The woman in this essay is having her moment of peripeteia.<p>It’s just bits in a database. From an alien looking down on earth, there is no difference between the people with big numbers and the people with small numbers. They all spend their entire lives under the same set of beliefs, namely:<p>1. Any decrease in my number would be horrible. The best part of my life was when my number was zero, and other people are happier with lower numbers, but that is irrelevant. I need a big number or else I will suffer immensely.<p>2. People with bigger numbers than me are more important than anybody else in my life. I worship them, or I hate them, but either way, I think about them all the time.<p>3. I must commit my entire life to increasing this number. I am willing to do things I hate, or stupid risky things for no other reason.<p>Note that I’m not claiming to be any exception. It really is stupid though. Even people that hate the fiat system still worship it. Maybe it’s necessary for our civilization to follow these rules, but it seems to me that a fiat system would work best if people were thinking least about the ‘meta’ aspects of money, such as investments. It seems to me that, historically, public frenzy over financial topics has been a reliable predictor of collapse, and generally this starts with an attempt to use the financial system for some social engineering purpose other than the three primary purposes: store of value, unit of account, medium of exchange.