Money Blind

Monetizing every aspect of our lives has blinded us from what truly matters. It will, inevitably, continue to destroy the health of ourselves and our planet...

Read time: Approx 5-7 mins

We’ve all been there. Chasing the dollar, dreaming of the day the numbers in our bank account finally feel… comfortable. We strive for it, sacrifice for it, often measure our worth by it. Money. It's the lubricant of our modern world, the silent engine of ambition, the supposed key to all our desires. We try to find the good in it, to frame it as a tool for generosity, a means to an end, a necessary evil.

But what if I told you that money is the perfect story of Lucifer? A beautiful, shimmering angel, once revered for its light, now fallen, blinding us with its power and twisting our very perceptions. A wolf in sheep’s clothing, whose subtle bite has infected nearly every corner of our lives, even the acts of human kindness and shared knowledge that once flowed freely.

From where I stand, a fortunate soul with a stable job and a roof over my head, I admit my own bias. My privilege is a lens, and I know it. But looking through it, what I see isn’t pretty.

The Golden Cage of Privilege:

Think about folks like Elon Musk, or any of the myriad of billionaires who seem to dictate the global conversation. Their words, often delivered from a platform of unimaginable wealth, carry disproportionate weight. Why? Because we, as a society, have elevated money and status to a god-like reverence. We worship the balance sheet, confusing financial success with inherent wisdom or moral authority.

These titans of industry, often brilliant in their domains, are, tragically, often utterly blind to the gilded cage of their own privilege. They speak from a place where basic human needs are not just met, but opulent. Their solutions to societal problems often reflect this detachment, failing to grasp the raw, gritty realities of daily survival for billions. And because we, in our collective awe of their wealth, seem to absorb their every pronouncement, the world truly does bend to the whims of those who have cornered the market on our collective aspiration. It’s a sad, self-perpetuating cycle.

The Digital Serpent:

Money has infiltrated *everything*. Remember when the internet felt like a vast, open library? A place where you could learn how to change a tire, bake sourdough, or meditate, all for the price of your ISP bill. Now, try finding a simple how-to video without wading through five minutes of ads, or hitting a paywall the moment you try to access anything beyond the bare minimum.

It's not entirely the content creator's fault, bless their capitalist hearts. They need to eat, pay rent, and maybe even afford their own increasingly expensive healthcare. They've been forced into the monetization game to survive. But we are foolish to think that this doesn’t subtly, insidiously, influence the very content they produce.

I see it constantly with my favorite podcasts. They’ll wax poetic about evidence-based health practices, about radical self-care and authentic living. Then, without missing a beat, they hawk some overpriced, often scientifically dubious supplement like Athletic Greens AG1. You know, and I know, they’re getting a kickback. It’s a direct contradiction, a jarring dissonance between their proclaimed values and their financial realities. And it's not just supplements. It bleeds into how we view everything from immigration (are they a burden or a benefit to the *economy*?) to even something as abstract as the stock market.

The stock market, our great barometer of wealth, is less about tangible value and more about collective human psychology. It dances to the rhythm of our hopes and fears, our greed and our panic. Those with significant power and money understand this fundamental truth. They know that a well-placed news article, a carefully stoked social movement, or even the looming threat of war, while possessing their own complex merits, can be amplified and manipulated because, deep down, the super-wealthy understand its influence on collective psychology, spending habits, and ultimately, their own burgeoning fortunes.

Bloat, Burnout, and Broken Hearts

My wife is a teacher, and in my humble (and biased) opinion, she is quite simply the best. I watch her pour her soul into nurturing the potential and protecting the innocence of these young children every single day. Yet, she exists in a constant state of cognitive dissonance, trying to do profound, human work within a system that seems hell-bent on bloat and financial absurdity.

The education system, ostensibly designed to foster growth, has become a bureaucratic beast. More and more resources are diverted from the most crucial frontline jobs – those directly impacting the students – into an ever-expanding maw of administrative positions and questionable consultants. And those in power, who control the purse strings, very subtly insert utterly meaningless metrics that teachers are forced to abide by. These metrics, in no earthly way, genuinely help the children. The teachers know it. They feel it in their bones.

This is why they are leaving in droves. Because when your deepest inner knowing, your moral compass, clashes violently with financial pressures and societal demands for meaningless data, the inevitable outcome is burnout, depression, and ultimately, profoundly bad results for the very children we claim to cherish. It's a fact. F**k the noise that says otherwise.

Time, Truth, and the Yacht Problem

I work in healthcare. I've probably burnt out more times than I care to admit. I got into this field because, deep down, I couldn’t imagine a job that didn’t directly involve helping people. Having navigated my own psychological struggles and physical ailments, I've become acutely aware of the raw pain that others carry. I know, with every fiber of my being, that what people need more than anything these days is to be seen, validated, and given the time and space for genuine healing to occur.

But the system, oh, the system! The f**king system… It keeps crunching harder and harder, reducing patient interactions to frantic ten-minute slots, all so those at the top don't have to scale back their yacht collections or sell off their multi-million dollar mansions. The recent, horrific actions of Luigi Mangione, while never to be condoned, should serve as a stark, screaming wake-up call about the psychological, economic, and hierarchical despair brewing beneath the surface of our society.

We live in a wage-based society that, I don't care what anyone wants to admit, is a modern form of slavery. People in power control money. Money controls psychological actions. Because, at the end of the day, if you do not abide by the system, if you step off the conveyor belt, your health, your family's health, your very survival will collapse. That, my friends, is slavery. Call it capitalism. Call it trickle-down economics. Call it “rise and grind.” Call it hustle culture. Call it whatever your brain needs to justify the atrocities on the back end of your decisions. It's f**king slavery.

