From the End of Money to the Age of Being: When Humans No Longer Need to Prove Themselves

Introduction: A Misplaced Anxiety

In recent years, an unprecedented anxiety has been spreading. It is not confined to any single industry, class, or country—it has seeped into virtually everyone who makes a living through “ability.” An illustrator discovers that AI can generate in seconds what would take her three days. A programmer watches AI write increasingly complete code with ever-rising accuracy. Translators, lawyers, accountants, doctors—one by one, they begin to feel that encroaching, ineffable dread.

At the core of this dread lies a single question: If AI can do everything I do, what value do I still have?

This question seems so reasonable that we hardly think to doubt it. But what this article aims to show is that the question itself is wrong. It’s not that the answer is wrong—it’s that the question is wrongly framed.

Why? Notice a curious phenomenon: many people anxious about AI are not in dire financial straits at the moment—they have stable incomes, some savings, and lead reasonably comfortable lives. Of course, if they actually lost their jobs, those savings would be far from sufficient to support them and their families for the rest of their lives; practical economic worries do exist. But upon closer observation, you’ll find that their fear goes far beyond the pragmatic concern of “what will I live on in the future.” Many people, even when they rationally know they could switch careers, learn new skills, and are not truly at a dead end, still feel a deeper, more ineffable sense of destabilization. It is not a fear of poverty, but a fear of being replaced—as though once what they do can be done better by a machine, their very existence as a person loses its foundation.

This observation reveals something important: the root of the fear lies not only at the material level but at the level of identity. Our sense of self has become so deeply bound to “what I can do” that when that “what” is threatened, what shakes is not just our livelihood but our entire sense of self.

So how did this binding form? Who taught us to measure a person’s worth by “what they can do”? The answer lies hidden in a system far more ancient than AI—money.

The underlying logic of money is exchange: you provide some function—labor, skill, service—and the market assigns you a price. After thousands of years of repetition, this logic has long ceased to be merely an economic system; it has been internalized as a psychological structure: a person’s value equals what they can produce. From the moment we can remember, from the first time we heard the question “What do you want to be when you grow up?”, we have been shaped by this logic.

Once you see this, the true nature of AI anxiety becomes clear. AI did not create the anxiety. It merely exposed, to an undeniable degree, a value logic that has long existed deep within us—one implanted by monetary civilization. Before AI appeared, this logic ran smoothly—most people could find some “function” to prove their worth, even if that proof was fragile and constantly in need of renewal. But when AI begins to surpass humans across the board in the dimension of “output,” what collapses is not human value—what collapses is the formula for calculating value itself.

In other words, AI anxiety is not the beginning of a new problem but the culmination of an old one. It marks the final crisis of the ancient equation: “a person’s value equals their function.”

So the real question this article pursues is not “Will AI replace humans?”—but rather: If humans no longer need to prove their value through “what they do,” what will humans become?

Following this question will lead us into territories far deeper and broader than AI. We first need to understand how money engraved the equation “a person’s value equals their function” deep into our psyche (Chapter 1). Then we ask: Is it possible for this equation to be dismantled at the material level? (Chapter 2). Next, we face a thornier question: even if the equation is dismantled materially, what happens to the human instinct for comparison, which is far older than money? (Chapter 3). We then explore whether this comparative instinct might eventually recede (Chapter 4). Finally, we attempt to sketch—tentatively, as it must be—the contours of an “Age of Being” in which human value no longer needs to be proven (Chapters 5 and 6).

Before we set out, I must state a methodological commitment. The arguments in this article will pass through highly speculative territory—concerning the demise of money, the retreat of comparison, the fundamental transformation of human psychological structure. At the most speculative points, I will try to distinguish among three different kinds of claims: analysis based on existing evidence, reasonable extrapolation based on trends, and pure thought experiments. I will mark these distinctions where necessary, rather than letting them blur together in the flow of rhetoric.

Chapter 1: Money Is Not a Tool—It Is an Operating System

1.1 The Surface Functions and Deep Functions of Money

Since the introduction has identified the root of the equation “a person’s value equals their function” as lying in money, we need to first clarify: What exactly has money done to us? How did it, step by step, transform an economic institution into a psychological structure?

Open any economics textbook and the definition of money is clear: medium of exchange, unit of account, store of value. This is money’s “official résumé”—it is a tool that helps us conduct exchange more efficiently. In the textbook narrative, money is neutral, modest, like a ruler quietly measuring the world, carrying no agenda of its own.

But if you shift your gaze from the textbook to actual human life, you see an entirely different picture. Money does not merely help us exchange goods—it shapes how we perceive value, defines the standards of success, and organizes the logic of social relations. It is not a tool embedded in human society; it is more like an operating system—all our social “applications” run on top of it, including how we see ourselves, how we see others, how we see a relationship, a choice, a life.

This judgment is not a novelty. Over a century ago, the German philosopher Georg Simmel saw this in his 1900 work The Philosophy of Money. Simmel offered a striking insight: the fundamental effect of money is to convert all qualitative differences in the world into quantitative ones. A Rembrandt painting and a ton of steel, in the eyes of money, differ only in numbers—one is priced higher, the other lower, and that’s it. The suffocating chiaroscuro in a Rembrandt, the human emotion that still burns across three centuries—at the moment a price tag is affixed, all of it is compressed into a number. And that number can be compared with any other number.

This conversion seems harmless. After all, it merely “gives things a price.” But Simmel saw something deeper: when everything can be converted into the same kind of number, the qualitative differences between things recede into the background—all that truly matters is quantitative ranking. The world transforms from a garden of incommensurably unique things into a sortable spreadsheet.

And once the world becomes a spreadsheet, a new psychological possibility opens up: universal comparison of all things.

1.2 How Money Built the Infrastructure of “Comparison”

The most far-reaching consequence of Simmel’s “quality-to-quantity” process lies not in the economic realm but in the psychological one. It means that money is the most powerful “infrastructure of comparison” in human history.

Before money, many things could not be directly compared. The courage of a hunter and the wisdom of a healer, the beauty of a poem and the sharpness of a knife, a mother’s love and an autumn sunset—each existed in its own dimension, with no common measure between them. You could say this knife is sharper than that one, but you could not say a knife is “more valuable” than a poem—because no common scale existed to make such a comparison.

Money created that scale. When a poem can be sold for fifty yuan and a knife for eighty, suddenly you “can” compare—and the result is unambiguous: the knife is worth more than the poem. The comparison is, of course, absurd, but its absurdity precisely demonstrates money’s power: it can make absurd comparisons seem “natural.”

The deeper impact is that this comparative logic did not stop at objects—it extended to people. Net worth, annual salary, property value, credit score—these numbers became the most intuitive, most inescapable scales of comparison between people. When you learn that a classmate’s salary is three times yours, that complex feeling that wells up inside you—not quite envy, not quite inferiority, but a vague, unsettling sense of “being ranked”—that is what money is doing to you. It is not merely telling you “he earns more than you”; it is telling you “his value is higher than yours.” You know intellectually that this is wrong, but emotions do not listen to intellect. Emotions directly receive money’s pricing and translate it into fluctuations in self-worth.

From “quantifying objects” to “quantifying people”—this step seems natural but is in fact a tremendous leap. It means that people are no longer merely users of money; they have begun to be objects of money’s measurement. And this process has long been keenly captured in the history of ideas.

1.3 From Marx to Heidegger: How Humans Were Reduced to Functions

The first thinker to systematically reveal this process was Karl Marx. He coined a concept that remains sharp to this day: alienation. In Marx’s analysis, the capitalist mode of production strips labor from the person—your labor is no longer your own expression; it becomes an abstract commodity that can be bought and sold on the market. You are no longer a whole person; you are a unit of “labor power,” a function node that can be priced, compared, and replaced. What you are worth depends not on who you are, but on how much the market is willing to pay for your function.

Marx’s insight was profound, but it had a boundary. His analysis primarily remained at the level of economic structure—he was concerned with relations of production, class exploitation, material inequality. He saw the reality of humans being objectified as functions within the monetary system, but he did not deeply pursue a further question: What if, one day, material alienation were completely eliminated—if no one lacked any material thing—what would happen to the human psychological structure? Would the marks that money has carved deep into our psyche automatically disappear?

