Perhaps the most incredible thing ever portrayed in the many hundreds of hours of Star Trek media is also the most mundane: a restaurant. Specifically, Sisko's Creole Kitchen, in New Orleans, on Earth. And I mean "incredible" in a very literal sense, which is to say "not believable". It's just a restaurant. It's got tables, chairs, fabulous atmosphere, and great gumbo. It also has cooks and waitstaff. You know: as restaurants do. But there's something a bit odd about that, upon reflection. They haven't used money on Earth for centuries when Sisko's is open. Nobody is paying the cooks or the waitstaff. The proprietor, Joseph Sisko, isn't making any profit from owning, operating, and working in this restaurant. Let me make that abundantly clear: there are people in Star Trek working in food service voluntarily. Because they like it. They may even love it. Joseph certainly does. The job nearly does his heart in, but he keeps plugging away, without a cent to show for it. Crazier still is that this is in a world where there exist appliances that can summon up any kind of sumptuous feast you wish. Again: free of charge. Nobody has any need to go to this restaurant. There are public teleportation services, so getting there isn't much more difficult than asking a matter-manipulating megacomputer to materialise lunch, but it's still a restaurant. You still have to be seated, wait for the waiter, order your orders, then chat while the cooks cook them. Only then are they presented to you, no hotter, and no tastier than the instantly-generated option available to you at home. Some of you may have had the unique - shall we say? - privilege of working in a similar setting. Would you, still, if there weren't only no tips, but no pay at all? Would you get up a 7 in the morning, stumble into the sonic shower, then go to work in a hot, steamy kitchen on the Gulf of Mexico, just for the love of the game? I imagine some would. I imagine many more would if they never had to pay rent. Or health insurance. Or grocery bills. Or, well, for anything. None of your patrons have any bills to pay, either, so they can consume their meal without being consumed by worry. Nobody is anxiously watching the clock for the end of their lunch break, either. I don't think the people eating at Sisko's are kind to the staff because they're in a fantasy land; I think they're kind because their society is kind. Please, imagine it: going to work because it makes you happy, and because it makes the people around you happy. Because it feels good to do a good job. Like I said: nothing in Star Trek is stranger. Coral reefs are animals, like humans; the least you'd expect is for an extraterrestrial to have pointy ears and green blood. It's possible to travel in space, so why not time? Space probes checking in with the whales? Honestly, it's weirder that Admiral Cartwright and Joseph Sisko are played by the same actor. So, can we just admit that money is evil? Like, ontologically evil. Idiomatically evil, even. We all know it, right? I wouldn't be surprised, were it possible to chart such a thing, that global happiness is inversely proportional to the adoption of money and the increase in its supply. Sure, there are quality-of-life improvements like washing machines, or luxuries like movie tickets, that can be procured with money, and these bring happiness. But money did not create these things. The story of human invention is full of tinkerers, solution-seekers, and well-educated nerds who either did not need to work or, at most, worked in some sort of R&D-type setting for a fixed salary. Money isn't even connected by correlation. If anything, it gets in the way. How many times have you heard that "sure, we could do that great and wonderful thing everybody wants, but it's just too expensive"? Truly free and universal health care? Too expensive. Proper public transportation? Too expensive. Solving the climate crises? Waaay too expensive. Ensuring that everybody has a place to live, clean water, and food to eat? I mean, I'd've thought the pattern is clear by now. Nothing good comes from money, because money is an organism (I think of it as a memetic virus) that must reproduce, and there's no business case for solving problems, unless you can cause three new ones in the process. And people with money don't "create jobs", either. Human potential, rather, is locked away behind a paywall, and is more often set loose upon devising thirty varieties of toaster with features nobody wants, never uses, and will in any case need to replace a day-and-a-half after the warranty expires because you can't make money selling one unpatentable toaster per customer. There are millions of jobs, extant independent of any employer, being left undone because all of the people capable of and willing to do them have bills to pay. And so many of them are doing jobs that, at best, make no difference, and, at worst, are actively eroding the structure of society. Of which they are no doubt keenly aware, hence the general misery of modern life. It's not the devices, or the culture, or the food; it's the fact that all these things are monetised up the wazoo that is the greatest contributor to the mass malaise. Little computers capable of communicating across the globe and accessing the sum of human knowledge are a sci-fi dream come true. But, the money needs there to be more money, so you're forced to pay a premium for that computer, only to have it convert your interactions with it into saleable information. It can be more profitable to claim a complete motion picture - the work of thousands of people - as a loss for tax purposes than to release it for audiences to enjoy. Why spend a life perfecting your art when you can wait until a century after the artist dies in poverty, so you can charge $50 for people to walk through empty rooms with the now-freely-available art projected on the walls? And why use the power of genetics to make healthier, hardier, more plentiful crops, when you can just use it to sell more pesticide and the seeds you made immune to it? Garbage. All of it. And all of it for the sake of a number. A number without morals, without vision, without any care or appreciation for the needs of anything other than its own endless, destructive multiplication. I don't know about you, but I'd rather be a busboy without bills than the CEO of a dead planet. Money needs us, not the other way around. What we need is friends, atmosphere, and great gumbo.