Wellness Money
A few days ago, I shared my joy in using a Wellness Room at the office. If you didn’t see the tweet, my point was that the room, imperfections and all, helped me relax by providing a mostly-quiet space. Furthermore, the room brought a feeling that could transform many other places like the park or the car into spaces of wellness and relaxation.
This brought about some good questions. Can only places bring about this feeling of relaxation? What about money? Can an improved form of money support wellness? What would that look like?
What is Wellness?
The term wellness has grown in use over the past decade or so and tends more toward health than say joy or exuberance. Here’s a definition.
The condition of good physical and mental health, especially when actively maintained by proper diet, exercise, and avoidance of risky behavior.
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition
Isn’t it strange then that the Wellness Room with its comfy chair, pillow and blanket doesn’t help with any of these? Best I can see it’s a place to take a nap.
How can money support wellness?
First of all by there being enough to eat well, exercise, and avoid risky work. This should be possible by observing the labor market, growing your skills, and getting paid as much as you can for those skills. Secondly money supports wellness by being reliable. That means storing value for later and as a medium of exchange.
Wellness Money
If we were to design a Wellness Money it should be reliable in the broad sense just mentioned. It would work for savings, protected against inflation. In recent years inflation has ramped up as the supply of money has increased substantially by the Federal Reserve and other central banks around the world. A dependable store of value helps you plan for the future, reducing the number of ways your plans might go awry. For example, if you can put a little money away and depend on it you’ll experience less stress when losing your job or getting sick.
Our ideal Wellness Money would also be one that transacts better than current systems. It would be fast enough for checkout, private so you don’t feel like you’re always being watched and reliable in the sense that your payment won’t be randomly declined due to glitches or some AI-based fraud protection.
Does anything like this exist? Gold comes to mind. It’s been tested over thousands of years as a store of liquid wealth but it’s strength in being physical is also a big weakness in a world of electronic payments. Attempts to take gold online weren’t successful for reasons I won’t get into here. Point is, you can’t order online with gold.
The good news is something better than gold and I’d say pretty darn close to our ideal Wellness Money exists. It’s called Bitcoin. You’ve probably heard of Bitcoin and a number of things may come to mind but I’d encourage you to reboot your opinion on it. Try to understand why it’s survived for 11 years when most attempts at better on line money have failed. Bitcoin, in which I include the lightning payment network, is inflation-protected, private, fast, and reliable. There are still some issues like volatility and acceptance but these have been getting better over time.
My experience with Bitcoin much like with the Wellness room. It helps me relax. Sounds unlikely but so did the idea of this little green room before I ever got a chance to use it.