Martin Heidegger approached this deeper layer—the one Marx did not pursue—from a different path. Heidegger argued that the essence of modern technology is not merely a collection of tools but a “Gestell” (enframing)—a mode of being that regards everything (including people) as “Bestand” (standing-reserve). Under the logic of enframing, a river is not a river in itself but “hydroelectric resource”; a forest is not a forest in itself but “timber reserve”; likewise, a person is not a being in itself but “human resource”—a functional reserve that can be called upon, optimized, and replaced.

Heidegger’s analysis is highly isomorphic with this article’s critique of monetary logic. What money does—reducing people to priceable functions—is precisely how the logic of enframing operates in the economic domain. But where Heidegger goes further than Marx is in pointing out that this tendency to view everything as standing-reserve is not merely an economic phenomenon; it is the fundamental mode of being of modern civilization. We are not merely priced by money—we have fundamentally forgotten a more primordial way of being. Heidegger called this “Seinsvergessenheit” (the oblivion of Being). In that more primordial mode, things are not functionally used objects but beings that manifest themselves; a person is not a resource to be evaluated but a “Dasein”—a being that inquires into Being itself.

What Heidegger saw in the first half of the twentieth century has reached its sharpest form in today’s AI anxiety. When AI surpasses humans across the board in the functional dimension, it is effectively saying: if you insist on understanding yourself as “human resource,” you are destined to be replaced by a more efficient resource. But if you can reconnect with what Heidegger called that more primordial way of being—a person is not a resource; a person is Dasein—then AI’s threat loses its meaning at the very root.

From Marx to Heidegger, we see two layers of the same process: Marx saw humans objectified as functions within economic structures; Heidegger saw what this objectification means at the ontological level. But both point to a common premise—monetary logic is no longer merely an external institution; it has penetrated into the interior of the human being. To understand how deep this penetration goes, we need to take one more step.

1.4 The Psychological Internalization of Money: We Don’t Just “Use” Money—We “Are” Monetized Beings

After several thousand years of monetary civilization, something subtle but profound has happened: the logic of money has been internalized as part of our psychological structure, to the point where we cannot even perceive its existence—just as fish cannot perceive water.

You can do a simple self-test to feel this. When you consider whether to learn a new skill, what is your first thought? Most likely it is “Is it worth it?”—Is it worth investing the time? What’s the return on investment? Can it be monetized afterward? These questions feel so natural that you don’t see anything wrong with them. But look closely at their structure—“worth it,” “return on investment,” “monetize”—they are all metaphors of monetary logic. You are evaluating a learning experience through the framework of investment returns, measuring the value of a skill through the logic of market pricing.

This is not an isolated phenomenon. We use “invest” to describe education, “social capital” to describe relationships, “time management” to describe life, “personal brand” to describe self-presentation, “emotional bank account” to describe intimate relationships. These metaphors are so ubiquitous that we forget they are metaphors. They are not merely rhetorical devices—they reveal the underlying code of our thinking.

The Hungarian economic historian Karl Polanyi, in his 1944 classic The Great Transformation, described from the historian’s perspective how this penetration occurred. Polanyi demonstrated a crucial historical reversal: before the market economy, the economy was embedded within society—the market was merely one part of social life, subject to the constraints of social norms, moral traditions, and interpersonal relationships. But the rise of the market economy inverted this relationship: it was no longer the economy embedded in society, but society embedded in the economy. The whole of society—land, labor, money itself—was converted into “commodities” and subsumed within the operation of market logic.

Polanyi described a reversal at the institutional level, but the same reversal has also occurred at the psychological level—and far more covertly. Monetary logic is not embedded within the human psyche—the human psyche has been embedded within monetary logic. We don’t occasionally use market thinking to make judgments; our entire framework of judgment has been structured by market thinking. When you consider whether a relationship is “worth maintaining,” whether a hobby “has a future,” whether a life choice “pays off,” you are already running your life on the monetary operating system. You didn’t “choose” to do this—you don’t even know there are other ways of thinking.

Are there other ways? Erich Fromm, in his 1976 To Have or to Be?, named this “other way” in the most concise terms. Fromm distinguished two fundamentally different modes of existence: the “having mode” and the “being mode.” In the having mode, people define themselves through what they possess—possessing knowledge, possessing property, possessing relationships, possessing identity. The foundation of self is “what I have.” In the being mode, people realize themselves through experience and action itself—not “I have knowledge” but “I am knowing”; not “I have love” but “I am loving.” The foundation of self is not having but the living process itself. What Fromm saw is precisely the core of what this article asks: monetary civilization has locked nearly everyone into the having mode, while humanity’s true potential—the vivid, unpossessable quality of being itself—has never been fully released.

At this point, we can see the full picture of what money has done to humanity. Simmel revealed how money turns the world into a sortable spreadsheet; Marx revealed how humans are reduced to function nodes within that spreadsheet; Heidegger revealed what this reduction means ontologically—a fundamental forgetting of a more primordial way of being; Polanyi revealed how this logic was reverse-flooded from the institutional level into the whole of society and psychological structure; and Fromm named the thing that was forgotten—the “being mode.”

This is why AI anxiety cuts so deep. What it touches is not the replaceability of some specific skill but the very foundation of the entire system of self-worth. When the monetary operating system tells you “your value equals your output,” AI steps in and says: “I can do your output better.” And so the whole edifice begins to tremble.

But note: it is not you that trembles. It is the edifice—the value assessment system built over thousands of years of monetary civilization. The distinction between the edifice and you is the core of what this entire article seeks to illuminate.

And to illuminate this distinction, we need to enter the next question: Is this edifice eternal? Or is it heading toward its own end?

Chapter 2: Heading Toward the End—The Logical Chain of Money’s Demise

2.1 The Technological Path: From Automation to Post-Scarcity

If Chapter 1’s argument convinced you that money is an operating system embedded deep in the bone, then the question this chapter addresses naturally follows: this operating system may be heading toward obsolescence.

It must be stated clearly from the outset: the argument in this chapter is an extrapolation based on trends, not an established fact. A post-scarcity society is not the inevitable endpoint of history but one possible direction that technological trends might take under specific conditions. Yet even as merely a possible direction, it deserves serious consideration—because once it is even partially realized, its impact on human self-understanding will already be profound enough.

Let us start at the most intuitive level: technology is driving the cost of material production toward zero. AI is already drastically reducing the cost of intellectual labor—translation, programming, design, analysis—work that once required massive investments of human time and training is becoming cheaper at an exponential rate. Meanwhile, automation is doing the same to physical labor. And on a more distant horizon, controlled nuclear fusion promises to provide nearly limitless clean energy, and nanomanufacturing technology may make material production as convenient as copying information.

These trends converge toward a tipping point described by economist Jeremy Rifkin: the zero marginal cost society. In his book of the same name, Rifkin articulated a seemingly paradoxical yet rigorous logical chain: the core driver of capitalism is competition; competition drives companies to continuously lower costs to gain advantage; and technological progress is the most powerful means of reducing costs. But this logic has a self-defeating endpoint—when technological progress pushes the marginal cost of production to zero or near-zero, pricing loses its basis, profit becomes unsustainable, and market exchange loses its meaning.

This is not utopian fantasy—in fact, this process has already occurred in the information domain. Twenty years ago, you needed to spend several hundred yuan on an encyclopedia; today, Wikipedia provides information far richer than any encyclopedia for free. Twenty years ago, recording and distributing a song cost tens of thousands of yuan; today, a laptop and free software can do it. The marginal cost of information products has approached zero, which is why information is becoming free—not because some kind soul is being charitable, but because economic logic itself dictates it.

Rifkin’s core argument is that the same thing will gradually happen in the domain of material production. When 3D printers can print a house, when renewable energy drives electricity costs toward zero, when AI and robots handle most labor—material products, too, will move toward being free, like information. At that point, money’s function as a medium of exchange will be fundamentally hollowed out.

This picture is enticing. But if we wish to remain intellectually honest, we must seriously confront some serious objections before pushing the reasoning further.

2.2 An Objection That Must Be Faced: Why Post-Scarcity Might Not Arrive

Even if post-scarcity is technologically achievable, it may not materialize in reality. There are at least three reasons, each with substantial historical and logical grounding.

