Topic Battle

Money's reliability is rather more questionable. Currencies collapse—ask anyone who held Zimbabwean dollars in 2008 or German marks in 1923. Inflation erodes purchasing power with silent efficiency. Markets crash with distressing regularity, evaporating savings and retirement plans. The 2008 financial crisis demonstrated that money can transform from apparent security to devastating loss within weeks. Money promises stability but delivers volatility.

Money's adaptability borders on the supernatural. It has transformed from cowrie shells to gold coins, from paper notes to digital abstractions existing only as numbers in distributed databases. Cryptocurrency represents merely its latest metamorphosis. Money has survived the fall of empires, technological revolutions, and fundamental restructurings of human society. It adapts not over decades but over millennia, proving infinitely more resilient than any fictional creation.

Money's emotional range is considerably more complicated. It generates joy, certainly—but also anxiety, depression, envy, and despair. Financial stress contributes to approximately 27% of relationship breakdowns. The pursuit of money drives both philanthropy and atrocity, innovation and exploitation. While Bond films end with triumph, money's emotional narrative often concludes in therapy sessions and existential crisis. Its power to affect mood is unmatched but not uniformly pleasant.

Money's influence is rather more comprehensive. It determines who eats and who starves, which nations rise and which crumble into historical footnotes. The global currency market processes approximately $7.5 trillion daily—more than the entire Bond franchise has earned in sixty years, occurring every single day. Money shapes migration patterns, political systems, and family structures. It is, quite simply, the operating system of human civilisation.

Money, in some form, will almost certainly outlast human civilisation itself. Even post-apocalyptic societies would likely develop exchange systems—bottle caps in one popular fictional imagining. The concept of money is so fundamental to human cooperation that its elimination would require a complete restructuring of social organisation that no society has successfully achieved. Money's longevity is measured not in decades but in the lifespan of the species.