Consider highly lucrative professions, like orthopedic surgery. While I would never claim that these skilled physicians are doing things for financial gain *alone*, it is incredibly naive to think that, in some way, their colossal paychecks are not influencing some of their behavior. That's just how humans work. It happens to me; sometimes, I'm not even aware of it until after the fact, a subtle whisper of bias in my own decisions. That's why I've burned out repeatedly and actively try to distance myself from workplaces that are heavily tied to billing metrics. I know, deep down, that it will inevitably clash with my core morality and ultimately grind me down. There's simply no way to genuinely balance human well-being with profit margins in today's skewed world.

The Human Heart in a Money-Mad World

I’ve been working at a migrant outreach clinic for the last two summers. These are legal visa holders, mostly from places like Mexico and Honduras, here on temporary visas to perform manual labor that most Americans wouldn’t tolerate. They are paid absolute garbage wages, have shockingly few rights, and work most of their waking hours during the harvesting season. Many arrive with significant health issues, but no means to care for them, no time to get care, and they’ll return to health systems back home that are frankly not designed to sustain life.

So, we do our best. We set them up with what we can, but there's this gut-wrenching pain knowing that they will do what they need to do to survive. Even if that means putting our carefully crafted health recommendations aside for another back-breaking day of work. I’ve never been in that position, and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. And despite what I perceive as a profound form of suffering, these people are some of the most genuinely gracious, deeply human individuals I have ever worked with. That's why my days, as exhausting as the can be, just..feel different. Feel like what being human is supposed to, maybe? They would give you the shirt off their back, the last few dollars in their wallet, the food from their meager plate—regardless of how little that left them. The level of sheer, unadulterated humanity in these individuals… it makes you realize just how incredibly messed up this world is, and how profoundly money has warped our own sense of compassion and connection.

The Zero-Sum Game of Accumulation

I think it is reasonable to recommend that people acquire a basic level of financial literacy these days, simply to navigate and survive. But to claim that money is a net positive for humanity is, frankly, foolish. With every asset owned, every rental property acquired, every vast safety net built, someone on the other end is, in some way, suffering.

The Cult of Scarcity

Let’s pause and talk about the foundational myth that props up this entire house of cards: growth. We are taught—sometimes explicitly, often subliminally—that forward is the only valid direction. “Once I have enough saved, I’ll finally…” “When my business grows, then I’ll…” “I just need to hustle a bit more, and I’ll arrive.”

But this linear, upward-only trajectory is not just unrealistic, but deeply damaging. Our economic system is built not on balance or sustainability, but on scarcity. It needs you to believe there’s never enough. That you're never enough. That everything is a race, and the finish line keeps moving.

Capitalism, particularly in its modern, late-stage iteration, only functions if there’s perpetual growth. If businesses don’t grow, they “die.” If the economy doesn’t grow, it’s in “recession.” Stasis is treated like decay. The machine must expand, consume, devour—always. And what happens when it can’t?

Here’s the hard truth: growth cannot occur forever. The planet has limits. Water is drying up, forests are shrinking, the ice is melting, and the ground we stand on is less stable—literally and figuratively. Yet the mindset hasn't shifted. We’re still playing by rules written in the 1950s: invest in a home, get a 9-5, stash money in a 401k, and watch it grow. That worked—once—because of a very specific post-war economic boom, relatively empty land, and an artificially suppressed underclass. But the rules have changed. The world is more crowded. Globalized. Interconnected. Tapped out.

So what do we do? Most people keep trying to run the same playbook, wondering why it’s not working. Why rent eats half their income. Why their degree doesn’t guarantee a career. Why that “starter home” now costs $400k in a city where they make $60k. It's not them. It's not a lack of grit or financial savvy. It’s the scarcity model itself, still whispering that success is just one more side hustle away.

And the people who did win that old game—those who got in on real estate, on stocks, on pre-boom America—many of them now weaponize their success into advice. “Just save more.” “Buy used.” “Work harder.” But they’re like travelers who boarded a train when the tracks were freshly laid, telling the rest of us to just “catch up” while the rail yard burns down behind them.

Until we name this illusion—that infinite growth is not just unsustainable but delusional—we will keep slamming into the wall of reality and blaming ourselves for the bruises.

Capitalism, in its purest, most unchecked form, is a profoundly blinding system. The illusion is that everyone can ascend, that prosperity is universally available. But the hard, cold truth is that the wealthy stockpiling resources, assets, and wealth cannot exist without an increasingly larger class of poverty. It’s a teeter-totter. The higher one end goes, the lower the other *must* go to compensate. Unless someone has quietly dismantled the Law of Conservation of Mass, resources cannot simply grow ‘til the end of time…There is no world, no economic theory, no magical pixie dust that makes this not the case. It is a zero-sum game, disguised as “opportunity.”

So, the next time we chase that dollar, or admire the shiny trappings of wealth, let’s remember the serpent in our pockets. Let’s remember the subtle, insidious way it twists our perceptions, warps our systems, and, ultimately, makes us believe that a number in a bank account is more valuable than our humanity, our health, or the boundless, unquantifiable wisdom of simply being alive. It’s time to call this wolf by its true name. And please, for the love of God…stop voting for the f**king lunatics who continue to perpetuate this toxic system.