To use Love to accomplish any task is to destroy love before it even exists

“If You Give Me Your Money” is a song by Ian Mykel. It identifies that pleasures gained from social value are different than pleasures gained from monetary value. At its root, social value is love. Love is about creating and giving. Love is not a tool. The socially constructed pretend of monetary value, money and wealth, is at its root a tool, and as such is about power. Power and love are two different things. However, people do often confuse the two.

How is Social Value different from Monetary Value?

Typically, humans gain a sense of reward by being part of a community/group; A family is one example of a community, so are clubs and churches. One might participate in such a group in different ways, such as with thoughtful words, egg salad, heavy lifting or good jokes. One gains a sense of belonging and a sense of reward by seeing and hearing the ways people show appreciation for us as individuals; smiles, hugs, affirming words. These create a sense of belonging, of validation, and appreciation for who we are as a person. This is social value. This is love.

Our society at large celebrates monetary value. Our government hand-holds the stock market. Only the wealthiest have real access to politicians. Television is focused on wealth, we listen to wealthy people speak on the radio. We celebrate athletes with outstanding wealth, and any artist’s value in national discourse is based on their power over the airways and distribution (both controlled by monied corporations). After all that, the only social reward a person feels at having wealth is when other people see the wealth. “Oh look. There is some money over there.” That’s all it is. This is monetary value.

Money is a tool

The amount of importance our society places on monetary value leads people to believe that our worth, and the worth of others within a community, is based only on how much money we make, or can be made off of us. Money is about control. It’s something to brag about. It’s something we threaten others with. We show off the hottest toys we can afford. We attempt to win respect, if not love, with demonstrations of force and the giving of gifts. Money is a tool.

Love is not a tool

Love does not desire power or destruction. It appreciates who a person is as an individual. Love encourages joining and participating in a community. It is this foundation of connection and appreciation that prevents love from being a tool.

As humans, we long for validation of who we are. When humans don’t feel loved (or when we try to replace love with a tool), we become sad and destructive. Everyone. All of society suffers as a result. It doesn’t make sense that people can confuse love and money. How does this happen?

Why we confused love and money

Our brains reward our successes with a release of chemicals and hormones. Such chemical releases create pleasure sensations similar to feelings created when humans experience love / appreciation. If we aren’t exposed to love regularly, we interpret the chemical release as love instead of what really caused it; money, power, sex. Feeling good is feeling good right?

Sadly no. Not all good feels are the same.

The similarity of sensations in our brains between social value and monetary value can blur together. If we are not rewarded with actual love often enough (or early enough in life) we lose touch with love. We begin to think the sense of arrogance we feel from having money and power is the same as having love.

In our hearts we know the difference. It takes a lot of energy to pretend the sense of reward we feel from a tool is the same as love because, it isn’t the same. This pretend becomes a subconscious lie we tell ourselves.

We all require the feeling of being loved if we are to thrive as individuals. Without love we become very lonely and confused. It is this loneliness that tricks our minds into believing that that feelings from having money and power are the same feelings from having love in our lives. They are not same at all. But still we lie to ourselves because we need love. Further, as this is a lie it must be bolstered and defended with even more lies, continuously.

Love Requires Honesty. Money Requires Lies.

Money is a lie. It is a pretend. The social value of money is about the object itself, the coin, the paper. Yet the outsized social importance of money in our society at large moves us further away from truth, and from love. We grow more lonely, and as a result we grow resentful because, things don’t feel right. We don’t feel love when we think we should be. Resentments turn to anger and we seek out and invent enemies to receive our wrath.

These responses to loneliness are all forms of lies. These lies compound and grow more toxic. Destructiveness and rage take over. Without love in our lives people see no reason to save anything. They won’t save the planet, not the nation, not the marriage, not the children, not even their own sakes.

Money is a tool of power, and to have power is to have the ability to destroy. Too many lonely people are willing to destroy everything due to a lack of love in their lives. They’ve lost touch with how to find love. So, they won’t stop fighting for the thrill of money and power. The push for greed and profits are destroying our ability to seek love and grow social connections. Connections and love are the things that can improve our lives drastically, and they might even save our planet. Love is the only thing that can do this.

Spread Love, Not Hate. My Only Hope, It’s Not Too Late.

If you think you might like to change, “Just give up.” Stop trying to win at everything. Let others win. There is so much reward to be found in letting others go first, in acceptance, and in holding others in high esteem. Giving others a sense of being loved allows our own hearts to open, and we can begin to accept that we can receive love, real love. You can be loved.

The secret to finding love? Do not want, do not cast judgements, and seek out those who do not judge.

If You Give Me Your Money is a song by Ian Mykel, released on October 10, 2022. It’s a song that hopes to redirect our thinking about money. Story-telling and emotional response help people see how the lies about money might be set aside for real pursuits of love.

You can listen on any streaming service starting November 24, 2022, or can listen at Bandcamp now.

There is also a faster version at Bandcamp, but it might be too fast, lol.

Thank you for visiting

Share: