The meaning of money — what it ultimately is

Money is a social agreement — a shared fiction that functions, up to a point, as a reliable store of human effort and a medium of exchange. It becomes destructive not when people use it but when they mistake it for something it is not: a measure of worth, a guarantee of security, a substitute for meaning. Reason holds that money is a tool with an unusual property — it is very good at convincing its user that it is something more.