When you really look at the function of money through the base function it,'s supposed to serve in civilization, its function is beautifully simple: money is credit you earned within a civilization for performing tasks you wouldn't have done without incentive. As a reward for contributing to the system in a way you otherwise would not have, you are given a universally trusted and accepted unit of exchange is accepted by other people who are also performing tasks they'd rather not be doing. You spend your time doing things you'd rather not have to do, and in exchange, strangers will do things for you they'd prefer they didn't have to do in equal exchange. This is how we were able to scale up from living among small tribes where everybody had personal connections to massive civilizations full of strangers, and the system has worked beautifully when it's been respected. We haven't respected the system for over a century now, and that's why things are fucked up. Units that are meant to represent an expenditure of effort towards maintaining civilization by an individual are now printed by the trillions with none of the labor it was traditionally supposed to represent behind it. The modern monetary system is a mockery of the technological innovation of currency that allowed us to originally build large civilizations numbering in the millions, and the only reason the mockery goes unnoticed is because of generations of conditioning for respecting this paradigm and a widespread belief that our leaders won't corrupt its civilizational purpose for their own benefit.