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Your Brain Thinks Money Is A Drug
- Herring 17y agoMisleading title. Pleasurable != drug.
- dkarl 17y agoAs far as your brain's concerned, money can act as a substitute for social acceptance, reducing social discomfort and, by extension, physical discomfort and even pain. It makes sense. Money enhances your personal security just like social acceptance and bodily health do. If you think of your brain as a tool for genetic fitness, it's quite clear that your brain actually badly underestimates the degree to which money enhances your ability to survive and reproduce in a first-world country. If you have money, you're never dependent on the goodwill of others for food, shelter, and physical security. If you fall out with your friends, girlfriend, or employer, money ensures your physical survival and gives you time to build new social relations. It's interesting that our brains are able to grant money such deep significance. I wonder how generic that ability is. Does it apply to any object or substance that we think is a source of security -- like a gun, for some people, or a good-luck charm, for others -- or only to objects of recognized social value that we can trade for goodwill with others? How easy is it for an object to assume that primal significance -- do me merely have to rationally know that it is valuable, or does it acquire that significance by repeated association over time? More studies, please, guys!
- asdlfj2sd33 17y agoMoney is security, control, power and yes even social acceptance in very real non-metaphorical terms. Saying that may be cynical but it's reality.