Intrigued by @dantheman's posts series about Universal Basic Income, I started to dig into my own ramblings on this topic. Well, not exactly this topic, but my somehow utopian exercises - and they’re not just a few.

For instance, 7 years ago I wrote a piece called 6 Degrees Of Integration. It was a parallel with the famous 6 degrees of separation paradigm, which states that we are separated by any other human being by only 6 connections (we can reach to anybody on this planet in maximum 6 iterations).

My text didn’t focus on separation, but on integration. It’s worth mentioning that 7 years ago the real estate crisis was at its peak (incidentally, I lost pretty much all I made in my first exit in that crisis) so these thoughts have a very real background, they’re not just philosophical.

Value Is Subjective, Money Is Just An Agreement

If someone gives you water while you’re near a lake, it doesn’t worth much. But if you’re in a desert and you’re dehydrated, it worths a lot. It may be vital.

Value is context-dependent. It doesn’t exist by itself, wrapped in plastic, somewhere outside of our current context. There is no such thing as an eternal, objective etalon for value. It can’t be, because everything changes.

People use gold or other assets in order to create a common baseline for their money denominations, but gold is useless if you’re in a desert, dehydrated. Pegging money to gold is just another convention, one that works only in a limited context.

Because it doesn’t really matter how much money you have in your pockets, if you’re going to die of thirst.

And by context I don’t mean only a certain space, but more like a time-space continuum.

There are big differences in perceived value based on the amount of time you spent in your current life form. Young people tend to value a completely different set of things than old people. Just look at the election results in any country (US included) and you’ll see how youngsters are more into high-risk-high-reward economic models while older generations value more stability and predictability.

Value And Context

The problem with context is that it cannot be controlled with the same speed as our reaction to context. In other words, there is a relevant inertia between our intention and the moment it gets materialized.

You want to build a home, for instance. That means altering your current context. Depending on how much value you have and how well adapted is that value to that specific context, your home could be built in days, or in years.

Value adapted to context may mean, in this case: enough money to buy land, materials and work power. Or it may mean: you already have some land and the skills to build a house, then you have some more things, like food, that you can exchange for building materials. The key word here is: adapted to the context. If, for instance, you will have a ton of gold, but no one will exchange that for building materials, the value is irrelevant. It’s not adapted to the context.

Money Is Just A Shortcut

So what roles do money have in this picture? It was created in order to solve the “double coincidence of wants” and I already wrote about this in another post on Steemit.

Let’s say you have some food and you want building materials in exchange for that food. Well, there is a chance that nobody will want your food. They may want some water, though, because, probably, there might be some water shortage.

But you don’t have water, so instead you offer them money, with which they can buy water from somebody else.

The double coincidence of wants: you want building materials, they want water. Money solves that problem, which food couldn’t.

So money is just a shortcut. And as a shortcut, it has limitations. The most important limitation is that it cannot function outside the convention.

If I and @dantheman decide right now that 1 Steem = 10 USD, we can start buying and selling to each other at this price, but nobody will buy from us. Why? Because the outside convention says that right now 1 Seem = 0.1 USD. So my intention may be to sell Steem at 10 USD, but the context will only allow me to get what everybody involved in this context agrees upon.

Money, as a collective convention has limited effectiveness in modifying the context. Unfortunately, the abundance of situations in which we can use money tricks our minds into thinking that money can be used for everything. It can’t.

It can’t buy happiness, because happiness is something extremely personal, and cannot be defined collectively. Or, in other words, money can buy only the happiness that has been collectively defined as happiness - the American dream, for instance: house in the suburbs, cars, etc. They can’t buy you peace of mind because peace of mind is extremely personal for each individual.

The Inherent Inertia Of Manifestation

On the other hand, our reaction to context can be controlled. Our own actions are covering a much larger area than the conventional consensus. As individuals, we have more choices than the collectivity, or the social context in which we are acting.

In other words, we can choose how to feel and what to do in a certain context, regardless of the general norm. That’s very tricky, by the way, and it requires a lot of training, but it's "affordable", we really have access to this. With proper preparation we can change our reaction to context and we can do this much faster than we can change the context.

As we create a more consistent reaction to the context, we will consume less and less energy to adjust and adapt (we’re going on autopilot). The end result will be that adaptation to the context will start to creep in.

For instance, if we start to run daily, our bodies will start to create adaptation to the context and we will be able to run faster and longer for that given context (and the context here will be a mix of temperature, gravitation and energy potential generated by our bodies). If we consistently start to do more sales of whatever we have to sell, we will create an adaptation of our personal monetary balance: it will start to grow and adjust to the economical and transactional context in which we are acting.

One way or another we will get more in tune with the context. In a very slow, but measurable way, the context will follow our intentions.

But it will always lag behind our cognitive processes. We adjust our cognitive processes much faster than the context changes.

There will always be a lag between what we want and what will happen. We will never be able to have everything we want right here, right now.

(the main reason for that is that the consequences of our previous actions are clogging the current context with results, hence, the context is becoming more "muddy" and more inertial - but that's a different story)

One approach that could streamline this adaptation process is based on this 6 degrees of integration I mentioned at the beginning of the article. These degrees are:

1. you
2. family
3. friends
4. guilds (professional relationships)
5. clients (beneficiaries of our value)
6. the world (everybody else).

Think of these 6 degrees as insertion points where you can intervene to modify your reaction to the current context. A consistent reaction at these insertion points will create, as we already saw, an adaptation process. The end result will be that we will shorten the time between what we want to happen and the moment it happens. Or we will spend less energy. Or we will create less friction.

Or all of the above.

Since I didn’t plan to have such a long introduction, I will outline each and every degree in a series. Next article will be published tomorrow, and it will be about how working at the first degree, which is “you”, can speed the adaptation process to the context.

To any context, for what matters.

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I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.

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