When you sit down and really examine the function of money through the base societal purpose it's supposed to serve, its role is beautifully simple: money is credit you earn within a society for performing tasks which are necessary, but will not be completed unless somebody is provided a personal incentive. As a reward for contributing to necessities of society, you are given a universally trusted unit of exchange which is accepted by others. Those who accept your unit of exchange will then perform laborious tasks on your own behalf that they'd rather not have to do, be it the production of goods or performance of services. You spend your time doing laborious tasks you may dislike, but which need to be performed. In exchange for that sacrifice, strangers will do laborious things for you as part of regular transactional interactions. This social innovation is how we were able to scale up from small tribes where everybody had personal connections to massive civilizations full of strangers performing highly specialized roles, and when the system is respected it has worked beautifully. We haven't respected the system for over a century now, and that's why things are fucked up. Units that are meant to represent an expenditure of effort towards the maintenance and/or advancement of civilization are now printed by the trillions, backed by none of the labor that it was traditionally supposed to represent. The modern monetary system is a mockery of the human innovation of currency that allowed us to build large million+ pop civilizations of specialized labor in the first place, and the only reason the mockery goes unchallenged is because generations of conditioning has bred an unquestionable respect for this ancient social paradigm, paired with a widespread and misplaced trust in our leaders' abilities to resist corrupting the money for their own personal gain when it's within their capacity to do so.