The first is artificially manufactured scarcity. History has repeatedly shown that those who hold power have strong incentives to artificially maintain scarcity—because scarcity is a prerequisite for profit and control. Diamonds are not scarce, but De Beers successfully maintained their high prices for decades by controlling the supply chain. Pharmaceutical companies use patent systems to block generic drugs, selling medications with extremely low production costs at astronomical prices. The very existence of digital rights management (DRM) proves that when the cost of copying information approaches zero, the response of power systems is not to embrace the free, but to artificially rebuild paywalls on top of it. There is no reason to think the same logic will not repeat itself in the material domain. If 3D printing can print a house, you can expect the construction industry to push hard for legislation restricting the use of such technology—just as the taxi industry once tried to strangle ride-hailing services.

The second is the Jevons Paradox. Nineteenth-century British economist William Stanley Jevons observed a counterintuitive phenomenon: when steam engines became more efficient, coal consumption did not decrease but increased—because greater efficiency made coal use more economical, thereby stimulating more use. The same logic may apply to the argument for post-scarcity: when AI drastically reduces the cost of information processing, people don’t settle for their existing level of information consumption but generate far more demand than before. Every time technology lowers one layer of costs, humans invent new, more expensive tiers of demand. The endpoint of post-scarcity may forever recede like the horizon—the closer you walk toward it, the further it moves away.

The third is ecological carrying capacity. Even if humans can technically expand production without limit, the Earth’s material and energy carrying capacity remains finite. The assumption of zero marginal cost often ignores ecological externalities: free energy could lead to larger-scale resource consumption; free manufacturing could exacerbate waste and pollution problems. Post-scarcity may hold in economic models but hit a ceiling in physical reality.

These objections are all powerful. I will not pretend they can be easily dismissed. But I want to point out that even if post-scarcity is only partially realized—even if artificial scarcity persists, even if new tiers of demand keep emerging, even if ecological constraints continue to exert force—the core thesis of this article still holds. The reason is this: the core thesis is not “money will completely disappear,” but that the equation “a person’s value equals their function” is being fundamentally shaken. This shaking does not need to wait for full post-scarcity. AI is already doing it today—it doesn’t need to replace all labor; it only needs to demonstrate superiority over humans in enough domains to force humanity to reexamine the question “Does my value equal my output?” Post-scarcity is the logical limit of this process, not a necessary precondition. Even if we never reach that limit, the direction itself already carries transformative significance.

With this important qualification in mind, let us continue the extrapolation: what might the transitional stages look like before full post-scarcity arrives?

2.3 The Transitional Stage: UBI, De-commodification, and the “Hollowing Out” of Money

Even if full post-scarcity remains far off, we can already see some early signs of the transition toward it.

The discussion of Universal Basic Income (UBI) is heating up globally. Finland, Canada, Kenya, and others have conducted experiments of varying scale; some Silicon Valley tech leaders—the very people who best understand how AI will impact employment—have become the most active advocates of UBI. The logic of UBI is simple: if technology makes a large amount of labor unnecessary, then just give everyone money directly so they can at least survive.

But UBI’s significance extends far beyond economic policy—it implicitly carries a profound philosophical shift: it is quietly severing the binding between “labor” and “the right to exist.” In the default logic of monetary civilization, you must first “do something” (labor) before you have the right to “be alive” (receive survival resources). UBI says: No, your being alive is enough in itself; you don’t need to first prove you are useful. This is precisely the equation analyzed in Chapter 1—“a person’s value equals their function”—being loosened for the first time at the institutional level.

Starting from UBI, we can sketch a possible (note: “possible”) transition path: first, UBI covers basic survival needs; then, as technology further reduces costs, more and more basic needs—food, energy, housing, healthcare, education—are de-commodified, becoming free or nearly free public services; in the process, money gradually degrades from a “survival necessity” to a “luxury exchange tool”—you don’t need money to live, but you might need it to buy a handmade limited-edition something; ultimately, as enough things become free, money’s social importance continues to decline—perhaps it won’t completely disappear, but its psychological grip on people will be greatly weakened.

But I must introduce a political-economic realist footnote here. Every major economic transformation in history—from feudal to market economy, from agrarian to industrial society—was not a smooth, peaceful process of technological substitution but was accompanied by massive social upheaval, conflicts of interest, and political struggle. The transition from a monetary economy to a post-monetary one (or more modestly, to one where money’s importance is greatly diminished) has no reason to be an exception. Large-scale technological unemployment may trigger social fracturing and political extremism; vested interest groups will fiercely resist de-commodification; global inequality means that post-scarcity technologies will likely first materialize in a few wealthy nations while much of the world still struggles for basic survival. To describe this process as “like horse carriages being replaced by automobiles” is far too glib. It is more likely to resemble the Industrial Revolution—the direction is broadly right, but the process is filled with pain, chaos, and injustice, requiring generations of political struggle to be even partially realized.

2.4 The Tipping Point: When “Free” Is No Longer the Exception but the Default

Despite all the above qualifications, let us still cast our gaze further ahead, proceeding as a thought experiment: imagine a world where “free” has become the default. Food is free—automated farms and lab-grown food technology make production costs negligible. Energy is free—controlled fusion or highly advanced solar energy provides nearly limitless clean electricity. Housing is free—3D printing and automated construction technology drive building costs toward zero. Healthcare is free—AI diagnostics and nanotechnology make high-quality healthcare a universal service. Education is free—this has already been largely achieved.

In such a world, what can money still buy?

Only two things remain. The first is scarcity itself—for example, a painting genuinely made by human hand, a bottle of wine from a particular vintage, a piece of land with historical significance. These things have “value” not because they are useful but because they are one-of-a-kind. The second is status signaling—the point of possessing certain scarce items lies not in using them but in showing others “I have what you don’t.”

Pay attention to the second point, because it reveals a deep problem that persists even after money’s demise. When money exits the stage, the human drive to pursue status and comparison does not exit with it. Money has disappeared, but the psychological logic behind money—I need some yardstick to prove I am “better” than you—remains perfectly intact.

This means that even if we solve the problem at the material level, a deeper problem awaits us: comparison itself. Solving the material problem does not equal solving the psychological problem. A post-scarcity society eliminates material inequality, but it will not automatically eliminate the psychological impulse to compare.

To understand why, we need to trace the deeper roots of comparison—roots far more ancient than money.

Chapter 3: After Money, Comparison Does Not Immediately Disappear

3.1 The Human Instinct for Comparison: A Legacy of Evolution

The discovery at the end of the last chapter—that solving the material problem does not equal solving the psychological one—brings us to a more ancient stratum. Money is only a few thousand years old, but the history of comparison is far longer. For hundreds of thousands of years before money existed, our ancestors were constantly comparing. Who runs faster? Who throws a spear more accurately? Who commands more respect in the tribe? Who has more mating options? In an environment of scarce resources and fierce competition, accurately assessing one’s relative position within the group was a matter of life and death. Those individuals who could keenly sense their “ranking” were more likely to make decisions favorable to survival and reproduction—not challenging opponents far stronger than themselves, while also not shrinking from contests they could win. Natural selection rewarded this capacity and wrote it into our psychological architecture.

In 1954, social psychologist Leon Festinger formally theorized this observation. His “Social Comparison Theory” proposed a concise but powerful thesis: humans have an inherent drive to evaluate their own opinions and abilities; in the absence of objective standards, people automatically evaluate themselves by comparing with others. This is not a cultural product, not something capitalism taught us—it is part of our cognitive architecture, as fundamental as depth perception or color discrimination.

Festinger’s theory explains why even people who lack nothing materially still involuntarily compare themselves with others. The function of comparison is not just “acquiring resources” but “positioning the self.” We need to know who we are, and to a great extent, we achieve this self-positioning by knowing who we are relative to others. This is a profoundly deep psychological need—so deep that we are usually unaware of its existence.

But Festinger’s theory only explains the side of comparison as a tool for “self-evaluation.” French thinker René Girard saw a deeper layer—comparison is not merely a tool for evaluation; it is the very mechanism through which desire itself is generated. Girard’s core insight can be summarized in one sentence: human desire is not spontaneous but imitative of others’ desires. We want something often not because the thing itself is good—but because someone else wants it.

Consider what this means. A child is playing happily amid a pile of toys when another child picks up one of them—the first child immediately wants that toy too. Not because the toy suddenly became more fun, but because another person’s desire ignited his. Girard believed this is not childish behavior—this is the fundamental structure of human desire. We crave elite university degrees not just because the education is good, but because others crave them too; we chase fashionable items not just because they look good, but because they are being chased; we even follow the same pattern in love—a person suddenly becomes more attractive to you after acquiring other suitors.

