He asked for a hint, and he named the figures not idly but with a sort of hugging relish. Uch! How they love money, thought Wilhelm. They adore money! Holy money! Beautiful money! It was getting so that people were feeble-minded about everything except money. While if you didn’t have it you were a dummy, a dummy! You had to excuse yourself from the face of the earth. Chicken! that’s what it was. The world’s business. If only he could find a way out of it. Such thinking brought on the usual congestion. It would grow into a fit of passion if he allowed it to continue. Therefore he stopped talking and began to eat.

From “Seize the Day” by Saul Bellow

This snippet contains terrific criticisms of our modern society. “Uch! How they love money, thought Wilhelm. They adore money! Holy money! Beautiful money!”  Day after day, the importance of money grows. Ideas and knowledge used to move the world. Now it is money. But is it really that important? How much do we need to live? How many shoes should we keep in our walking closet? We create our own needs. When I was nine years old, I went to visit my grandmother, who lived in a poor neighborhood in my hometown. As I was walking alone on the street that led to her home, a boy about my age, whom I had never met, darted out of the front door of a tenement.  He approached me and said,

“I know more than you do?”

He proceeded to ask me questions about geography, mathematics, physics, and so on. I answered most of them and came up with my own queries for him. Knowledge was so valuable. But now money has replaced it, and its hegemony climbs year after year.  People place a value on everything. Do you know that according to a website my blog is worth $ 8.50 dollars? If I ever sell it, I could buy a cup of coffee at Starbucks.