Money Isn’t Real. We’re All Playing With Floobs.

I’m going to say something financial advisors aren’t supposed to say.

The money you’re spending your life chasing was made up. The whole thing. Made up by people who do not have your interests at heart, managed right now by institutions whose priorities are not yours, and somehow accepted by most of us — without ever quite agreeing — as the official scoreboard for whether our lives are working.

Before I get into the mechanics, I want to tell you a story.

A Story About Floobs

Imagine you arrive in a foreign country. You don’t speak the language well. You have no money, no shelter, no idea how the place works.

A man approaches you. He’s friendly. He holds up a small object.

“What’s that?” you ask.

“A floob.”

“What’s a floob?”

“It’s one hundred.”

“One hundred what?”

He looks at you like you’re slow. “One hundred.”

You let it go. “Okay. What’s it for? What do I do with it?”

“You use floobs to get the things you need. Food. Shelter. Clothing. The essentials.”

“Got it. How many floobs do I need to live here comfortably?”

“About ten thousand.”

You do the math. Ten thousand floobs. That’s a number. You can work toward a number. “Okay. I’ll figure out how to get ten thousand floobs.”

The man shakes his head. “That’s not enough.”

“You just said ten thousand floobs gets me everything I need to live comfortably here.”

“It does. But that is not enough. You’ll be nothing if you only have ten thousand floobs.”

“…Nothing?”

“Yes. If you only have ten thousand floobs, you’re a nobody. You mean nothing. You need more.”

“How many more?”

“As many as possible. You can never have too many floobs., The best people — the most important people — have billions of floobs.”

You pause. “What’s the difference between someone with ten thousand floobs and someone with a billion?”

“Worth.

“Worth in what?”

“Worth in floobs.”

You set that aside for the moment. “Where do floobs come from? How do I get them?”

“The best way is to help someone with a lot of floobs get even more floobs. Then, they’ll give you some of theirs.”

“And how do they get floobs?”

“From other people. Eventually, from you. You give them floobs in exchange for what you need to live your comfortable life.”

“Wait — I give them my floobs to get what I need to live, and then I work for them to get more floobs, which I give back to them for more things I need?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. But originally — physically — where do floobs come from? Do they grow on a tree somewhere? Are they something you have to find somewhere in nature, like a scarce rock or something?”

The man smiles. “Oh, no. I make the floobs.”

You blink. “You make them?”

“Yes.”

“Then could you just make some more for me? Save me the trouble?”

“I can’t do that.” ‍

“Why not?”

“Because then floobs wouldn’t be worth anything.”

You take a breath. “Let me make sure I have this right. You make the floobs. You decide how many floobs exist. You decide how many floobs I need in order to be considered valuable in your society. You decide what counts as ‘enough.’ And the rest of my life — my time, my work, my health, my creative energy — gets spent chasing more and more of this thing that you create out of nothing, literally thin air, according to a standard that you set.”

“Yes.”

“And if I don’t chase enough of them, I’m nothing.”

“Correct.”

You laugh. The man does not.

This is Your Reality

This is not a thought experiment. This is your current reality, the world you live in.

The man with the floobs is a composite — a central bank that creates money by decree, a financial system that decides whose hands it flows into first, a culture that has been told to grade human beings by how many of these tokens they accumulate. You didn’t sign a contract. You didn’t get a vote. You never agreed. You were simply born into this reality and handed the rules.

The True Story of Money

Until 1971, money was tied to gold. Then Nixon ended that, and the dollar became fiat — Latin for “let it be done.” In other words, the dollar became worth what it is because the government says so, and because enough people accept that declaration to keep the system running. Think about that for a moment. Money is valuable today because we believe it is.

The Federal Reserve — a central bank whose board you didn’t elect — decides how much of it should exist. When they want more, they create it. Not by printing bills. By typing numbers into reserve accounts at commercial banks. The money doesn’t come from anywhere. It is conjured into being by decision.

Commercial banks multiply that base. When you take out a mortgage, the bank doesn’t hand you cash from a vault. It creates a new deposit — also numbers, also from nothing — backed by your promise to spend the next thirty years paying it back with interest. The vast majority of money in the economy was created exactly this way: invented out of debt, owed back with interest, to institutions that profit on both ends.

