What do we actually have?

We often hear the same sentence repeated again and again in political debates, budget meetings, and everyday conversations:

“There isn’t enough money.”

Not enough money for better schools.
Not enough money for safer infrastructure.
Not enough money for healthcare, climate transition, or protecting children.

But do we actually have enough resources if money is not the obstacle?

Money is not a resource.

Money is a permission system. A token. A bookkeeping layer placed on top of physical reality. And it is man-made. We create it from nothing — mostly as debt — and inject it into circulation as loans that must be repaid with interest.

Yet repayment does not come from money itself.

It comes from extracting, producing, transporting, consuming — from the planet. The main resource depletion comes from trying to repay the never ending debt.

So for a moment, let’s remove money entirely.

If we omit it completely, what do we actually have?

We have energy.
We have land.
We have water.
We have materials.
We have technology.
We have knowledge.
We have human time and skill.
And we have ecological regeneration rates.

That is the real inventory of civilization.

Do We Physically Have Enough?

For basic human wellbeing, the answer is clearly yes.

Food

We already produce more than enough food globally to feed every human being on Earth. Several times over. Hunger today is not caused by insufficient production. It is caused by distribution systems, purchasing power, conflict, and waste. In other words, it is caused by the monetary system itself.

Energy

The amount of solar energy striking Earth each day exceeds total global human energy consumption many times over. Wind, geothermal, hydro, and storage technologies are already capable of supplying far more than we currently harness. The constraint is not energy availability — it is infrastructure, investment priorities, and political will.

Housing

In many countries, empty homes coexist with homelessness. We have the materials, the construction knowledge, and the technical capacity to house everyone safely. The bottleneck is not bricks, timber, or engineering. It is access.

Water

The planet holds vast freshwater reserves, and we possess desalination, purification, recycling, and distribution technologies. Water itself is part of a continuous planetary cycle — it evaporates, condenses, falls, flows, and can be cleaned and reused again and again. The issue is not that water does not exist. It is how it is managed, allocated, polluted, and whether we choose to treat it as a renewable flow rather than a disposable commodity.

Technology & Coordination

Never in history have we had this level of technical sophistication. We can monitor ecosystems from satellites, design regenerative agriculture systems, 3D-print buildings, coordinate global logistics in real time, and model climate systems with advanced computation.

The limiting factor is not capacity.

The limiting factor is organization.

The Real Constraint: Regeneration Rates

There is, however, a physical boundary.

The planet regenerates forests, fisheries, soil, and freshwater at measurable rates. It absorbs waste and carbon at measurable rates.

If extraction exceeds regeneration, systems destabilize.

This is not ideological. It is biological and thermodynamic.

So the real resource question is not:

“Is there enough money?”

It is:

“Are we operating within ecological renewal rates?”

If we align civilization with regeneration rather than with financial return, abundance becomes possible.

Not infinite growth — but sustainable sufficiency.

What We Have, In Reality

We have:

• Enough food production capacity
• Vast renewable energy potential
• Sufficient material resources for safe housing
• Advanced global coordination technology
• Knowledge accumulated across centuries
• Billions of skilled human beings capable of contribution

What we lack is not resources.

We lack alignment.

Money often makes scarcity appear natural. But most of today’s scarcity is structural — created by ownership systems, pricing mechanisms, debt pressures, and competitive growth incentives.

When money becomes the primary lens, access is rationed by purchasing power.

When physics becomes the lens, access is organized by availability and regeneration.

Remove the permission-token layer, and civilization must face physical reality directly.

That may sound restrictive.

In truth, it may be clarifying.

Because once we look at what we actually have — energy, land, materials, knowledge, and human capability — it becomes difficult to argue that poverty, homelessness, and ecological collapse are caused by a lack of resources.

They are caused by how we choose to organize them.

So perhaps the real question has never been:

“Do we have enough money?”

Perhaps the real question is:

Do we have enough wisdom to use what we already have?

If this reflection resonates with you, I invite you to explore these ideas further in Waking Up – A Journey Towards a New Dawn for Humanity, where a future civilization has already reorganized itself around physical reality rather than financial abstraction.

And please share this article if it resonates. The conversation about resources, value, and our collective future is one worth expanding. Don’t you think?