Almost everything is pretend though, unless we’re talking about the basic laws of science (and even those change with context).

Language is “pretend”. Words don’t mean anything unless we all agree they mean something.

Valuing family is “pretend”. We all agree to give family importance, but plenty of animals don’t.

All laws are pretend. Country borders are pretend. Gender roles are pretend. Social position is pretend. Even my job is only my job because everyone agrees to give me responsibility in this role. Pretty much everything in society only works because of tacit agreement.

You should check out the book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. Humans have this amazing ability to make up all sorts of crazy shit, but it has huge advantages in our ability to organize.

One on one, a chimp would easily be at up a human. Ten on ten, the chimps still have an advantage. But 200 on 200, humans would win no contest. Our ability to make shit up allows us to coordinate with huge numbers people that we don’t even know, which is extraordinarily rare.

What differentiates humans from all animals including apes is our ability to cooperate & coordinate. Cooperation is what has allowed humans to dominate the world. I’m quite optimistic about the future simply because our innate sense of cooperation is all the good we have ever needed to conquer any and all evil the world has managed to create at any point in history all the way to now, and will continue to hold true forever.

our ability to cooperate & coordinate

Yeah, tying back to the original post about whether money is real or made up - that ability to come up with abstract concepts out of asses is what allows us to cooperate on such grand levels.

You might only personally know 100 people that you reasonably trust. But you don’t need to personally know and trust someone in order to sell something to them. We all sort of magically agree that money has value and it allows us to transact with almost anyone.

Same thing with governments. A government isn’t a real thing that you find in nature, but by believing in the concept of it, we’re able to (somewhat) unify millions or billions of people to get shit done.

I guess what I’m saying is, don’t discount the power of something just because it’s not “real”. Making up imaginary shit has got our species pretty damn far!