Putting Festinger and Girard together, we can see the complete picture of the comparative mind: comparison is both a tool for self-positioning (Festinger) and the generative mechanism of desire itself (Girard). This means that eliminating comparison, in a certain sense, requires simultaneously reshaping both the way we know ourselves and the entire structure of desire. This is far more difficult than simply “not comparing yourself with others”—because you may not even be able to tell how much of your own desire is “imitated.”

Now we can more clearly see the implications of the discovery at the end of Chapter 2: money merely provided an extremely efficient external tool for these two deep psychological mechanisms—social comparison and mimetic desire. It made comparison precise, instantaneous, and inescapable. But even if you take the tool away, the mechanisms themselves remain, waiting to find new tools.

And this is not a hypothetical prediction—we can already observe it happening today.

3.2 “Comparison Substitutes” in the Post-Monetary Era: A Contemporary Rehearsal

If the above argument still seems somewhat abstract, let me give you a concrete case that you can observe today—one that clearly demonstrates how comparison finds new vehicles even in the absence of money.

Imagine an Instagram influencer. She is completely financially secure—perhaps she has family wealth, perhaps she has substantial passive income. She doesn’t need social media to make a living; she posts photos purely “because she enjoys it.” But observe her behavior closely: every time she posts a photo, the first thing she does is check the likes. If there are more than the last post, she feels a wave of pleasure; if fewer, she feels a vague anxiety and begins analyzing why—was the timing wrong? The filter not good enough? Or has the topic fallen out of public interest? If she discovers that a similar photo by a peer influencer received more engagement, she feels an indescribable sting—not quite envy, but deeper than discomfort.

Note: throughout this entire process, her bank account balance hasn’t changed at all. Not a single cent gained or lost. But her sense of self-worth is fluctuating with numbers—likes, comments, follower growth rate—these numbers constitute a new pricing system that, in a manner strikingly similar to money, quantifies her, ranks her, and defines her “value.”

Tim Wu, in his book The Attention Merchants, analyzed in detail the structural forces behind this phenomenon. Attention has become the new “currency” of a new era—it can be quantified, traded, and accumulated, and social media platforms have built a complete “attention economy” infrastructure. This infrastructure is strikingly isomorphic with the traditional monetary economy: it has its own “market” (the feed), its own “pricing mechanism” (algorithmic recommendation), its own “wealth inequality” (the attention gap between influencers and ordinary users), and even its own “inflation” (getting the same level of attention requires ever more stimulating content).

The social media case matters because it is essentially a rehearsal for comparison in the post-monetary era. It shows us a key fact: even in domains where money is no longer relevant, the human instinct for comparison can rapidly find new vehicles and manufacture anxiety, hierarchy, and discontent with equal efficiency.

This observation naturally leads to a larger picture: if the competition for attention on social media is only a small-scale rehearsal, then after material scarcity is fully eliminated, the same logic will unfold on a much grander scale.

3.3 The “Spiritual Currency” Stage: The Final Arena of Comparison

Let us continue extrapolating from the logic of the social media case.

Suppose one day the problem of material scarcity is completely solved. No one lacks food, housing, energy, healthcare, or education. Traditional money has become irrelevant. But as the social media case foreshadows, the human instinct for comparison will not bow out on that same day. On the new soil of material equality, it will quickly sprout new forms—something we might call “spiritual currency.”

People no longer compare whose house is bigger or whose car is more expensive, but they may begin to compare: Whose creativity is higher? Whose thoughts are more profound? Whose aesthetic taste is more refined? Who has been to more incredible places, accumulated richer experiences? Even—whose moral attainment is higher? Who is more spiritual, more “awakened”?

The defining feature of this stage is: the vehicles of comparison become ever more subtle, but the psychological structure of comparison remains unchanged. A person can be completely indifferent to money yet intensely concerned with their intellectual standing—whether their papers are cited, whether their views are taken seriously, where they rank in intellectual circles. Another person may scoff at fame and fortune yet be intensely concerned with whether their creative work is “unique”—carefully scrutinizing every piece to ensure it doesn’t resemble anyone else’s work, and this very “ensuring it resembles no one” is itself a deep act of comparison.

Even in the spiritual realm—theoretically the domain most “beyond comparison”—comparison is everywhere. Who meditates longer? Whose “enlightenment” is deeper? Who is closer to “truth”? The implicit competition among spiritual seekers is often more intense than commercial competition, because it wears a cloak of “I have already transcended comparison”—and this very cloak makes the comparison harder to detect.

This is the intermediate zone between old humanity and new humanity. Comparison has not vanished; it has merely changed clothes—from the coarse garment of material things to the refined garment of spiritual things. The body underneath is still the same.

At this point, our analysis seems to have reached a dead end. Material scarcity can be eliminated by technology, but the instinct for comparison has evolutionary roots older than money and has already demonstrated its ability to rapidly find new vehicles in any new environment. An unavoidable question therefore surfaces: Will this “spiritual currency” stage last forever? Is comparison an insurmountable ceiling for humanity, or is it possible for humans to eventually graduate from comparison itself?

This is the most difficult argument in the entire article, and the most critical turning point.

Chapter 4: The Demise of Comparison—The Most Difficult Argument

4.1 Directly Addressing the Strongest Objection

Before unfolding the argument, let me honestly face what is likely the reader’s most intense objection at this moment—because if this objection is correct, the rest of the discussion is unnecessary.

The objection goes like this: Everything you say is beautiful, but comparison is written in our genes. Hundreds of thousands of years of evolution have carved it into our neural circuits; it is part of human nature. No matter how advanced technology becomes or how abundant material resources are, human nature cannot be changed. So “the demise of comparison” is nothing but a beautiful fantasy.

This is the most lethal objection to this article’s thesis. If it is correct, then all the visions of the “Age of Being” that follow will amount to castles in the air. So I will not skirt it—I will respond head-on. The response has two layers: first, historical evidence shows that “written in genes” does not mean “unchangeable”; second, specific mechanisms exist that may weaken comparison.

4.2 Historical Evidence: Humanity Has Already Transcended “Insurmountable” Instincts

The first layer of response is historical. “Written in genes” sounds like a final verdict—as if genes are an unalterable fate. But if you look at the human historical record, you will find an encouraging fact: humans have many instincts “written in their genes,” yet cultural evolution has profoundly changed how these instincts are expressed and, in some cases, has made certain instincts almost unrecognizable.

The most powerful example is the impulse toward violence. Like other primates, humans have deeply rooted aggressive instincts—territorial intrusion triggers rage, resource competition triggers violence, fear of out-groups triggers war. These are written in genes. But Steven Pinker, in his magnum opus The Better Angels of Our Nature, argued with a convincing mountain of data for a counterintuitive fact: levels of violence in human society have declined dramatically over the past few centuries. Whether measured by war death rates, homicide rates, use of torture, or domestic violence rates, nearly all indicators of violence have been continuously trending downward. This is not because genes changed significantly in a few centuries—evolution’s timescale is far longer. Violence declined because institutions (rule of law, international organizations), culture (human rights concepts, expansion of empathy), and technology (trade making cooperation more advantageous than plunder) changed how instincts are expressed. The aggressive impulse in our genes remains, but it has been wrapped, reshaped, and redirected by layer upon layer of cultural construction, transforming violence from a default option into an increasingly unacceptable exception.

Another example is the fear of different ethnic groups. Evolutionary psychology research suggests that wariness and rejection toward groups whose appearance differs from one’s own is an instinct with deep evolutionary roots—in the ancestral tribal environment, strangers often signified potential threat. But in many modern societies, this instinct’s hold has been substantially weakened. This is not to say that racial prejudice has disappeared—far from it—but rather that the kind of matter-of-fact hostility and violence toward other ethnic groups that prevailed centuries ago has, in many cultures today, been reshaped to an entirely different degree by education, institutions, and values.

These two examples point to a common conclusion: “written in genes” does not mean “unchangeable.” Genes provide tendencies, not destiny. They set default values for psychological responses but do not determine final outputs. Culture, institutions, education, and technology can reshape the expression of instincts—not by fighting genes, but by constructing new environmental conditions and psychological frameworks that fundamentally change how instincts manifest. Over sufficiently long timescales, even the tendencies themselves may be altered—because cultural evolution can in turn influence the direction of genetic selection.

