yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

The Obsession of the Modern World | Origins: The Journey of Humankind


less than 1m read
·Nov 11, 2024

In a society filled with human innovation, one invention stands out above them all: the one that has become the obsession of the modern world—money. Money was not just an intervention; it was a mental revolution and created a system of trust. An elaborate tie binds us all together; it connected the world, sending merchants across continents in search of far-off riches. Exchange was the engine that drove the progress of civilization, and money was the fuel.

It allowed us to specialize, turning hunters into blacksmiths, artists, soldiers, and kings. Money is what made the world modern.

We have taken it to dizzying levels of complexity, from gold coins to bits of information stored in the cloud. The history of money is the history of us; every coin, stone, and shell a symbol of what we have valued, who we have served, and how our cultures evolved. It has become a language that all humans speak.

This is the story of how money made us modern, how it opened the globe and spread ideologies, transforming the ancient world into a complex civilization of merchants, mercenaries, industrialists, and billionaires. This is Origins.

More Articles

View All
How to Get Started, Doing Things that Don't Scale, and Press (How to Start a Startup 2014: 8)
Thanks for having me, Sam! I’m Stanley, I’m the founder of DoorDash, and it’s really amazing to be here because it wasn’t naturally that long ago where I sat in your seats. I was class of 2014, graduated in CS, as well as my co-founder, Andy. For
American Empire
The United States is, shockingly, a bunch of states that are united. It was just 13 to start with, but as time marched on, the border marked west, bringing us to today and the 48 contiguous states plus Alaska and Hawaii. They’re usually drawn in these lit…
Badland's Prairie Dogs vs Coyote | America's National Parks | National Geographic
NARRATOR: Badlands National Park, South Dakota, 244,000 acres split into two dramatic worlds, the Rocky Badlands themselves, carved out of the ground by wind and rain, and beyond them, an ancient sea of grass, home to the icons of the Old West. This land …
After the Avalanche: Life as an Adventure Photographer With PTSD (Part 2) | Nat Geo Live
In the field, I feel so connected to everything, but then I’d come home and I would feel so disconnected, and I started to hate coming home because I wasn’t stimulated. I’d have to sit in this quietness and feel this pain, and I didn’t know where it was c…
Partial derivatives and graphs
Hello everyone. So I have here the graph of a two variable function, and I’d like to talk about how you can interpret the partial derivative of that function. So specifically, the function that you’re looking at is f of x, y is equal to x squared times y…
Kalani Queypo: Playing Squanto | Saints & Strangers
Squanto is actually a real figure in American history. Quanto is from the Pawtuxet tribe, and Squanto actually is a way for like a decade. He’s enslaved, he’s captured by Europeans, and he learns the English language. A decade later, he comes back, finds …