Why your Great-Grandparents Were Richer Than You'll Ever Be (And They Had No Money)

Everything about how humans live has changed in just a few generations, and most people don't even realize it.

Traditional existence model vs Modern existence model

The Big Switch

Imagine if tomorrow, instead of going to school to get good grades so you can get into college so you can get a good job and make money, you spent your days learning how to grow food, build things with your hands, and take care of your neighbors. That's basically how every human lived for thousands of years; until very recently.

Your great-great-grandparents organized their entire lives around their community and the natural world around them. Today, we organize our lives around making and spending money. This switch happened so gradually that most people don't realize how completely different life has become.

What Kids Used to Learn vs. What You Learn

Then: Kids learned survival skills. How to grow and preserve food. How to predict weather by looking at clouds. How to make tools and fix things. How to get along with people in small communities where you'd see the same faces your whole life. How to work with nature instead of against it.

Now: You learn money-making skills. Which subjects will help you get the highest-paying job. How to network. How to manage your finances. How to compete with other people for limited spots in good schools and good jobs.

Neither approach is wrong, but think about this: most teenagers today couldn't grow their own food or build their own shelter if they had to. But most teenagers 200 years ago couldn't read or do advanced math. We've completely swapped what we consider "essential knowledge."

How We Get What We Need

Then: Your family grew food on land you knew personally. Your community built houses together using materials from nearby forests. If you needed tools, someone in your village made them. If you got sick, someone who knew about healing plants helped you. Everything came through relationships and sharing.

Now: You buy everything with money. Your food travels thousands of miles to reach you. Your house was built by strangers using materials from all over the world. Your clothes were made in factories you'll never see. If you don't have money, you can't get what you need to survive.

This system works amazingly well when it works, you can get pineapples in winter and talk to people on the other side of the planet. But it also means you're completely dependent on systems you don't understand and can't control.

What Makes You Feel Safe

Then: People felt safe when they were tightly connected to their community and knew their environment deeply. Your security came from being useful to others, from strong relationships, from understanding how to live off the land if needed.

Now: We feel safe when we have enough money saved up. We try to become financially independent so we don't need to depend on other people. We buy insurance and save money to protect ourselves from problems.

Here's the weird part: trying to become independent from other people has actually made us more vulnerable. If you lose your job or get sick and can't work, your whole life can fall apart quickly. But if you're deeply connected to a strong community, people will help you through tough times.

Our Relationship with Nature

Then: People saw themselves as part of nature. They had to pay attention to seasons, weather patterns, and natural cycles because their survival depended on it. They knew they needed to take care of the environment because they depended on it directly.

Now: Most of us live like we're separate from nature. We spend most of our time indoors, eating food that comes in packages, barely noticing what season it is. We often see nature as something pretty to look at or visit on weekends, not something we're part of.

This separation has created huge environmental problems because when you feel separate from nature, it's easier to damage it for short-term profit.

What We're Most Afraid Of

Then: People's biggest fear was their community falling apart. If people stopped cooperating, stopped sharing knowledge, or started fighting too much, everyone suffered.

Now: Our biggest fear is running out of money. Losing a job, having a medical emergency we can't afford, or seeing our savings disappear. Almost all our anxiety comes back to money somehow.

The scary thing is that most people today have no idea how to meet their basic needs without money. Could you grow food, find clean water, or build shelter without buying these things? Most of us can't, which makes us incredibly vulnerable to financial problems.

The Path Forward: Community Wealth

Here's the good news: we don't have to choose between the old way and the new way. The future belongs to people who can combine both approaches.

Community wealth is built on a simple but revolutionary idea: people are your most valuable resource. Instead of seeing other humans as competition for limited resources, community wealth sees them as the solution to most of our problems.

This shift in thinking is desperately needed right now. Our money-focused world has created some of the biggest challenges facing your generation:

Loneliness: Even though we're more "connected" than ever through social media, rates of loneliness and social isolation are at historic highs. People feel like they have no real community to belong to.

Mental health crisis: Depression, anxiety, and suicide rates among young people keep climbing. Much of this comes from feeling isolated, purposeless, and constantly competing instead of cooperating.

Declining birth rates: In many countries, people are having fewer children partly because raising kids feels impossibly expensive and isolating when you're doing it alone instead of with community support.

Economic stress: Even people with good jobs feel financially insecure because they're trying to handle everything individually instead of sharing resources and support.

Community wealth addresses all of these problems at once because it recognizes that humans are naturally social creatures who thrive when they're genuinely useful to each other. When people become your most valuable resource, you invest in relationships, cooperation, and collective wellbeing instead of just individual financial gain.

Why This Matters for Your Generation

Your generation is inheriting a world where the old systems are breaking down. Climate change, economic inequality, social isolation, and mental health crises are all connected to this shift toward individual wealth over community wealth.

But you also have incredible opportunities. You can use technology to organize communities in ways that weren't possible before. You can start businesses that serve communities instead of just extracting profit from them. You can choose to live in ways that combine financial success with strong relationships and environmental responsibility.

The most successful people in the coming decades won't just be rich; they'll be people who know how to build community wealth. They'll understand both the language of money and the language of cooperation. They'll be financially smart and relationally smart.

Your great-grandparents knew how to live without money but couldn't access the opportunities money provides. Your parents' generation learned how to make money but lost many community skills. Your generation has the chance to combine both, and that combination might just save the world.

The future doesn't belong to people who choose between money and community. It belongs to people who figure out how to build both.