But before applying this conclusion to comparison, I must honestly face an important asymmetry. Violence was substantially weakened in part because violence has extremely obvious external costs—death, social disintegration, economic loss—which provides powerful collective motivation for institutional intervention. The whole of society has reason to suppress violence. The situation with comparison is different: the “costs” of comparison are primarily internal psychological suffering (anxiety, envy, inferiority), which does not directly threaten social order and is even viewed as a positive driving force in many contexts—“healthy competition” is widely encouraged; “refusing to fall behind” is considered a virtue. Society will not only not collectively mobilize to suppress comparison but will in many cases actively reinforce it. This means the path to weakening comparison is more circuitous than that of weakening violence, because it lacks a clear external push. The push must come more from individual awareness and the slow evolution of cultural values, rather than from institutional coercion.

What, then, are the specific mechanisms of this slow transformation? For that, we need to enter the second layer of the response.

4.3 Specific Pathways for the Demise of Comparison: The Convergence of Three Forces

Merely saying “theoretically possible” is not enough—I need to concretely describe which forces might gradually weaken comparison and how they might work synergistically. I will describe three forces, moving from outer to inner, from coarse to fine, forming a progressively deepening structure.

The First Force: Fundamental changes in environmental conditions.

This is the outermost force, directly continuing Chapter 2’s discussion of post-scarcity. Let us return to the basic logic of evolution: social comparison was retained by natural selection because it conferred survival advantage in a specific environment—one characterized by scarce resources, fierce competition, and individual relative position directly affecting survival probability. But evolutionary psychology has an often-overlooked corollary: when environmental conditions change fundamentally, once-useful adaptive mechanisms lose their selective advantage and begin to become “evolutionary vestiges.”

This is what a post-scarcity society would do to the comparison instinct—if it arrives. When material resources are no longer scarce, when a person’s survival and reproduction no longer depend on their relative position within the group, comparison loses the reason it was preserved by evolution. It will not vanish instantly—evolution has inertia, just as humans today still secrete excessive cortisol under stress (a response useful in the ancestral environment but often overactivated in modern life). Comparison will shift from a “useful instinct” to a “useless vestige,” much like the human appendix—not excised but slowly atrophying. This process may take a very long time, but the direction is clear.

However, as Chapter 3 demonstrated, changing external conditions alone is not enough. Even if comparison loses its survival function, it can still operate as “spiritual currency”—because it still has another function: providing rankings for differences. This leads to the second force.

The Second Force: The transformation of difference from “hierarchical” to “lateral.”

Comparison can operate because of an implicit premise: differences must be rankable. You can compare the “value” of two people because some common scale exists—income, status, achievement—that makes the question “who is higher and who is lower” meaningful. But when human differences are increasingly expressed as “lateral differences”—each different, but not rankable—comparison loses its operational basis.

Let me illustrate with a simple example. You can compare who earns more—this is hierarchical difference with clear ranking. But how do you compare the “value” of someone obsessed with deep-sea exploration and someone obsessed with mathematical proofs? What scale do you use? There is no common measure between deep-sea exploration and mathematical proofs, just as you cannot compare whether blue or C major is more “excellent.”

In the early phase of “spiritual currency,” differences remain largely hierarchical—whose paper has more citations, whose work gets more attention, whose opinions are more esteemed—because humans are still accustomed to constructing ranking systems. But over time, as individual development becomes increasingly diverse and ever harder to measure on any single dimension, the structure of difference will gradually shift from vertical (rankable) to lateral (unrankable). Each person delves deeply in their own unique direction, and these directions become increasingly incommensurable.

When the psychological circuits of comparison can find no operable input—no common scale, no rankable dimensions—they will gradually idle, like a search engine receiving a query it cannot parse. It won’t return an error; it will simply return a blank. Over time, this circuit will weaken from disuse.

But even if comparison loses its external conditions (the first force) and its objects of operation (the second force), it can theoretically continue running as an unconscious psychological program in the background—it just won’t find effective inputs. To reach this deepest layer, the third force is needed.

The Third Force: The self-transparency of consciousness.

This is the most radical of the three forces, and the most speculative. What it addresses is a problem the first two forces cannot reach: even if comparison loses its function and its objects, how do you deal with the program itself that is still running in the background?

The key is awareness. In our daily lives, the vast majority of comparative behavior occurs unconsciously. You walk into a room, and before you’ve had time to think, your brain has already completed a series of scans: whose clothing is better, who looks more confident, whose social status might be higher, roughly where you rank in this group. All of this happens below the threshold of consciousness; what you usually feel is only the result—a vague sense of comfort or discomfort.

But what if you could “see” the comparative impulse at the very moment it arises? Not suppress it, not deny it, not criticize yourself for “shouldn’t be comparing”—just clearly, without judgment, “see”: Ah, comparison is happening.

This is precisely what contemplative traditions have been doing for thousands of years—cultivating the ability to observe psychological processes in real time. In Buddhist psychology, there is a precise concept for comparison: “māna” (conceit), listed as one of the fundamental afflictions. Māna is not merely what we ordinarily understand as arrogance; it encompasses three forms: thinking oneself better than others (superiority conceit), thinking oneself worse than others (inferiority conceit), and thinking oneself equal to others (equality conceit). Note the third: even the seemingly neutral assessment “I am just as good as you” is considered a form of comparison in Buddhist psychology—because it still uses others as a frame of reference for positioning the self. As long as “I” is confirmed through its relationship with “you,” māna is operating. Buddhism’s more radical insight is “anattā” (non-self): the “I” that needs to be positioned, compared, and confirmed is itself a psychological construct, not an entity. When this construct is seen through, comparison doesn’t merely “stop happening”—it loses the subject that makes it happen.

Buddhism’s analysis need not be accepted as a matter of faith. It can be treated as a refined psychological hypothesis—and one that has been partially validated by thousands of years of meditative practice. Modern neuroscience is beginning to provide corroborating evidence: fMRI studies of long-term meditators show that activity in their default mode network (DMN)—the brain region closely associated with self-referencing, mind-wandering, and social comparison—is consistently reduced. This is not a temporary effect during meditation but a lasting change in neural structure. In other words, long-term meditation practice can substantively alter the way the brain processes information about “self” and “comparison.”

The problem with contemplative traditions is that they are too inefficient. After decades of arduous practice, only a very few individuals can achieve a state of sustained, stable self-awareness. But future breakthroughs in brain science and consciousness-enhancing technology might change this equation—here I enter highly speculative territory, which I need to explicitly flag. Neurofeedback technology can already help people learn to regulate specific brainwave patterns more quickly; future brain-computer interfaces might allow unprecedented precision in observing one’s own mental processes. If such technology matures—and this is a very big “if”—then the state of self-awareness that only a handful of people have achieved after thousands of years of contemplative tradition might become far more widely accessible.

When awareness becomes fast enough and clear enough, the comparative impulse is seen the instant it arises. And an impulse that is seen is like a shadow caught in a spotlight—it is still there, but it can no longer frighten you, can no longer drive you. You don’t need to “defeat” comparison; you only need to “see” it. Seeing itself is transcendence.

Now let me bring the three forces together. Environmental conditions eliminate the practical value of comparison (outermost layer); the structure of difference eliminates comparison’s operability (middle layer); the transparency of consciousness eliminates comparison’s unconscious drive (innermost layer)—none of them alone can end comparison. Their certainty levels also differ: the first is based on observable economic trends, the second on reasonable social extrapolation, and the third remains largely speculative. But their convergence may, over a sufficiently long timescale, cause comparison to gradually withdraw from the human psyche. Not overthrown in a dramatic revolution, but receding like a tide—barely noticeable at first, but centuries later looking back, the shoreline has completely changed.

But if we accept this possibility—at least as a serious possibility—we must face a weighty follow-up question: What else disappears along with comparison?

4.4 When Comparison Disappears, What Else Disappears with It

The first things to disappear are those psychological experiences that depend on comparison. Envy—an emotion built directly on comparison: you have what I don’t, and I suffer for it. Without comparison, envy loses its conditions of occurrence. Vanity—the other side of comparison: I have what you don’t, and I enjoy it for that. Inferiority—I am at a disadvantage in comparison. Superiority—I am at an advantage in comparison. Success anxiety—I am afraid of falling behind in comparison. Status anxiety—I am afraid of dropping in the social ranking. These are among the most pervasive, most deeply embedded psychological experiences in human civilization, and all of them depend on comparison. If comparison disappears, they will fall like dominoes, one after another.

