Hoarding money

Erin Remblance (LinkedIn, 22 Aug 2026)

“If a monkey hoarded more bananas than it could eat, while most of the other monkeys starved, scientists would study that monkey to figure out what the heck was wrong with it. When humans do it, we put them on the cover of Forbes.” – Nathalie Robin

The obsession with more, with growth, with money, with billionaires and trillionaires is not the natural human condition, rather an anomaly as capitalism makes the things we need to live a good life artificially scarce. Capitalism makes people feel like they need to hoard money and other assets in order to ensure they can meet their needs in the future because everything is commoditised and the more you need it to live the greater the likelihood that it will become more and more expensive.

This combined with cultural hegemony, whereby the working class absorbs the values of the ruling class through media, education, entertainment, the arts and so on, and starts to value things that do not benefit them – such as the existence of billionaires -means that we have normalised the hoarding of money, “a somewhat disgusting morbidity” as John Maynard Keynes called it.

There is an inverse relationship between the hoarding of (private) money and how much we value the commons, universal public services, ‘private sufficiency, public luxury’, community, third spaces (not home or work), and, lets face it, a liveable planet for future generations and other life that calls Earth home.

We need to recognise when we have enough, and encourage others to do the same, and then begin prioritising things that will genuinely make life better for everyone.

Erin Remblance is co-creator of Beyond Duality and The Healthy Habits accelerator.