings but break down in large settings where interacting with strangers is the norm.
Time, agree, time is what is most essential to everyone here on this planet.
A lot of cultures ended up with effective currencies. Whether that was grains of rice or chickens there ended up a small number of items that had a well understood value and ended up being the default item of trade, not because the receiver needed those items but because they were known to be easily exchanged with others.

Because they represent a resource, concrete or abstract. Currency is easily exchanged, either for other currencies, or for goods and services. This allows for a lot more opportunities than hauling around a swarm of sheep for bartering at the car dealership.

On one end carrying sheep would be annoying, but so is a credit score; arguably both are sources of noise distracting humanity from actually improving at all
- We had currency without credit scores for about three thousand years prior to the first credit score agency (1841 from what I found). Having credit score agencies is just a modern problem and their prevalence in the past fifty years is a demonstration of how shitty our capitalist system has gotten.
- Credit scores aren't a direct result of currency. Credit scores are the result of lending and credit, which is possible without currency.
  Example: "I could give you this car if you promised to bring me schwiftyfive thousand sheep over five years, but according to my records you're only good for schiftytwo sheep. Sorry pal. Here, first borrow this chicken, and give me an egg every day for a few years to prove that you're the kind of guy/gal/ghoul who honors debts, and we can discuss the matter again."

Modern society is only possible because of global trade networks. Global trade networks would never work without currency. If a person spends all their day fabricating metal sheets they need a way to buy bread to feed their family. Otherwise we'd all be back to farming our lives away.

God? Jesus is that you? Or at least someone omnipotent
You know with absolute certainty the only way people can trade is capitalism?
- Trade is not the same as capitalism.
- Even in a non-capitalist economy, currency would still make trading easier. It simply might not be exchanging hands between private individuals but between governments.
  Capitalism is not trade in and of itself. It has to do with who owns the means of production.

There is also a meta discussion here on liquidity (how easy it is to exchange something). People want currency because it is easy to exchange. Your landlord might be okay with getting paid in a mix of gallons of milk and some cuts of beef, but most will not. Trading for "non currency value" is not uncommon. You might get paid with stocks depending on your work. If you buy a car you might trade in your old one.

You can either barter or you can have currency. Currency is the means through which the economy functions. You need something abstract to indicate value. That's currency.

In a post-scarcity society, when everyone could just get everything they wanted whenever on a whim just because, we could get rid of it. Could. Probably wouldn't. That society is a fantasy. But it's nice to dream of.

Sometimes I would rather barter because the additional effort would make things more important instead of all the mass produced crap that is ruining the world. A robust wconomy tends to mean an excess of stuff we don't need.
But it wouldn't reeally work out that way, just wishful thinking.

Those are 2 very different questions

Food, water, sex, security, shelter. This are the major factors that drove human behavior. Currency is only useful in that it can be used to secure the other things.

Nobody is lusting after a hyperinflated Zimbabwe dollar.

Maybe it's not as essential as one is led to believe. The book Debt by David Graeber deals with the very question you asked. I highly recommend you check it out.

I can't really summarise it well since I haven't finished it myself, so maybe peruse the Wikipedia entry. But the first couple of chapters try to answer your question

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years

Every exchange between people requires an exchange of value. If we both agree on a common "thing" as a representation of value, we can be more accurate and flexible in our transactions.

Barter was never a thing in daily life. No anthropogist found evidence for that. Trust based systems were used, but those don't work well when they population increases and interaction with strangers happens more. That's where currency takes over.

Why currency is the most important thing right now? Because currency at the moment is status and many people seek a high status on society.

It's not because we require currency in order to meet our basic needs?
- Today, yes. We're dealing with a few billion people with stuff shipped across the planet now.

Kinda like when an AI is overtrained on one thing that wasn't really correlated to its original goal, we've attempted to create a system that organizes collaboration between people; were now so overtrained on acquiring wealth that some would rather the planet burn than risk acquiring slightly less.

Its similar enough to a trail of ants in a death spiral; the same essential survival instincts that their society depends on, now nefariously dooming all involved to a slow starvation.

That being said similarly to the ants most of the populace will do the average (as it's what's kept us alive this long so how could it harm us?) And continue the spiral, but if one individual is able to reconnect the spiral to the main pheramone train the entire death spiral may be avoided

I appreciate the analogy

Currency is an energy equivalent in human society. I'd say our current ridiculously exploitable system with greedy for profit banks, rampant credits, tax havens, exchange rates manipulation, dividends and stock market micro trading leaves a lot to be desired, yet it is still incredibly convenient and relatively stable even with all the major crashes. Beats barter that's for sure.

We are focused on it because life itself is based on burning energy to sustain itself. Any plant would be happy to get more nutrients and sunlight like every animal would gorge itself to get some of that fat on their bones. It doesn't matter that it's sometimes to the detriment too - it's just wired that way in the DNA, because scarcity is way more common than abundance and if this balance crumbles then it's just a matter of time before abundance turns to even more scarcity due to overgrowth/desertification/overpopulation.

We live in capitalism

Idk why the correct answer always attracts several down-votes on Lemmy. This is literally it... Money is useful because it can be used as payment, it can be exchanged for goods... The reason why our whole lives revolve around it is because we have shaped society to be that way... We call that capitalism.
(And with knowing the proper term for it, everyone can just look it up on Wikipedia and learn about the history and how it's all linked.)
... Bottom text?
- It's literally in the name. CAPITALism

Because it gives the ruling class something to hold over the poors so the rest of society is so terrified of becoming poor they forget that they're being used as literal slaves for the state

This is the crux of it. Currency is essential because it allows people to exchange goods and services in a timely manner. What it is used for today is not essential to the individual.
Today 100 different people could think up a 100 different ways to streamline the exchange of goods and services without using fiat currency. The reason we don't is because it would take power away from those who covet it and most people don't understand they are being used.
- Step 1: Hoard a bunch of stuff no one really cares about.
  Step 2: Wait until you've hoarded the majority of that stuff in your local area.
  Step 3: Start telling people how important the thing you've been hoarding is.
  Step 4: People are dumb and actually start believing the useless thing you've hoarded is actually important.
  Step 5: Enjoy your new status as the man who convinced everyone something completely useless was important.

The first question has been answered already a few different ways. As to the sub-question:

Why do we focus solely on this one aspect of life?

It’s because we as a society lost track of other aspects of life, e.g. relationships for the sake of relationships- which if we question our basic humanity, we also need. Instead we focus on materialistic requirements, both for basic survival but also for status, security, and comfort. I would argue that second aspect (status) is an indirect (and inefficient/ineffective) means to accomplish the forgotten parts of life (relationships).

People want purpose. Most people are too inept to grasp greater purposes, so rewarding them with ornate paper slips keeps them placated.

So money is used to control people?
- Oh absolutely. Consider how inflation and the cost of living rise faster than the minimum wage, or even the median wage.

Because that philosophy has won over the most people.

I didn’t say it was the best. You may or may not believe that living in a yurt foraging mushrooms might be the best life; but “western “ civilization has deemed capitalism to be the way.

Under capitalism people need money to use for the things they want that they cannot make themselves.

A wise man once said “Money can’t buy me Love” —but it certainly improves your bargaining position

I should note that currency and capitalism are not the same thing. Pretty much every existing economic system has currency of some form, it's just a way of tracking the relative values of various things so that people can make agreements about who gets what.
- This is a very important distinction. Even socialism and communism can use currency to track value.

Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens. Enjoy.

Life ain't nothin but bitches n money

Who cares about a return on one's effort amirite