90% of the World Is Stuck in a Game They Don’t Want To Play

Let’s face it: the economy is rigged and getting worse

May 01, 2021

Imagine you’re given the option to play one of two games:

Game #1

It’s the year 2021. You will start out by sharing a few hundred acres with a close-knit, self-sufficient community of 150 people who know you intimately. They will teach you all the life skills you need for free. Then, by contributing three or four hours of infinitely varied and interesting labor per day, you'll be able to directly meet all your needs for the rest of your life without the need for money or politicians or taxation, in a way that strengthens your body and improves the planet for future generations. You will have an equal say in the decision-making of your community. You will rarely feel busy, lonely, or anxious. You will likely die naturally at an old age in your sleep, at home, surrounded by people you love.

Game #2

It’s the year 2021. You start with no land and maybe a few semi-skilled family members if you’re lucky. You’ll then be expected to indebt yourself to the tune of hundreds of thousands of credit-money points in order to acquire one specific skill that will allow you to accumulate more money points. You’ll then be expected to work for at least forty years at one repetitive task you probably don’t love that wears down your body and doesn’t exercise most of your potential. During this entire time, someone else (either a boss, shareholder, lender, and most often all three) will make money points off your time, talent, and hard work. Each year, your money points will be worth less than the year before, but the cost of everything you need — food, housing, clothes, heat, energy, transportation —will keep going up. In a few years, all your saved money points will become meaningless because they will be completely untethered from underlying useable value anyway. Worse still, you will have less autonomy, freedom, and control over your life each year, as powerful elites bribe politicians to pass laws that advance their agenda and put you at a systemic disadvantage. With one exception: if you get lucky and find a way to exploit enough money points off of other people. Either way, you will suffer chronic busyness, loneliness, stress, anxiety, and hopelessness. This game will make you contribute to planetary collapse whether you like it or not, leaving far less real wealth for future generations, and there is a high likelihood you will die painfully, in a plastic-clad hospital surrounded mostly by strangers, nearly a decade sooner than the Game #1 version of yourself.

Which game would you choose?

Frankly, your choice doesn't matter.

You’re stuck in Game #2.

A few thousand families control the world.

The top dozen control more than the bottom half.

There are 7.9+ billion of us — most of whom would be happy to live free of manipulated currency and corporate-sponsored politicians and unaccountable taxation in a self-sufficient community of friends and family — but pretty much only the happiest people on earth (monks and nuns) still do.