Being in debt means using up the future in the present. Essentially, it’s about how we manage our time. Therefore, the most valuable resource for debtors is time, and it depends on which side time favors. Paying off debt is like repaying borrowed future time early. When the ability to generate wealth over time decreases, the future time becomes a burden, and the debtor faces the pain of bankruptcy. Taking on debt is costly. It may seem like borrowed money is repaid with money, but the irreplaceable resource of time is also returned along with interest. With the rise of postpaid credit cards as a common payment method, we’ve become less sensitive to the associated pain and cost. There are two ways to spend money: using present time or future time. The costs and pain are much higher when the future is spent as if it were the present. - Joseph’s “just my thoughts”
Capitalistic thinking is not about domination by capital; it refers to financial thinking. The economy revolves around exchange. The performance of the counterparty corresponding to what I want to exchange is called ‘ consideration ,’ and a ‘ transaction ’ is the accumulation of added value by exchanging equal considerations. However, among transactions, this consideration is not relative but absolute; trading solely in one fiat currency as consideration is termed ‘ finance .’ When I obtain a loan, the bank lends me fiat currency (the bank’s consideration), but my obligation is to return the fiat principal plus the contracted interest . The consideration in this transaction is unidirectional, involving only one fiat currency. In contrast, when I buy shoes, the seller has an obligation to hand over the shoes to me, and I have a counterpart obligation to pay in fiat currency. Once these two considerations are exchanged, an industrial transaction occurs. However, as noted earlier, in f...