But this is not all “good news.” What also disappears includes things we typically view as positive. The competitive drive behind innovation passion—“I want to do this better than they did” has fueled how many great inventions and masterworks? The sense of achievement from surpassing others—how much of the thrill of summiting a mountain comes from the quiet comparison that “very few people can do this”? Even aesthetic judgment produced through contrast—a large part of why we find a painting “good” is because we are tacitly comparing it with other paintings.

This is not an evolution without cost. The demise of comparison means humanity will lose an entire set of psychological engines that have long driven the progress of civilization. This raises a pointed question—one that two great thinkers have each posed in their own way: In a world without comparison, will humans still have motivation?

Friedrich Nietzsche’s answer would be unsettling. Nietzsche’s concept of the “Übermensch” (overman) is one of the most powerful imaginations of self-transcendence in the history of human thought. But the overman’s core is not merely “surpassing others” in the popular understanding—that is a vulgarization of Nietzsche. The overman’s core is the “Wille zur Macht” (will to power), and the will to power is not the pursuit of external power but life’s fundamental drive to continuously transcend and reshape itself. It is life’s inner thrust in every moment to overcome its current form and stretch toward higher intensities of existence.

Nietzsche’s truly unsettling challenge is therefore not “what do you do without opponents?” but a more fundamental question: In a world without comparison, without hierarchy, without “better,” would this will to self-transcendence still exist? If it didn’t, would the so-called “Age of Being” be precisely what Nietzsche despised as the “last man” (der letzte Mensch)—a satisfied, comfortable creature that no longer creates? In Nietzsche’s writing, the last man is the most contemptible human form: no longer harboring great longings, no longer suffering deeply, desiring nothing more than ease and freedom from worry.

Hannah Arendt touched on a similar concern from a different direction. In The Human Condition, Arendt distinguished three levels of human activity: “labor” is repetitive activity for sustaining survival; “work” is creative activity that produces durable objects; “action” is the activity through which a person reveals their uniqueness in the public sphere through speech and deeds. For Arendt, “action” is the highest form of human activity—because only in action does a person truly appear as a unique “who,” not merely a “what” whose attributes can be described.

Arendt’s concept of “action” offers a more nuanced answer than “pure overflow” to the question of what humans do after comparison disappears: humans do not merely overflow without direction; they reveal their uniqueness in the public sphere. But Arendt’s concept of action itself contains a tension—doesn’t revealing uniqueness implicitly involve some form of comparison? Doesn’t the claim “I am unique” necessarily presuppose “different from others”? Arendt herself might respond: uniqueness in action is not established through ranking but through self-revelation in a common world—its frame of reference is not “better than others” but “showing who one is before others.” This distinction is subtle, and it may be precisely the most crucial subtlety in the transition from comparison to non-comparison.

Both Nietzsche’s and Arendt’s challenges carry great weight. Let me honestly set them aside—not bypass them, but acknowledge their gravity, then carry them forward as we push on, seeing to what extent we can respond.

4.5 What Remains, and What Takes Its Place

Let me use a micro thought experiment to make this discussion concrete, and then on that basis attempt to respond to Nietzsche and Arendt.

Imagine two painters. One lives today; the other lives in the Age of Being.

Today’s painter finishes a painting. What is her first thought? Most likely some form of comparison—“How does this compare to my previous work?” “Where does this rank in the context of contemporary art?” “If I submit it to a show, what will the judges think?” These thoughts may not be articulated as clear sentences; they are more likely a kind of vague background feeling—an automatic tendency to place the work within some ranking system.

The painter in the Age of Being finishes a painting. That thought never arises. Not because she has suppressed the comparative impulse—suppression would mean the impulse is still there, just held down. Rather, the impulse itself no longer exists. She looks at her painting and experiences… what? Perhaps curiosity—the painting turned out somewhat different from what she imagined before she started; it has taken on a life of its own. Perhaps a kind of satisfaction—not the satisfaction of “I’m so great,” but something quieter, like a complete breath. Perhaps nothing at all—she’s already thinking about the next one.

So why does she still paint? If not for recognition, not to surpass others, not to leave a mark in art history—what drives her?

The answer is: the impulse to create does not depend on comparison.

This is a point that requires careful distinction. We are so accustomed to bundling “creation” and “competition” together that it is hard to imagine what creation without competition looks like. But if you carefully observe the purest form of creative behavior, you will find comparison entirely absent. A child building a sandcastle at the beach—he doesn’t know what art history is, doesn’t know what other people’s sandcastles look like, doesn’t even care how this sandcastle compares with his last one. He is simply building. Sand takes shape in his hands, and that process itself is the entire reason.

This example reveals a more general phenomenon: some of humanity’s most fundamental experiences do not require comparison as a prerequisite. Curiosity does not need comparison—you don’t need to be more curious than someone else to be curious. Curiosity is the natural response of consciousness encountering the unknown; it points toward no ranking, only toward the world itself. The joy of creation does not need comparison—an idea taking shape in your mind, a melody flowing from your fingers, a line of text that precisely captures something you vaguely felt—this joy is internal and self-sufficient; it needs no external frame of reference to confer its value. Love does not need comparison—you don’t need to love more than others to love. Love is an overflow, not a ranking.

After comparison demises, what remains is precisely these: curiosity, creation, love, play, exploration—human experiences that do not require comparison as a prerequisite. They need no ranking to be driven, no audience to exist, no comparison with anyone’s anything to gain meaning. They are the natural expression of being itself.

Now I can attempt a response to Nietzsche—not a perfect one, but an honest, tentative one.

The distinction between Nietzsche’s last man and the Age of Being might be understood as follows: the last man’s “satisfaction” is hollow, because the last man never truly lived deeply—he never created, never explored deeply, never burned. His satisfaction is another form of impoverishment: not a lack of material things, but a lack of life’s intensity. The self-sufficiency of the Age of Being is entirely different. It is a state full of intensity—curiosity remains fierce, creation still pours forth, exploration still runs deep—only these are no longer driven by scarcity and comparison but propelled by the abundance of life-force itself.

Nietzsche’s will to power—life’s inner drive to continuously transcend itself—perhaps does not disappear in the Age of Being but is transformed. It no longer manifests as “overcoming my current self to become a better self” (which is still a form of comparison—with one’s past self) but as “the full unfolding of life-force in this moment.” This is like the growth of a tree: a tree does not grow in order to “become a taller tree”—growth is the tree’s way of being, the natural movement of life-force. Removing “taller,” “better,” and other comparative endpoints does not remove the movement itself. Movement shifts from being teleological (directed toward a goal) to being intrinsic (as an expression of being).

Would this response truly satisfy Nietzsche? Perhaps not. Perhaps Nietzsche would insist that force without resistance is not force, depth without suffering is not depth. This disagreement may be irreconcilable—because it ultimately concerns different intuitions about the question “What is the essence of life?” But at the very least, we can say: there is a clear line of distinction between the Age of Being and the last man—intensity. The last man has no intensity. Beings in the Age of Being have intensity, but this intensity does not depend on comparison to be generated.

What does this kind of “intensity without comparison” concretely look like? Let us try to draw closer to it.

Chapter 5: The Age of Being—A Portrait of “Future Humans”

5.1 The Difficulty of Naming

Before attempting to depict the Age of Being, we encounter an unexpected difficulty: what should we call it?

This difficulty is not rhetorical but structural. Humans have a deep-rooted habit: understanding themselves through naming. Throughout the long history of self-knowledge, we have given ourselves many names, each corresponding to a particular understanding of “what a person is.” “Homo Sapiens” defines the human by “thinking.” “Homo Faber” defines the human by “making.” “Homo Ludens”—a concept proposed by the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga—defines the human by “playing.”

In the twenty-first century, Yuval Noah Harari proposed a new name in Homo Deus: “Homo Deus” (god-man). Harari painted a picture: once humans acquire unprecedented power through biotechnology, AI, and data algorithms, humanity will evolve toward “divinity”—pursuing immortality, pursuing ultimate happiness, pursuing total mastery over the natural world.

But note the common structure of all these names: they all define the human by “what they do” or “what they pursue.” Each name is a verb—the human is the being that does some particular thing. This is precisely the projection of the monetary logic analyzed in Chapter 1 onto the conceptual plane: a person’s value equals their function, so a person’s name also equals their function.

