The Four Currencies

Money is a tracking instrument, not a currency. What a living being actually spends is attention, time, energy, and sacrifice — and every allocation question is incoherent until that is named.

Attention is the first and the deepest. Nothing can be attended to that is not perceived, and everything downstream — where time goes, where energy goes, what gets made, who is related to — follows from where attention was placed. What a person attends to all day is what they become, which makes attention the most consequential moral choice most people never treat as one. The old world understands this precisely, which is why an entire economy exists to capture it at industrial scale (Focused Attention As Discipline, Perception, Manufactured Dependency).

Time is finite while embodied, and less fixed than the clock suggests: a few minutes of real presence do what hours of scattered activity cannot, and hours can pass with the clock moving and nothing spent (Time, Here and Nøw, Minutes are the one unit, Honesty about time).

Energy is the vital force that animates doing. It is cultivated and it is drained — by environments, foods, information, company — and learning to read one's own is not optional, because without the reading a person is at the mercy of whatever room they walk into (Energy, Associative And Dissociative Energy, Vitality, Rest And Regeneration).

Sacrifice is the terminal one: what a person is willing to lay down. Not loss imposed, which is a different thing, but voluntary release for the sake of something greater — the work that no longer fits, the comfort that prevents growth, the identity outgrown. Anyone imagining a crossing with no sacrifice has misread the architecture (Sacrifice, The Act Of Release, The Voluntary Leap Forward).

Money, possessions, status and title are derivative — records of how the four were spent (Money, TimeEnergy, Time Currency, The six capitals). So the discipline is one question asked of each, at four sizes: this hour, this day, this season, this life. Am I spending this in line with what I say I am for? (The compass question, A Day Well Lived, The TEA Card.)

Also called: attention, time, energy, sacrifice · what a being actually spends Stands on: TimeEnergy · Energy · Time · Sacrifice Opens onto: Focused Attention As Discipline · Time-Energy Accounting · The TEA Card · Voluntary Tithing · Money · The six capitals · Rest And Regeneration · The Act Of Release In play: the table — the four questions behind every commitment a Player makes Sources: LIØNSBERG Wiki Books/LIØNSBERG, Earth, and the Cosmos/Cards/The Four Currencies.md (Card, captured, from the audit of The Wisdom of the Way) Open: The corpus elsewhere pairs time and energy as one unit and counts attention separately again; the enumerations do not agree. · The Card's claim that time is denser at higher presence is offered as verifiable by practice and has no test attached. · Whether sacrifice is a currency or the act of spending the other three is not settled.