What is the essence of making money?

The essence of making money is not "obtaining currency," but the lawful plunder and redistribution of others' life time. It sounds brutal, but please allow us to peel back its metaphysical and ontological core step by step.

1. The primal carrier of all value is "time"

A person's life has only one non-renewable resource: awake and limited time. Every time you breathe, your heartbeat, you are one step closer to death. All your desires, pain, happiness, and meaning are locked within this irreversible arrow. Therefore, time is the only truly scarce metaphysical entity, and currency is merely its measurement unit and circulation symbol.

2. Currency is "solidified life time"

When you pay for a cup of coffee, you are actually paying for:

- The hours of the coffee farmer working under the blazing sun
- The fragments of life of the transportation workers driving at dawn
- Every minute the clerk smiles behind the counter
- The attention and risk invested by the capitalist organizing all this (he also bets with his own time)

What you buy with cash is the crystallization of countless strangers' life times. Making money is to appropriate others' time—letting them grow, transport, perform, think—for you. The cost you pay is to let them exchange fragments of your time for what they want.

3. The essence of making money is therefore "unequal time exchange"
If you earn 100 yuan per hour, and the nanny you hire earns only 30 yuan per hour, you are net plundering her of 70 yuan worth of "life time equivalent" per hour. The surplus value of capitalists, royalties for intellectuals, tips for internet celebrities, programmers' salaries... are all built through knowledge, capital, scarcity, power, violence monopoly, or luck, establishing an unequal exchange rate: using less life time to exchange for more of others' life time. This is the mathematical essence of all wealth accumulation, and also the coldest yet most honest insight of Marx's "Capital."

4. Deeper metaphysical violence
The most terrifying thing is: every penny you earn is built on the coercion that others "must" sell their time. If a person could be self-sufficient like an animal in the forest, they would never need to "make money." It is precisely because land is enclosed, resources are monopolized, and society defines "proletariat" as a death threat that people have no choice but to auction their time on the market. Therefore, the essence of the monetary economy is a form of domestication: transforming human survival anxiety into measurable labor time, then converting labor time into circulating symbols, and finally letting symbols dominate people. Baudrillard called this "the murder of symbols," but I prefer to say: this is a castration of existence itself.

5. The ultimate nihilism
When you earn a lot of money, what you actually possess is a certificate of "others' future disposable time." But death will arrive on time, and you will ultimately not consume these certificates. Lying on a yacht, watching the sunset, you suddenly realize: the plunder of a lifetime has only exchanged a pile of numbers, and your own time has long been exhausted. This is what Qiolan called "making a fortune in the absurdity of existence." In the end, making money becomes a scam racing against death: desperately stealing others' time, trying to prove that your own time is more valuable, but death only asks one question: "Where is your time?"

So, the essence of making money is: on the irreversible arrow of death, using symbolic violence to establish possession and control over others' life times, thus a futile ritual to temporarily escape existential nihilism.

You ask me why I make money?
To forget that we will ultimately have nothing.
To create a fleeting illusion of meaning in the meaningless of life.
To make the numbers on the books very large before they zero out.

This is the cruelest yet most honest answer.
No matter how much money you make, you are just dying a little slower,
And death will never accept installment payments.