Harari’s “Homo Deus” is particularly worth discussing because it is the most recent and influential naming of humanity’s future, and it happens to expose the limitations of this naming approach. Homo Deus is still pursuing—pursuing immortality, pursuing happiness, pursuing greater power. Pursuit implies “not yet having,” implies scarcity, implies an underlying feeling of “I am not enough.” In this sense, Homo Deus has not exited what Fromm called the “having mode”—he has merely upgraded the objects of pursuit from money to immortality, from social status to divine power. The logic of pursuit has not changed.

The humans of the “Age of Being” are defined precisely by their departure from this naming logic. They are not Homo Deus who pursue more, but “beings” who no longer need to pursue. For them, there is no destination to reach, because they already “are”—completely, self-sufficiently, without any sense of lack.

Perhaps they need no name at all. Because naming itself is an act of distinction and comparison—you name a group of people to distinguish them from another group. And when comparison demises, the need for distinction demises with it. But in order to continue the discussion in this article—in order to use language to point at something beyond language—let us provisionally use the imperfect designation “Age of Being.”

5.2 The Daily Life of the “Age of Being”: Beyond Our Imagination

Here I must acknowledge a fundamental epistemological predicament: we cannot truly imagine the daily life of the Age of Being.

This is not a modest figure of speech but a strict epistemological judgment. Just as an ape-man could not imagine the daily life of modern humans—calculus, symphonies, the internet, quantum mechanics—we cannot imagine the daily experience of beings whose psychological structure is fundamentally different from ours. Our imagination is constrained by our own psychological structure, which is the very structure we are trying to transcend. Using a comparing mind to imagine a life without comparison is like using two-dimensional eyes to imagine a three-dimensional world—you can know what is “there,” but you cannot “see” it.

So I will not pretend to paint a complete picture of the Age of Being. What I can do is start from our existing experience, make some tentative extrapolations, and acknowledge their limitations.

When creation is no longer for the sake of recognition, what does creation become? Perhaps it becomes bolder—because without the gaze of an audience, there is no fear of failure. Perhaps it becomes more intimate—not secretive, but no longer needing to be externalized as “works.” Creation may become a continuous, internal process rather than a series of “achievements” that need to be displayed.

When learning is no longer for the sake of surpassing others, what does learning become? Perhaps it becomes freer—because without the framework of curricula, exams, and degrees, learning can follow curiosity’s free wandering. Perhaps it becomes deeper—because there is no longer any need to “cover” all the areas required by an exam, a person can immerse themselves in a single question for ten years without feeling they are “wasting time.”

When relationships no longer have power structures—no longer “who needs whom more,” “whose social value is higher,” “who has the upper hand in this relationship”—what do relationships become? This may be the hardest thing to imagine, but it may also be the most profoundly transformative.

All of our current understanding of “relationships” is built on an unspoken premise: there is an “I,” there is a “you,” and a relationship is a bridge built between two separate individuals. But this premise itself may be a product of comparison. “I” needs to be so clearly defined, so carefully guarded, largely because “I” needs to be positioned within comparison—I must know who I am, where I am, where my boundaries with others lie, in order to find my place in the ranking system.

If comparison disappears, the hard wall that sharply divides “I” from “you” might soften, become permeable. This does not mean individuality vanishes—it does not become some vague collective consciousness—but rather the boundary between individual and others shifts from a defensive fortress wall to a breathable membrane. Your joy no longer threatens my status; it can flow freely in and become my joy. My creation does not need to compete with your creation; they can converge like two rivers. The individual is not dissolved but transformed from a sealed container into an open process—each person remains unique, but this uniqueness is no longer a rampart for demarcating borders with others, but a window open to the world.

Arendt’s concept of “action” acquires new meaning here. In the Age of Being, “action”—revealing one’s uniqueness in a common world—may no longer need an “audience” in the public sphere to be valid, because revealing uniqueness is no longer a claim that needs to be acknowledged but a fact that naturally occurs. Your uniqueness exists without needing others’ confirmation, just as the unique form of a flower does not need contrast with other flowers to already be itself.

These descriptions are, of course, only tentative. Our present language was designed to describe separated selves, and using it to describe the state after that separation dissolves is like trying to scoop water with a net—the mesh of language is too coarse; the water of experience flows through it. But even if we can only point in a direction, the direction itself is worth noting. And beyond these outward pictures, there may be an inner dimension we can approach more closely—the sense of time.

5.3 A New Sense of “Time”

The reason I single out time from among the various possible inner dimensions is that the experience of time may be one of the deepest yet least self-conscious areas of the monetary operating system’s impact on us.

The modern person’s experience of time is deeply structured. Deadlines, efficiency, return periods, the anxiety of “wasting time,” the fear of “running out of time”—these constitute the basic tone of our daily temporal experience. Time, for us, does not flow naturally; it is divided, priced, and managed. The “value” of an hour depends not on what you experienced in that hour but on what you “produced” in it. This is precisely what Heidegger criticized as “calculative thinking” manifesting in the temporal dimension—time is reduced to “a resource that can be consumed or invested,” and the existential texture of time itself is concealed.

In the Age of Being, if there is nothing that needs to be “completed”—because there are no deadlines, no efficiency requirements, no value that needs to be proven through output—what happens to the experience of time?

Here I can ask you to draw on your own experience as a bridge. Almost everyone has had moments like this: you are completely absorbed in something—perhaps playing a piece of music, painting a picture, writing a passage, or even just walking through a forest after rain—you forget time, forget yourself, forget whom you should be comparing yourself with, forget tomorrow’s deadline. You don’t know how long it has been—maybe five minutes, maybe two hours—and when you “come back,” you find yourself in an unusually clear, unusually whole state.

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi named this state “flow.” In flow, time is not “spent” nor “managed.” Time simply flows. Or more precisely: in flow, your relationship with time undergoes a fundamental change—you are no longer standing outside of time watching it pass (and then feeling anxious that it passes too fast or too slow); you are within time, merged with it. There is no concept of “wasting time,” because there is no external standard to judge whether this time has been “effectively used.” Time is no longer a resource to be managed; it becomes a medium to be inhabited.

Now, imagine stretching that moment into eternity—not an occasional peak experience, but the baseline state of daily existence. Not that you occasionally and luckily “enter” flow, but that you have never “left” it. This may be the temporal experience of the Age of Being—a continuous, undivided, unpriced time directly inhabited.

5.4 A Dialogue with the Omega Point: The Age of Being Is Not Religion

When we attempt to depict the ultimate direction of human evolution, we inevitably touch on a question: What is the relationship between this vision and religious ultimate visions? This question deserves a direct answer, because although the direction of this article’s argument resonates with certain religious visions, it is fundamentally different in nature.

Among the most striking ultimate visions in the history of human thought is that of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French paleontologist and Jesuit priest. In his 1955 work The Phenomenon of Man, Teilhard proposed a grand vision: the evolution of the universe has a direction, and that direction is the continuous intensification and complexification of consciousness. From inanimate matter to life, from simple life to conscious life, from individual consciousness to collective consciousness—evolution proceeds along a trajectory of “consciousness intensification.” The endpoint of this trajectory, which Teilhard called the “Omega Point,” is the ultimate convergence point of cosmic consciousness evolution—a state of ultimate unity that transcends the division between individual and collective, matter and spirit.

Teilhard’s direction deeply resonates with the argument of this article. He saw the arc of consciousness evolution, saw that humanity is not an endpoint but a transition, saw that future forms of being will be fundamentally different from current humans. But Teilhard’s framework has a key premise: his Omega Point is religious. It presupposes a purposeful universe—the universe is not merely evolving; it is evolving “toward something,” and that direction is guided by some kind of transcendent attractor.

This article’s “Age of Being” can be viewed as a de-religionized, psychologically and technologically grounded similar vision. It does not need to presuppose that the universe has purpose. It only needs to ask an empirical question: if technology eliminates material scarcity (or greatly reduces material constraints), if money therefore loses its function (or loses its dominant control over the human psyche), if comparison gradually withdraws under the convergence of three forces—environmental change, lateralization of difference, and transparency of consciousness—then what is the ultimate stable state?

The starting point is not any religious text but observable technological trends and verifiable psychological research. The endpoint is not union with God but a fundamental transformation of human psychological structure—from “scarcity-driven” to “self-sufficient being.” This does not mean Teilhard was wrong—perhaps the universe does have purpose, perhaps the Omega Point truly exists. But even without accepting these metaphysical premises, we can still arrive, via a completely secular reasoning path, at a conclusion directionally similar to the Omega Point. This path requires not faith but clear thinking and honest engagement with trends.

