Money is merely a modern medium of exchange, but trust, empathy, and gratitude are a far older currency. When wealthier individuals share their financial resources within GemÖk, they receive something priceless in return: the deep satisfaction of genuinely improving someone's life.
What fascinates me again and again is the fact that for 94% of the roughly 300,000 years of our existence as Homo sapiens, we lived in small groups – without bureaucracy, without institutions, without money, without technology. And what held us together over many, many, many, many generations was above all the currency of trust. Trust has a higher value, an intrinsic value – a far higher value than any other artificial currency, than money, even than gold. Without human, social togetherness, without this fabric built on trust, we would never have got to where we are today.
We should remind ourselves of that again and again. It gets lost in our everyday lives, driven as they are by algorithms, by performance, by efficiency, extraction, by competition, by pressure. We have to pause, we have to switch off the noise. I’m with Anna Troia here: Anna Troia knows so well, so wonderfully, how to step into a space together in which I can feel like a human being, in which I return to the origin of being human. That’s why at UNO.TEAM we say: Empathy as a currency – or Empathy is the currency. No trust, no currency.
And I’m back with Yuval Harari, who says that institutions were created to take trust to a higher level. Nevertheless: if these institutions weren’t there, what would be left of us humans? Trust – and of course, first of all, trust in ourselves, in our own strength. Trust that we have a reason, a purpose, a – if you like – mission: that we don’t live in vain, that our life isn’t meaningless, that we are one of a kind, that every person is a one-of-a-kind, unique individual, and that nature has given us everything we need to live a happy, fulfilled, valuable life.
What do you take away from this thought?
Thank you. Every answer fits – take it with you into your day. Would you like to share something yourself?
