We spend too much time thinking about money and not enough time creating new social conditions.
Modern society teaches us to measure almost everything in financial terms: success, value, productivity, even human worth. Yet there are deeper forces that shape human life and give it meaning.
As Yuval Noah Harari argues, the human capacity for flexible, large-scale cooperation is one of the main reasons Homo sapiens came to dominate the planet. Human beings thrive through their ability to coordinate, cooperate, and build shared realities. Yet many modern systems push us in the opposite direction: toward permanent competition, where individuals and groups are often placed against one another in pursuit of limited resources.
This logic can even affect movements that begin by challenging it. Toward the end of Occupy Wall Street, the movement received significant donations and financial support. Instead of reinforcing the original political vision, the presence of money gradually shifted internal dynamics. More and more energy went into proposing projects, seeking approval for funding, and competing for access to resources. Over time, the movement risked becoming fragmented into smaller groups focused on managing or obtaining portions of available funding, rather than sustaining a unified critique of the financial system.
The problem is larger than any single movement. When money becomes the central organizing principle of social life, it begins to shape our imagination, our relationships, and even our sense of purpose. We start to evaluate value primarily in financial terms, often at the expense of human and social meaning.
Vast human capacities remain underdeveloped because modern society is so deeply organized around money. We still understand relatively little about consciousness, meaning, solidarity, creativity, compassion, transcendence, and the forms of cooperation human beings are capable of building. Economic thinking dominates so thoroughly that it can become difficult to imagine value outside financial success.
This is why time matters more than money.
Yet moments of solidarity reveal another possibility. When communities organize spontaneously to protect vulnerable people — as happened in Minneapolis during protests and in defense of neighbors facing deportation — we see forms of cooperation that are not driven by profit, fundraising, or institutional power. People contribute their time, energy, courage, and presence because they believe in defending one another. In these moments, society is held together not by markets or contracts alone, but by trust, empathy, shared responsibility, and the willingness to give time to others.
The civil rights movement understood this clearly. It was not built on financial resources but on the willingness of ordinary people — sharecroppers, students, domestic workers, congregants — to give their time, their bodies, and their courage to a shared cause. Money followed the movement; it did not create it. The most powerful thing Rosa Parks did could not be bought or funded. It was an act of time, dignity, and presence.
The deepest divisions in society are increasingly shaped by inequality in wealth and access to power. Economic structures influence political systems, media, and opportunity itself. It becomes difficult to remove money from politics if money continues to dominate how we define success, value, and participation in public life.
If we want to change society, we must begin by rethinking what we value. Financial support can help, and resources are sometimes necessary. But the most meaningful thing a person can give is time: time spent helping others, building relationships, organizing communities, creating knowledge, caring for people, defending justice, and participating in collective life. Time is the most precious resource in a human life because it is limited and irreversible.
Democracy cannot survive as a passive or purely transactional system. It depends on participation. It depends on people giving their attention, their energy, their creativity, and their time to one another.
Because in the end, time is not only a resource. Time is life itself.
