I don't know about you, but I've been leaving the house without cash for a while now. And I don't mean going down to buy bread. I mean taking a high-speed train, going to Madrid, spending the whole day there, and coming back without a single coin in my wallet. Not a bill. Nothing. At most, a card. And often not even that: my phone. I suppose that was progress. That's why it's somewhat comical that the European Central Bank is now recommending that we keep cash at home. Not much. Between 70 and 100 euros per person, more or less what would be needed to last 72 hours in case of an emergency. In other words, the same system that has been pushing us towards an increasingly digital, more traceable, and more dependent world of screens, networks, batteries, keys, and platforms for years, is now asking us to keep a few bills in a drawer in case all this technical marvel fails for three days. The news is amusing. First, they get us used to not touching money. Then they turn cash into a somewhat inconvenient relic, even suspicious and frowned upon. Then they close ATMs, reduce branches, normalize paying by swiping a finger over a screen. And, when the process is already quite advanced, they warn us: "Don't forget to have a little cash just in case." Just in case of what. Just in case what almost everything now depends on fails.The ECB explains it in technical language: resilience, contingency, operational continuity. All very credible. But translated into everyday Catalan, it means something quite simple: have cash, because we know the system can fail. And when it fails, you won't eat with a password. What strikes me most is not that they tell us to have cash at home, but that they have had to say it. It doesn't show that the authorities are giving up on digital money. It shows just the opposite: that they know perfectly well how much we have handed over our daily lives to a payment and collection infrastructure that we do not control. So much so, that they are publicly releasing a contingency plan that consists of returning, for 72 hours, to something that was supposed to be despicable and old. They don't recommend it to us from a daily perspective, but as a monetary first-aid kit, like someone who advises having flashlights, batteries, or cans of preserves. Honestly, it makes me laugh. Put 100 euros in your emergency kit for blackouts.The message: it's not that cash is still alive; it's that we've advanced so much towards its daily irrelevance that the central bank has had to remind us that real money (the kind that works when everything else fails) still exists, and that we should try to keep some at home. We are a society that, in effect, has already given up on cash.
