If Money Could Talk, What Would It Say? | What Would the Stoics Tell Us Today?

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. If money could talk, what would it say? Just as it does today in the ancient world, currency got around. Coins with Marcus Aurelius's face on them have been found in Eastern Europe and Egypt and London, thousands of miles from Rome. Even today you can buy them online, have them shipped thousands of miles further, thousands of years after they were made.

What do you think that money, or indeed any currency, modern or ancient, would say? If it could talk? Certainly it has seen a lot, seen the best and the worst of people been used for transactions of all kinds. If money could talk, the Stoics imagine, it would probably say something like although people chase me, I don't matter like they think I do. I have not helped anyone live forever, and nobody, even the people who insisted I be buried with them, was able to take me with them when they died.

The things I have helped to buy never brought people as much pleasure as they thought, and losing me never brought people most of the dangers they feared. I have never been able to give anyone class or decency and often the people who had the most of me. had the least of these things. Of course the Stoics have been saying this exact thing about money for thousands of years, and generations have always found it hard to listen. Money isn't evil, it can do real good, but it is a tool, not a measure of life.

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