I finally know what distinguishes man from the other beasts: financial worries.

Renard’s wry aphorism reduces “human exceptionalism” to a bleakly modern trait: anxiety about money. Instead of reason, language, or morality, he points to the uniquely human capacity to abstract the future into budgets, debts, and social comparison—and to suffer accordingly. The joke works by deflating lofty philosophical claims about what separates humans from animals, replacing them with a mundane but pervasive preoccupation. It also hints at a critique of bourgeois life: financial systems and property relations create a constant background of worry that animals, living more immediately, do not share. The line’s sting is its implication that civilization’s supposed progress has merely refined new forms of fear.