Salary
Salary: From Salt to a Faith-Based Illusion
Once upon a time, before salaries were numbers on a screen that vanished into rent and bills, they were tangible, useful, and even edible. The word "salary" itself comes from the Latin salarium, referring to the payments Roman soldiers received in salt—a commodity so valuable that it preserved food and, by extension, life itself. Back then, at least your paycheck could keep your fish from rotting.
Fast forward a few centuries, and wages had evolved beyond salty lumps into gold and silver coins. A step up, sure, but at least there was some intrinsic value. The jingle in your pocket wasn’t just the sound of wealth—it was wealth. Real, hard, shiny metal, forged from the earth, universally accepted, and nearly impossible to counterfeit without a pickaxe and a death wish.
Then came the paper money economy, a system that took a collective leap of faith. Instead of tangible value, money was now a promise backed by the state. And for a brief, shining moment, this paper was still tethered to something real—gold. The Gold Standard meant that your salary, at least in theory, could be redeemed for actual, physical wealth. But this arrangement was far too honest for the powers that be. Governments realized they could only print as much money as they had gold, and that, dear reader, was a problem for their spending habits.
Thus, in 1971, the final nail was driven into the coffin of monetary integrity when the U.S. abandoned the Gold Standard. Suddenly, money wasn’t backed by gold but by "full faith and credit", a poetic way of saying, "Just trust us, bro." Your salary was now a belief system, a financial religion where the currency had value only because everyone agreed it did.
And so, here we are today—working for digits on a screen, spending those digits before they devalue, and pretending it’s all perfectly normal. The paycheck that once preserved food now barely preserves purchasing power. Inflation gnaws away at your earnings while financial institutions, much like ancient emperors, decide the value of your toil.
So the next time someone tells you that salary is a drug to keep you complacent, remember: it was once salt, then gold, and now? Now it's just a collective delusion. But hey, at least it still buys a burger—until next quarter's price hike.
