A tree is worth more dead than alive.
A river is worth more bottled than flowing.
A human is worth more as data than as flesh.
This is the arithmetic of a world that worships money.
We forget: money was not discovered like fire. It was invented, like a story. A story that once helped us trade and trust. But somewhere, we stopped treating it as a tool and crowned it as a god.
Now the god demands sacrifice.
Governments poison their people in the name of “growth.” Corporations shred forests for quarterly returns. Investors cheer layoffs as “efficiency.” Wars ignite not for survival, but because destruction is profitable.
We invented money then decided it was worth more than people. More than peace. More than the planet that sustains us.
Look closer: this logic is everywhere. A hospital measured not by how many lives it saves, but by its balance sheet. An education system where children are “cost centers” unless they can be monetized. Even friendships bent into “networks,” even love recast as “investments.”
When money is sacred, everything without a price tag is dismissed as worthless. Peace is too fragile for markets. The planet too slow for quarterly reports. People too alive to be reduced to numbers yet reduced we are.
And the tragedy is not just ecological or political. It is spiritual. We are the only species that created a story, then chose to live and die by it.
But stories can change.
So the question is not whether we need money. The question is how long we will kneel before it. How long we will trade forests for figures, silence for dividends, futures for balance sheets.
Because in the end, money is only ink and code. A ghost we agreed to believe in. The real question the one that should keep us awake is this:
How long before our own invention decides that none of us are worth anything at all?