If Money Disappeared, What Would We Do for Each Other?

In our last newsletter we asked a question:

If money and policies disappeared, and all we had was land and food, how would you care for your community, not just yourself or your family but everyone around you?

It’s a question that looks simple until you try to answer it. The first reaction might be to reach for a trade: I’ll give you vegetables if you give me eggs, I’ll fix your fence if you give me bread. That sort of thing. But what came back in the replies wasn’t a set of tidy barter arrangements. It was something more honest.

One person admitted flat out, “Honestly I haven’t thought about it. I barely have time to get through the week I already have.” That’s not laziness or avoidance. That’s real life. Most people are already stretched to the point where adding another layer of imagining feels impossible. Survival, as it is handed down to us now, eats up the daylight.

And then we got a note from outside the country, not even in response to this question, but it belongs here: “I am 64 and wish I would have been brave enough when I was younger to walk away, and build a life.” It’s not about cucumbers or bread or fences at all. It’s about regret. About looking back and knowing there was another way, but not having the courage or the permission to take it.

Put those two replies side by side and they tell the same story. The present is filled with obligations that leave no space for imagining a different path. The past is filled with the weight of not choosing it soon enough. Between them sits the fear most people carry: that if they did try to step out, they would end up alone, unprepared, or left behind.

This is why we asked the question. Not because we wanted a spreadsheet of trades, but because these cracks are what show through when the surface is lifted. People know what they could do, and more importantly they know what stops them. Lack of time. Lack of security. Lack of bravery when it mattered most.

So what do we take from it? That deep down, people are not lost. They already carry the instincts to care for one another, to teach, to grow, to fix, to feed. But they also carry the weight of systems that train them not to think beyond the next bill or the next obligation. When asked to imagine, the answers don’t come out polished. They come out raw. “I don’t have time.” “I wish I had been brave.”

That rawness is the whole point.