Our generation has almost all been PUA'd by the same sentence:
You are just not disciplined enough.
House prices too high? Blame your lack of effort.
Can't save money? Blame your love for spending.
Anxiety, competition, short-sightedness? Blame your poor mindset.
But very few dare to ask a more brutal question:
What if it's not that people have become bad, but that money has gone bad first?
1. Time preference: It's not that you lack patience, it's that the future is not valuable.
(The Future of Currency) This book has a concept called 'time preference'. It sounds very academic, but to put it simply:
Do you care more about the present or the future?
A person willing to work for a better life ten years from now has a low time preference;
a person who only wants to 'enjoy today and talk about tomorrow later' has a high time preference.
Many people think this is a personality issue, but it's not entirely so.
The environment strongly shapes people's time preferences, and money is the most fundamental environment.
When you know that money will become less valuable, saving is equivalent to being robbed, will you still wait?
No. You will spend, borrow, consume early, and 'enjoy first and then talk'.
This is not moral degradation; it's a rational choice.
Two, the marshmallow experiment has actually been misinterpreted by many people
You've surely heard of the 'marshmallow experiment':
Whether a child can resist eating that candy determines the height of their future life.
But one overlooked premise is:
The premise is that children 'believe' that one candy will really turn into two.
If you live in a world where 'commitments often fail and rules can change at any time',
not eating that marshmallow would be irrational.
The same logic applies to the adult world:
When a currency system repeatedly betrays savers, delaying gratification becomes foolish.
Three, unsound currency will systematically create 'short-sighted people'
What is sound currency?
In simple terms: it cannot be created arbitrarily.
The book uses a metric to measure: stock / flow ratio.
The larger the existing total and the smaller the annual increment, the 'harder' the currency becomes.
Hard currency rewards saving, patience, and long-term planning;
Soft currency rewards debt, speculation, and 'spend it quickly'.
This is not a value judgment; it's an incentive structure.
What happens when a society's currency continues to depreciate?
Saving becomes the behavior of a fool
Borrowing money becomes a smart choice
Long-term investment disappears
People start to hate 'waiting' and 'discipline'
Over time, the entire society will become irritable, short-sighted, and easily angered.
Four, why did wars in the 20th century suddenly become 'affordable'?
In the gold standard era, wars were expensive.
Without enough money, wars would have to stop.
But once money can be printed infinitely, things change.
The government no longer needs to tax the people immediately,
but rather pass the costs onto the 'future' through inflation.
Printing money is essentially sending the war bill to those who have not yet been born.
Thus, the scale of wars has expanded, and their duration has lengthened,
the state apparatus has swollen, while individuals have become increasingly powerless.
This is not a conspiracy theory, it's a consequence of the system.
Five, in an inflationary society, why does morality also collapse?
In countries with hyperinflation, people quickly learn three things:
Spend the money as soon as you get it
Don't trust long-term commitments
Run if you can, cheat if you can
This sounds very 'bad', but the problem is:
This is the most rational survival strategy.
When rules punish honesty and reward speculation,
morality will surely be eliminated.
So what you see is not that 'people's hearts have turned bad',
but that the system has filtered out the good people.
Six, the most heart-wrenching truth: what you think is laziness is actually a result of being tamed by money
Many people have already vaguely sensed that something is wrong:
Why does working hard for ten years not compare to a single asset bubble?
Why is 'lying flat' actually more rational?
Why do young people not want to get married, have children, or plan for the future?
Because in a system that constantly punishes long-termism,
planning for the future is inherently a high-risk behavior.
When the future is no longer reliable, people can only live in the present.
Seven, this is not to make you 'bearish on the world', but to awaken you
This article is not meant to make you despair, but to place the blame where it belongs.
You're not undisciplined,
you are in a system that encourages short-sightedness,
yet still want to adhere to long-termism.
A truly mature choice is to see the rules clearly and then make a decision:
On a personal level, try to bind long-term efforts to assets and abilities that are not easily diluted.
On a cognitive level, be wary of any narrative that exchanges the future for the present.
On a value level, understand that patience is not a virtue, but a rational result after being correctly incentivized.
The last sentence
Civilization does not collapse due to decadence, but at the moment when 'the future is no longer worth waiting for'.
If you've read this far and felt for a moment that 'he's talking about me',
it's not because you're pessimistic,
but because you've finally seen where the problem lies.