Every innovation created by humans is always geared towards two things profit and most importantly to solve a problem. From the era of trade by barter, trade was blossoming and mankind enjoyed it provision like mana from heaven but we are but imperfect creatures, so is our inventions. So brilliant minds put their brains to work to solve the most obvious issue of trade by barter which was lack of unit of measure, scalability and security.
Finding solution to these problems, it became the foundation and the most notable evolution in the history of introduction of currency. We used all kind of manner of materials for currency, from shells, Gold, silver coins to paper and now the liquid digital currency known as fiat and the most advanced of it all, we have crypto currency. We have indeed come far from where we used to be, the more inventions we come up with, the more problems that needs to be solved. This is what drives the wheels of development, the hunan hunger for a better life is insatiable.
Well, lets say all these form of currency fails and it seems another form of currency needed to solve our current problems is using emotions as a currency. It definitely serves laughable but lets at least pretend it is actually possible. Do you know one of the greatest issue of mankind is our need for control and what we can't control we destroy. Trying to remove the centralised authority from currency is the idea that birthed crypto, to allow users to be in control of how their money will be used and having this in mind might just solve the issue crypto has been battling with for years.
But then, we have different categories of emotions; anger, happiness, hatred, love e. t. c each with its own unique effects. According to this prompt, joy will be considered the most valuable currency and while the rest will be less valuable. Having to think about this, I could think of a billion ways this could go wrong but then let me stick with the most obvious reasons.
From my experience so far I discovered something about humans, it is our greedy nature and it is illogical to underestimate mankind's greed. Even if all all kind of mechanism were put in place to make sure using emotion as currency works, we will always find ourselves battling one issue that has been existing for decades, an impediment of the human species. The issue with our ability to manipulate emotions for our selfish gains.
The issue of genuine emotions, this has been an issue even before mankind could consider using emotion as currency, now imagine what people will be willing to do if they discover emotions is now of value and believe me, we have surplus of it. Some humans have trained themselves so well that their false emotions can fool lie detectors, have you not seen people cry in movies without it being real, what about live tiktok videos. If something as difficult as tears could be conjured so easily then what will happen to something as easy as pretending to be joyful.
All I have to do is smile, to pretend to be joyful is not that difficult, which means that certainly humans are going to abuse using emotions as currency, it is in our nature to find loopholes, that is why there are lot of security layers put in place to ensure the safety of any form of currency but in this case, since emotions are humans attributes, each individual will be their own central bank which means there will be surplus of currency and with that comes inflation and with inflations comes famine and with this comes hunger and death and what comes next is desperation.
You know what happens when 90% of humans on earth becomes desperate? they go to war with one and another for the little resources left and we keep killing each other till we are pushed to the brink of near extinction and the little humans left, will be just a couple of broken people because only the strongest will be around and to be strong enough to survive when more than 70% of humans have been exterminated, means such people must have purge themselves of any form of humanity and what will be left is body and monstrous emotions. I wonder if there will be any joy left in people to be used as currency when wickedness and cruelty has taken of their minds.
Are you seeing the picture I'm painting, if you are, then you will understand that introducing this form of currency will only lead to the extinction of humanity. Which means there will always be humans left on Earth but with no souls and feelings, so what is the point of a living human without the sense of humanity? Just an empty shell.
This write-up was inspired by week 41 episode 1 - SciFi multiverse titled "A world where emotions use as currency" in SciFi multiverse community.
Cover image - 𝖣𝖾𝗌𝗂𝗀𝗇𝖾𝖽 𝗎𝗌𝗂𝗇𝗀 𝖼𝖺𝗇𝗏𝖺
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