Strawberry Planet

I want you to imagine something with me for a second.

There's a planet out there, somewhere, that is identical to Earth in every single way. Same people. Same buildings and cars and countries and cities and oceans and mountains. Same arguments, same dreams, same Monday mornings. Everything is the same.

Except for one thing.

There is no money on this planet. There is no such thing as money. What there is, though, is strawberries. And strawberries are how everything works.

When you go to work on Friday morning, your boss hands you a crate of strawberries. You did a good job this quarter, so you get a little bonus. 27 extra strawberries.

You stop and fill up on the way home and you hand the guy behind the counter a few strawberries. You get home and put the rest in the fridge, and you're feeling pretty good about yourself because this was a solid week for strawberries.

This is Strawberry Planet. And everything about it makes exactly as much sense as the world you and I live in right now.

There's a guy on Strawberry Planet who wakes up every morning and checks his strawberry count on an app. He's refreshing a screen to see whether his pile of fruit got bigger or smaller overnight, and whatever that number says determines whether today is a good day or a bad day. His wife can tell the second he looks at his phone. If the strawberries went up, he's present at breakfast. If they went down, he's distant and irritable and short with the kids and she's learned not to bring up anything important until after lunch.

His life is being dictated by fruit. On a screen.

There's a woman on Strawberry Planet who has 40 billion strawberries. She couldn't eat them in ten thousand lifetimes. They're sitting in warehouses across the country, and some of them are starting to rot because there are too many to even keep track of. She has a team of people whose entire job is to watch her strawberries. She has security guards walking the perimeter of her strawberry warehouses 24 hours a day. She wakes up every morning and the first thing she thinks about is how to get more.

She has more fruit than any human being could ever consume, and she still can't stop.

There are two brothers on Strawberry Planet who haven't spoken in eleven years. They loved each other, grew up in the same house, played in the same yard, had the same mother. And then she died and left behind a big pile of strawberries, and the two brothers couldn't agree on who deserved more of them.

So they hired people, and paid those people a lot of strawberries, to fight each other in a courtroom over their dead mom's strawberries. The fight lasted three years and by the end of it both brothers had fewer strawberries than they started with and a mother who was still gone and a relationship that might never come back.

Over fruit.

There's a couple on Strawberry Planet who were madly in love. They laughed together and dreamed of building something beautiful in the future, a future that belonged to them. And then the strawberries got tight. They started arguing about strawberries at dinner. The arguments got louder and more frequent and eventually they stopped being about the strawberries at all, but that's where they started so that's what they kept coming back to.

They measured their worth the same way almost everyone on Strawberry Planet measures their worth, by looking at their pile. And their pile wasn't big enough to quiet the voice that says they're falling behind.

They get divorced. The kids go back and forth between two houses now, which costs a lot of strawberries, but the lawyers ate well.

There's a kid on Strawberry Planet who gets made fun of at school because his parents don't have a lot of strawberries. He's nine years old and he already believes something is wrong with him, and the thing he believes is wrong has nothing to do with who he is and everything to do with how many strawberries his parents have.

Nobody sat him down and taught him that. He just absorbed it, the way kids absorb everything on Strawberry Planet, which is by watching what the adults around them worship.

There's a university on Strawberry Planet that costs an enormous amount of strawberries to attend. The people who go there carry themselves a little different, and they feel a little better than the people who don't go there. The education isn't better. The teachers aren't smarter.

But the kid from the cheaper school down the road learned the same lesson. On Strawberry Planet, the number of strawberries you spend on your education will follow you around like a credit score for your soul.

There's a woman on Strawberry Planet who saved strawberries her whole life. She sacrificed more than anyone else. She said no to the trip. She said not yet to the dinner. She said maybe next year to the thing she actually wanted to do, because the responsible thing on Strawberry Planet is to save your strawberries and wait and be patient and someday, someday, you'll have enough to finally enjoy them.

She's 74 now. She has a warehouse full of strawberries and a body that can't do half the things she was saving them for. The strawberries are all there. The life she was going to spend them on has mostly passed.

She thought her life was out there in the future, waiting for her to find it. Now she knows it was here the whole time.

There are entire countries on Strawberry Planet that go to war over strawberry fields. They draw borders around the soil and they send young people to die so that the supply stays in the right hands. The young people don't own any of the strawberries. They don't get to decide where the strawberries go, they just die near the fields protecting the supply of strawberries.

And back home, the people in charge build monuments to the ones who died and give speeches about sacrifice and honor, and they do it standing in rooms that were paid for with the same strawberries those young people were sent to protect.

If you asked anyone on Strawberry Planet whether strawberries were the most important thing in life, every single one of them would say no. Every one. But if you watched how they spent their mornings and their energy and their relationships and their health and their best years, the answer was almost always yes. The gap between what people said they believed and how they actually lived was the biggest gap on the entire planet.

But, there was an old man named Sam who lived on Strawberry Planet who figured out what strawberries were actually for.

He spent his twenties and most of his thirties doing exactly what everyone else on Strawberry Planet did, which is chasing strawberries and checking the pile and subconsciously asking the same question that almost everyone on the planet was asking, which is "do I have enough?" and "am I enough?"

And the strawberries kept replying "not yet."

Then one year Sam's little daughter got sick. Really sick. And Sam spent three months sitting in a chair next to her bed and he didn't check his strawberries once. Not once in three months. And when she got better, Sam realized something. To her, he had always been enough. He went back to his life, but something had shifted. He had gone ninety days without looking at the pile and the world didn't end and his family was still there and the sun still came up and he realized he had been looking to the strawberries to answer a question they were never designed to answer.

So Sam stopped asking.

And he started using the strawberries instead of serving them.

He spent three months' worth of strawberries taking his wife to a place she'd been talking about since she was twenty-three years old. His neighbor thought he was out of his mind. Sam said it was the best strawberries he ever spent.

When the family down the road lost their strawberries in a fire, Sam showed up with a crate and left it on the porch and never mentioned it. They found out it was him three years later.

There were years when Sam didn't have very many strawberries at all, but his kids could never tell. He showed up the same way every single morning regardless of what was in the warehouse.

Sam understood that the highest form of intelligence on Strawberry Planet wasn't acquiring the most strawberries. It was building a life you actually wanted to live.

Sam died last Tuesday.

The people who loved him celebrated his life in an old barn on a farm, and the room was full, and not one person who stood up to speak mentioned strawberries. Not one. They talked about how he made them feel. They talked about the laughter and the trips they took. The people he helped. They talked about the way he showed up for others and what it was like to be around someone who seemed free in a way that most people on Strawberry Planet never figured out.

After it was over, Sam's son sat in the parking lot and cried, thinking about something his dad told him on graduation day when he was 18 that he didn't really understand until he was about forty. By this time he had kids of his own and had spent over a decade chasing strawberries and checking the pile every morning and letting a number on a screen tell him whether he was allowed to feel okay about himself.

He remembered that moment, that life lesson, and the way his dad's eyes looked when he said:

Son, we invented strawberries to measure value. Don't ever let them measure you.