The old currency was things. In the beginning, and until, say, a 100 years ago, there wasn’t much stuff in the world and to make something required a lot of concentrated energy. A hand made thing has a certain quality, so focusing on things meant you’d imbibe energy along the way, or come into contact with it in a beneficial way. Kind of like encouraging kids to eat blackcurrants because along the way they’ll get their daily dose of Vitamin C. But what if our blackcurrants were GM specials with no Vitamains at all?(You have to imagine for the sake of this example we are briefly in a parallel reality where most people don’t accept that vitamins exist). What happens is that people start dying of scurvy.
The cure? Stop eating blackcurrants and start talking about Vitamin C and how to get it into your system.
So in a world which goes from not enough things to too many (my kids turned toys into a kind of plastic mulch we had to periodically throw out, a bit like that swirling plastic detritus pool in the middle of the Pacific) in this kind of world we have to refocus on a new currency. Things are way too diluted, the valuable stuff in things is way too diluted. No vitamins!
The old currency was things, the new currency is human energy (which was what was valuable about things anyway).
Most things now(but not all) are so low in useful energy they actually just weigh you down. Hence the current craze amongst multi millionaires (like CD Baby founder Derek Sieves) of owning as little as possible, of employing no one on a permanent basis and travelling all the time. Human energy is the new currency and all of that behaviour is about energy conservation and generation.
It’ll happen anyway. We’ll get the energy equivalent of scurvy otherwise. Start looking at the world differently, stop trading in the old currency and start dealing in energy.