What if the sun could give us all our power and energy, to drive everything we need to power our economies, perform our activities and live life? Or what if we can afford everything that we ever want and need? What if money can buy us everything? What if this one thing can solve all your problems?
If all that hypothetical questioning sounds like a bunch of marketing crap or storytelling, they are actually fantastic devices that somehow appeals so much to our psyche. But they can simultaneously be truth with caveats and also complete bullshit.
In case you are curious, I provide the solutions:
- The sun does power a lot of things and is capable of providing sufficient energy for all of our activities and more but capturing it and channeling them properly is had.
- We, as a collective earth, already is able to afford everything we produce and will be able to satisfy all of our needs – wants on the other hand are completely manufactured by ourselves and can be managed.
- Money can buy us everything that can be bought (or sold).
- One thing that can solve all your problems is a mental reframe to see them not as problems but challenges to help you grow.
There is always some kind of rhetoric to get you out of those conundrum but doesn’t really address the actual psychological appeal of those questions. The thing is that we naturally gravitate towards some kind of monolithic system or idea where we want a single solution or something that becomes a common denominator for everything else. Money comes close to becoming that. Yet that has probably demonstrated that such a system do not actually deliver what you think it would.
Likewise, the market economy and market system isn’t going to be the one that delivers us all from the problems around energy, climate change, innovations and poverty elimination. The market system needs to be rightly placed for what it is good for just as we should see wind and solar power in their place within the energy system rather than expecting them to deliver all our needs. Even oil and gas was not able to power all of our world’s energy needs even if they came close to that. Monolithic systems reduces resilience even if they provide scale economies.