Have you ever thought that one day the numbers in the bank card in your possession might not be able to buy anything? Have you ever wondered why the prices of things go up and down? Why did some things used to be worthless but later become valuable, while other things were once very valuable and then kept becoming less and less valuable? Who is defining the exchange ratios between these things? To figure this out, you have to understand how the society we live in right now actually operates—what everyone is busy doing with their 30-year loans, desperately earning money, and what they are earning it for.

We know that money is a certificate used to exchange for goods and services. But how much money corresponds to which goods and services? That depends on how much of that good exists, how many people provide the service, and how many people want those goods—besides you, there are also other people who want them. How much money they have, and how much they are willing to pay—everything is chaotic. There is no guarantee that if you have a certain amount of money, you will definitely be able to exchange it for the things you want. If everyone has more money than you, and everyone wants these limited things, then you won’t be able to exchange for anything.

And the numbers in our bank cards today do not actually correspond to real goods and services in the real world. In other words, most of the money only seems exchangeable for these things precisely because it is not being used to exchange. This is an illusion. It looks like everyone adds up to 100 units, but in reality only a few units are actually being exchanged for goods—so it’s possible to exchange for those things. But if everyone were to go exchange for these things, then, for the goods that can actually be exchanged, that money would become as worthless as toilet paper—probably even less valuable, because toilet paper is at least unpleasant to use.

So where does this “money that doesn’t exist” come from? It is created out of thin air by banks. Imagine you take out a loan: the bank adds a few digits to your card, and that’s it. Does it transfer depositors’ money over to you? No, not at all. It only adds a string of characters in its database. When the time comes, you repay the principal plus interest, and then it earns money. Look—does it have capital to do business? No. Depositors’ money is not its capital at all. As long as nobody withdraws, even if nobody deposits, it does not affect the bank’s ability to create this nonexistent money and lend it out, because these “funds” are created for you by a few keystrokes—by code. In the end, when you repay, it gets the interest. And even if you don’t repay, as long as you keep paying interest normally, it’s fine. After all, these funds were originally nonexistent strings of data—only serving as a scale indicator to collect interest—so it doesn’t need a penny of actual capital, yet it can grow to an infinite scale.

During economic booms, everyone desperately creates all kinds of goods and services. Everyone wants to make big money. Everyone keeps taking out loans, and the banks keep tapping away at the keyboard for everyone—these amounts of money circulating in the market are all nonexistent.

What does a bank fear the most? It fears that you stop paying interest and that there are no assets it can enforce. That’s when it truly loses money. But as long as other people also don’t withdraw, and just watch the numbers on their cards like fools, thinking that it can really be taken out, then it doesn’t care. If it loses, it loses. Anyway, it’s a numbers game—keep the music going and keep dancing.

Now you know what the country fears most, right? It’s not that you carry debts—it’s that you lie flat. Because once you lie flat, this theft-and-money game has to be exposed.

Look—goods and services have already become unable to be linked to this money. Claims like “one nation’s credibility,” or “one nation’s goods and services” as backing for the purchasing power of fiat currencies such as the US dollar and the renminbi are all just telling stories and making things up. It only seems like it can back those claims because you believe it. Even the small number of things that can serve as backing are only held up by everyone working desperately.

Let’s imagine an extreme scenario: what if everyone stops working, no matter how much money you give them? What is money then? Money is just useless trash—if you leave it on the ground, nobody picks it up. So, can everyone “lie flat”? If everyone lies flat, then nobody can lie at ease. No matter how much groundwork you had saved up before, it’s all zero now. Even people at the top would have to get up and start farming themselves. Want to hail a taxi? Sorry—no matter how much you pay, nobody will take you. Want to go out for dinner? There’s no one opening restaurants anymore.

And it’s precisely because people across the world still believe in the narrative of “more work means more reward,” that the system still works. It works because people believe their productivity can fairly be exchanged for the goods and services produced by others.

What I described just now already contains the essence of almost all economic theory topics—asset bubbles, economic crises, interest rate hikes and cuts, and so on. All of the government’s monetary policy and fiscal policy adjustments are based on the framework above. When an economic crisis happens, more liquidity gets injected—to dilute the purchasing power of everyone’s money and to stimulate people to keep producing. Then the fake money across the world keeps growing, and global debt keeps increasing. Whether it’s in the US, or in the current situation in China, or in Japan—it’s all the same. Don’t expect the scale of debt to shrink. Governments never intended to repay. They can always find grand, respectable reasons to print more, so why would they bother repaying?

So what do all this mean for ordinary people?

First, don’t put too much weight on cash anymore. Cash is just paper. It’s just grass paper. Its so-called “purchasing power” only exists because others still believe in this narrative—at least for now.

Second, this is just a game. You earn cash in order to exchange it for other things. You exchange it for other things in order to exchange those for more cash. But in the end, none of this is what you truly want. Your goal is only to seize the cheap labor of those who cannot create more efficiently, or who are not good at knowing when to make money, when to exchange, and when to switch back into more cash—at the end of the day, you’re consuming their labor for your own game.

Everyone is pulled into this game passively—no one can walk away and stand apart. If you don’t play, you’re still playing.

Finally, if you want to exchange cash for goods, you must exchange it for goods that will always be in demand, where the number of people who want them cannot decrease, and where the supply of the goods will not increase. Many people talk about things like “first-tier core real estate,” Bitcoin, gold, and so on as examples of this—but the prerequisite is that the number of people wanting them must keep increasing, or at least not decrease; and that the amount of the asset itself cannot keep increasing. This is very hard. No one knows whether Bitcoin’s future use cases will keep expanding. No one knows whether the consensus on gold will ever be broken. You can’t assume that there will always be as many banquets, or that there will always be as many people who want to drink Moutai.

So the only thing that never changes in this world is change. There’s nothing you can mindlessly swap for just because you have cash. That would be too simple. But things are never that simple. If everyone believed this, it would be dangerous—because the world’s goods and services are limited. Everyone can only get a limited share of them. There is no way to distribute wealth infinitely to everyone. Therefore, the “truth” that “people across the world can simply increase wealth by following the rules” is actually wrong.

If there are more goods and services, the world can become better—that depends on what? It depends on technology, on efficiency. The internet saved the fiat currency system once, and AI will save it again. Even though the fragility keeps increasing, these systems won’t collapse overnight.

For ordinary people, it means: if there are new tools that help you create goods and services efficiently, you must use them; if you find a shortage of goods or services that everyone wants, you must provide them; and finally, when you see other people’s foolishness and ignorance, you must stand against them, seize their labor—because if you don’t seize it, you’re going to be seized.

This is human society.