That’s the system. That’s the thing you’re chasing and constantly trying to accumulate more of.

Who Benefits

When the Fed creates new money, it doesn’t show up in your account. It enters the financial system first — into banks, into asset markets, into the hands of people who already own things. By the time it reaches wage earners, prices have already adjusted to reflect the new supply. The people closest to the spigot get the new money at the old value. Everyone else gets it after it’s been diluted.

This is the Cantillon effect. It’s not a conspiracy. It’s not hidden. It’s just not discussed in polite financial company.

Over decades, the result is predictable. Asset holders get spectacularly richer. Wage earners run faster to stay in place. The cost of housing, healthcare, education — the things you actually need to build a life — climbs faster than the dollars you can earn. And the same people who designed and benefit from this system turn around and tell you that if you’re not winning, you didn’t work hard enough.

You worked plenty hard. The game is structured so that working hard inside it makes them richer faster than it makes you free.

The Real Con

The con isn’t the money. Money is a tool. It’s a useful one. You can build things with it.

The con is convincing you to measure your life with it.

Because once you accept the dollar as the scoreboard, you have handed over the most important thing you own: your sense of how you’re doing. Your sense of whether your life is working. Your sense of whether you matter. All of it. Outsourced. To a number whose value is being decided, in rooms you’ll never enter, by people whose interests aren’t yours.

Inflation hits and you’ve “lost” — even though you did nothing wrong. A bubble inflates and someone with a fraction of your talent feels like a king. You build a body of work that will outlast everyone in those rooms and you still go to bed feeling behind because the number isn’t big enough yet.

That is the trap. That is the actual trap.

Not the existence of money. Not the necessity of using it. The trap is letting the man with the floobs decide what your life is worth in a unit he controls.

Refuse the Scoreboard

I’m not telling you to opt out of the financial system. That’s not possible and it’s not the point. You’re going to keep using dollars. You should. They work. They’re an extraordinary invention for coordinating effort and storing value across time.

I’m telling you to refuse the scoreboard. Stop trying to “win” when you actually have not control over the game. Stop letting the number grade you. Start measuring your life in things that don’t fluctuate with monetary policy:

•        The work. Are you making things that wouldn’t exist without you?

•        Ownership. Do you control your masters, your IP, your equity? Are you a tenant in your own career, or the landlord?

•        Mastery. Can you do something now that you couldn’t five years ago? Could you teach it?

•        Relationships. Do the people closest to you trust you? Are you someone collaborators want to work with again?

•        Optionality. Could you walk away from a bad deal tomorrow without it ruining you? Could you say no?

•        Legacy. When you’re gone, what continues? What did you build that compounds for the people you love?

None of these are denominated in floobs. None of them move when the Fed adjusts rates. They are not priced in a currency anyone else controls.

This is the revolution. Not burning the system down — building your life on terms the system can’t price. Letting them have their scoreboard. Refusing to keep score with it.

The Path Forward

Spotlight Advisory Group exists because there’s a way to use money without measuring your life by it. There’s a way to be financially serious without selling your soul to the scoreboard. We work with people building things that will matter in fifty years, and we help them stay financially solvent while they do it.

The floobs were made up. They can still buy you a house and feed your kids. But they were never the verdict on who you are. Stop letting them be.

Related Articles

Money: The Greatest Myth Ever Sold. A companion piece to this one. We live in a world ruled by numbers that don’t actually exist — and once you see it clearly, you can start building a life rooted in authenticity and real value instead of accumulation. ‍

The Fear Behind Wealth — and the Freedom Beyond It. The chase after floobs isn’t really about money. It’s about fear of not having enough. A look at the scarcity mindset that fuels the whole system — and how shifting to abundance changes everything.

Why the Rich Are Not Financially Free. Proof that the floob trap doesn’t end at any number. Even the wealthy stay caught in the cycle of earning, spending, and striving. True freedom requires breaking the belief that money is the goal.

The NFL Draft: A Ticket to Financial Prison? What happens when 21-year-olds get handed millions of floobs overnight without the inner architecture to resist the script. A vivid case study of the trap at maximum velocity — and what it reveals about the trap most of us walk into more quietly.