In my opinion, we live in a "money-crazed" society.
That is not to say that money is inherently a "bad" thing, it does have its place in life but it is not life in and of itself!
How often I find people endow the "money thing" with extreme power over them: it makes them sick with worry, burning with envy, seething with greed and addicted to fear of losing it. Capital is more than money, life offers many sources of "capital as "capital" is basically a resource from which one can grow, develop and create things in the world.
Nippun Mehta, the Silicon Valley owner of "ServiceSpace", has presented a fascinating idea that he delivered at a TedX talk in 2016 in the US.
ServiceSpace is an incubator of projects that works at the intersection of volunteerism, technology and the gift-economy.
What started as and experiment of 20+ year olds in 1999 in Berkeley, California, has now developed into a global ecosystem of over 400,000 members who have delivered millions of dollars of services for free.
Far from being a bunch of idealistic, new-agey, middle-class kids, ServiceSpace has attracted a huge crowd of followers who are attracted to new ways of living in this world, mostly be offering kindness and projects of value as part of human service, rather than financial transactions.
Mehta speaks of many kinds of capital: time, technology, attention, knowledge, nature, culture, among others. When we give of our time we create value, technology can create new realities, giving attention creates relationship, and so on.
In our "money-crazed world", we have lost site of the types of resources that are not money and yet present huge potential for creative "doing" in the world.
I admire Mehta and his followers for showing me- and many others- that it is not money that makes the world go around but people, kindness, love and relationship.
Pure "capital" if you ask me. Many lessons to be learned, many, many…
