It just seems to me that you'd need a lot of people on board to not take advantage of it. I'm not quite sure how someone would take advantage of it but it's hard to imagine it working at scale. This is in fact pretty close to what co-ops do, right? employees are paid but there's no owner that profits. Someone who organizes it would take a salary? (ironically, I believe that grocery stores are one of the lowest-margin businesses out there so even though I like your analogy of breath in vipassana to food in society, groceries are not actually a very high-profit business) On the subject of money: one of the things that's interesting when you study the history of currencies is that humans didn't use them in very small groups. There was just no need. But with trade among tribes, currencies tended to emerge naturally as a way to facilitate exchanges. You might find the study of money quite interesting.