5.5 Directly Addressing the Deepest Challenge: This Is Not Nihilism

By now, we have sketched the contours of the Age of Being—tentative, blurry contours though they are. But before continuing, I must directly address a challenge that may have been circling in your mind for some time, because if it cannot be answered, everything depicted above loses its foundation.

The challenge is this: If humans no longer need to prove themselves, no longer compare, no longer pursue—how is this different from total meaninglessness? Isn’t this just another name for nihilism? A world where everyone is “self-sufficient” and no one “needs” anything—is this really paradise, or a refined prison?

This challenge has a literary embodiment: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. In Huxley’s vision, the future society is a world of complete material satisfaction where everyone is “happy.” No suffering, no scarcity, no conflict. But also no art, no deep relationships, no real freedom. The result is a suffocating mediocrity—everyone is satisfied, but no one is truly alive.

If my “Age of Being” is merely Huxley’s dystopia wrapped in a more philosophical veneer, then it does not deserve to be taken seriously. So the key to the response lies in a distinction: the Age of Being is not the elimination of desire but the transformation of desire’s structure.

In Huxley’s dystopia, human desire is suppressed by external forces—drugs numb discontent, genetic engineering eliminates difference, social control prevents independent thought. People become hollow shells without longing—not because they are self-sufficient, but because they are castrated. That “happiness” is empty because its method of realization is subtraction—subtracting pain, subtracting desire, subtracting complexity, subtracting depth, until only a smooth, featureless surface remains.

What happens in the Age of Being is not subtraction but transformation. Specifically: from “desire driven by scarcity” to “creation overflowing from abundance.”

In the scarcity-driven mode, the structure of desire is: I lack X, so I pursue X. I lack security, so I pursue money. I lack recognition, so I pursue achievement. I lack self-worth, so I pursue advantage in comparison. The driving force of this desire is “not enough”—a persistent, fundamental sense of lack.

In the abundance-overflow mode, the word “desire” is no longer quite accurate—because there is no scarcity as a precondition. More fitting words might be “expression” or “creation.” Its structure is: my inner abundance—too much curiosity, too much vitality, too much impulse to connect—naturally overflows into action. Just as a tree does not bear fruit because it “lacks fruit”—it bears fruit because its life-force is so abundant that fruit is the natural overflow of that force.

The driving force of the former is “not enough”; the driving force of the latter is “too much.” The former is an inward pull (I need to acquire something from outside to fill the lack); the latter is an outward radiation (my inner abundance naturally expresses outward). The difference between these two is not one of degree but of structure—just as the difference between cold and warmth is not in the number on the thermometer but in the quality of the felt experience.

But here I must face a deeper meta-question: When I say “being itself is value,” what kind of claim am I actually making?

This is not a metaphysical proclamation—I am not claiming that being “objectively” possesses some intrinsic value independent of the observer. Nor is it an ethical prescription—“you should regard being as valuable.” What I am doing is closer to a phenomenological description: when the scarcity-driven psychological structure recedes, the state a person experiences has a self-sufficient quality—it does not need an external frame of reference to endow it with “meaning,” just as breathing does not need a reason to prove it is “worthwhile.” You don’t ask “What is the meaning of breathing?”—you simply breathe, and breathing is being alive itself.

“Being itself is value” is therefore not a proposition that needs to be “proven” but a state that can be “experienced.” Everyone has had those moments—completely immersed in the present, without any sense of lack, without needing to prove anything—and in those moments, “being is value” is not a philosophical proposition; it is the entire content of your experience. This article’s argument is not about proving this proposition “true” but about asking: What conditions would enable this occasional momentary experience to become a sustained state of being?

This is not meaninglessness. It is a state that transcends the framework of “meaning” itself. The word “meaning” presupposes a question—“What is this for? What does it point to? What purpose does it serve?”—and the experience of the Age of Being may simply not contain this question.

Huxley’s world is one where “living is no longer necessary.” The Age of Being is a world where people are “truly alive for the first time.” The difference between them is the difference between anesthesia and awakening.

Chapter 6: Returning to This Moment

6.1 Where We Now Stand

After this long journey of extrapolation—from the deep psychological structure of money, to its possible path of demise, to the evolutionary roots of comparison that are older than money, to the possible mechanisms by which comparison recedes, to the blurry contours of the Age of Being—let us put our feet back on the ground of this present moment and see where we stand.

If we use this article’s framework to locate ourselves—we are standing in the late period of monetary civilization, or more cautiously put, at a historical juncture where the equation “a person’s value equals their function” is beginning to be shaken.

Money still rules everything. Your first thought upon waking this morning probably involved money—mortgage, salary, prices, bills. The global economy still revolves around money, social hierarchy is still measured by wealth. The monetary operating system is still running at full capacity.

But cracks have appeared. The continuous expansion of the free economy—from Wikipedia to open-source software, from free online education to free social platforms—is proving in ever-larger domains that valuable things need not necessarily be priced. The global rise of UBI experiments is quietly severing the ancient binding between labor and the right to exist.

And AI—the force that triggered the anxiety described in our introduction—is shaking the ancient equation “a person’s value equals their function” at the most fundamental level.

Having come this far, I want to flip the narrative of AI—a flip that is in fact the logical conclusion of this entire article’s argument.

Perhaps AI is not a threat to humanity. Perhaps it is a catalyst for human evolution.

Consider: without AI, the equation “a person’s value equals their function” could have continued running unquestioned for another few hundred years. Most people would still be able to find some kind of work in which to anchor their sense of worth; the system, despite its many problems, could still function. AI’s arrival shattered this comfort zone. In an unmistakable way, it tells everyone: “Those functions you take pride in—thinking, analyzing, creating, judging—I can do them too, and I’m getting better and better.”

This looks like a catastrophe. But from another angle, it is precisely a gift—a cruel but precious one. It forces humanity to confront a question long avoided: If your value does not lie in what you can do, then where does it lie? The painfulness of this question is proportional to its importance.

Those who feel anxious because of AI—illustrators, programmers, translators, lawyers—their anxiety is real and deserves to be taken seriously. But the direction of the anxiety may be wrong. The question is not “How can I avoid being replaced by AI?”—this question still operates within the old framework, still assumes “my value depends on what I can do.” The real question is: “Can I build a sense of identity that does not depend on function?”

This question leads to the Age of Being.

6.2 Two Levels, One Direction

But what does “leading to the Age of Being” mean in practice? It does not mean we need to sit and wait for centuries of civilizational transformation. Because the “Age of Being” may simultaneously exist on two levels.

As a structural transformation of civilization, it requires a long historical process—technological breakthroughs, institutional reform, political struggle, generational turnover. It may take centuries; its path is full of uncertainty; it may unfold in ways we cannot foresee, and it may encounter obstacles we cannot foresee. What this article describes is only one possible direction, not a certain prophecy.

But as an individual’s momentary experience, it is happening every moment. Every time you are completely absorbed in something and forget who you are and whom you should be comparing yourself to. Every time you watch a sunset with nothing on your mind. Every time you hold your child and feel complete without needing any reason. Every time you create something—perhaps just a meal, a melody, a sentence—and in that moment of creation need neither to prove anything nor to surpass anyone.

In those moments, the monetary operating system has temporarily shut down. The psychological circuitry of comparison has temporarily stopped running. You are not a function node, not a priced unit of labor, not a social atom occupying a position in a ranking system. You are simply you. And “simply being you” is enough.

The relationship between these two levels may be this: the individual’s momentary contact is the micro-foundation and harbinger of civilizational transformation. What each person experiences in every “selfless” moment is a micro-rehearsal of the Age of Being. And civilizational-level structural changes—technological de-scarcification, weakening of monetary functions, social weakening of comparison—provide ever more soil for these momentary experiences, gradually transforming them from occasional peak experiences into the baseline state of daily existence. The relationship between individual experience and civilizational structure is not one of precedence but of mutual nourishment.

This article began with AI anxiety, but it does not end with AI. It ends with you—with your relationship with yourself, with how you define your value, with whether you have the courage to imagine an existence that needs no proof.

You do not need to wait for money to disappear. You do not need to wait for comparison to recede. You only need, in this moment—this very moment—to notice: the “you” who is reading these words already existed before any comparison occurred.

That existence needs no proof.