Our Obsession With Paper is Weird

Dollars.

Diplomas.

Deeds.

And we even care about paper that doesn’t start with the letter D.

Birth Certificates, Social Security Cards, Car Registrations, Passports, Tickets, the list of “important documents” goes on. If you have ever stopped in a moment of existential crisis (perhaps between 2 and 3 AM with a deadline fast approaching) and thought about the concept of money, you’ll be familiar with the beginning of this crusade against paper.

At its core money is just special paper. I like the way Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens and well-known historian, puts it: “Money is probably the most successful story ever told. Not everybody believes in the same God or in the same political myth but almost everybody on the planet believes in the same economic stories about money.”

Yuval explains that this “myth” or “story” perspective is what keeps societies functioning at the complex level that they do today. Even with billions of people on Earth, a very high degree of consistency and normalcy is maintained simply because every human agrees to believe in the same stories.