Never learning to solve for money is one kind of tragedy. Never being able to stop solving for money is a different kind of tragedy. It’s not about when you have enough. It’s about when you’ve had enough.
I’m mostly still a shameless neoliberal shill scheming to make cosmopolitan globalism great again, but one shift in cultural attitudes I vibe with strongly is general exhaustion with solving for money. It was insane for 4 decades.
I think the wealthy still don’t viscerally appreciate why deep inequality is a problem. With enough persistent inequality people start checking out of the money game. Participate in the least effort way to meet a minimum and walk off the playing field.
That’s why they trot out irrelevant arguments like material standards being better for all etc. An unequal economy is like a sports league where one team always wins because they get to rollover win margin from the last game. The game gets boring to play or watch.
Hustle theater takes 2 sides — a preacher side selling winning formulas and a hungry audience itching to play. Feels like preachers are preaching hard as ever but the audience is kinda wandering off.
It will be interesting to see how a world with weak money works. It’s like when religion got weak and people largely stopped solving for an afterlife. And the world does didn’t fall apart.
The pandemic was the first big lesson in a long time that there are limits to solving problems by solving for money. Some problems are too big to financialize.
The “burnout wave” going on is about a lot of people deciding to stop solving for money. They’ve had enough. What happens when you stop solving for money? You fuck around and find out.
You once proclaimed that money is the thing that it makes the most sense to solve for.
Was it the overwhelming and all-flattening success of financializtion that killed it?