If you’ve ever wondered why work feels draining, affording housing feels impossible, healthcare feels deadly, and debt feels endless — today’s article is for you.
Because the problem isn’t greed. It’s not corruption. And it’s not bad people. It’s something much less sexy than all those things: economics.
Not money — the rules around the money. Economics is the operating system our society has been running… but the current version is an operating system you never agreed to install.
Warning: once you see this, you can’t unsee it. And this realization might change how you hear everything else I talk about.
Why Everything Feels Connected
There’s a reason all of our conversations — work, housing, healthcare, debt, burnout, climate — keep collapsing into each other.
It’s not a coincidence. It’s not because people are hopelessly broken. And it’s not because everything has always been terrible.
It’s because all of these systems are running on the same invisible operating system, an OS called economics.
For our whole lives, most of us have been working inside this system without ever really understanding what it actually is, how it came to be, or how it really works.
Here’s the definition most of us were never given: economics is how a society decides what matters, who gets what, and who absorbs the cost when things break.
It’s not money. Money’s just the scoreboard.
The rules are the real story.
Once you see economics this way, patterns snap into focus. We stop asking why something failed and start noticing why every system seems to fail in the same direction.
What Economy Is (And Isn’t)
First, let’s talk about “economy.”
The word economy comes from the ancient Greek oikonomia which means the management of a household.
Not the stock market.
Not GDP.
The household.
Early economic thinking was about stewardship: how to manage resources so the household could live well, endure over time, and pass something viable forward. Limits weren’t obstacles, but kept life “bound” in healthy ways.
That’s why Aristotle made a sharp distinction between managing resources for life and accumulating wealth for its own sake. He called the first oikonomia (good) and the second chrematistics (dangerous). You don’t have to be a native speaker of ancient Greek to see: these are two VERY different words.
So here’s the invitation: what if we started thinking of ‘economy’ as how we collectively manage our household — just at planetary scale?
I mean, if humanity has a household, it’s Planet Earth, right?
Space = really cold.
Mars = super boring.
Earth = pretty damn spectacular.
So let’s say it: this is our collective household.
Then, how well do you think we’re doing at collectively managing our household? What grade would you give us?
Well, I can tell you one thing: if accumulating money is the goal, we are definitely no longer doing oikonomia.
We’re doing chrematistics.
Which isn’t “economy” anymore, at all. It’s something else.
How did we get here?
Economics To The Rescue!
For more than a thousand years, economics didn’t exist as a separate discipline at all. Not because people weren’t producing or trading, but because life was organized locally, visibly, and within natural limits.
After Rome, economies were embedded in land, obligation, tradition, and religion. People lived close enough to consequences that abstraction wasn’t possible. You don’t need models to explain limits when winter and hunger were right there.
Economics emerges as a discipline only when systems scale beyond human visibility — when trade expands across continents, states consolidate power, and complexity needs managing from a distance. That’s when economics stops being about households and starts being about… a bunch of other stuff.
Then, in the late 19th century, economics deliberately remade itself as a science.
This wasn’t an organic evolution — it was a calculated choice, driven by what critics call “physics envy.” Economists wanted the authority of the hard sciences, so they started building mathematical models that treated human behavior like predictable, mechanical forces.
In this new framework, humans became “rational actors.” Values became “preferences.” Nature became an “input.”
This narrowing gave economics authority. (It also amputated reality.)
But why exactly did economics remake itself this way at this particular moment?
Because if you can make your model look like physics — like gravity — then outcomes stop looking like choices and start looking like laws of nature. Inequality isn’t unjust, it’s just efficient. Extraction isn’t immoral, it’s simply optimizing. Suffering isn’t a policy failure, it’s a deeply regrettable side effect of “natural market forces.”
This gave capital an enormous gift: moral cover. You can’t argue with gravity. And if poverty is just a natural law? Well, then no one’s responsible for it.
The timing of this wasn’t accidental. Economics became “scientific” in the late 1800s — right as industrialization was creating massive inequality, child labor, brutal working conditions, and very visible human suffering.
Economics arrived with a convenient lie: this isn’t exploitation, it’s efficiency. This isn’t a choice, it’s nature.
If that suffering looked like a choice, people might demand it stop. But if it looked like a natural law? Well, then it’s just… unfortunate.
Mistaking The Map For Reality
Here’s another important distinction:
The economy is how we organize our shared, global household.
Economics, then, is the map we use to understand how our household is doing.
But lately, we’ve been confusing the map for the house itself.
Think about a map. A map can be incredibly useful. But it doesn’t include every tree, it doesn’t show the weather, it doesn’t show how exhausted you are on the trail, and it doesn’t show what it feels like to actually walk the terrain.
Imagine this hiking conversation:
You say: “I’m lost and dehydrated.”
The System replies: “That’s impossible. According to the map, you’re right here, doing great!”
That’s not a bad map, that’s a complete misunderstanding of what a map is freaking FOR.
But it also sounds a lot like a soundbite on the evening news, doesn’t it?
You say: “It’s harder for me to afford things than it has been in my whole life.”
The System replies: “That’s impossible. The stock market is higher than it’s ever been!”
That’s economics when it stops being a tool and starts being a judge.
Here’s the other problem: once the model matters more than our actual lived experience, anything the model can’t see stops mattering.
Burnout becomes “friction.” Ecological collapse becomes an “externality.” Care work — or any work traditionally done by women in general — disappears from sight altogether. Extortion of customers becomes “market power” and “record profits.” Hoarding money becomes “success.”
This is the lie: modern economics makes suffering look like YOUR failure instead of the system’s design.
It treats your exhaustion as poor time management, not overwork. Your debt as bad choices, not wage theft. Your burnout as weakness, not terrible workplace policies.
At that point, extraction isn’t a bug. It’s a feature!
Markets Are Not Nature
We need to understand something else that’s very important: markets are NOT natural.
They are not gravity.
They are not weather.
They do not exist in the biological world.
Markets are systems designed by humans. They have rules, assumptions, and values baked into them — and those values, surprise, weren’t chosen by you.
There’s the lie again: markets feel natural because we were born into them. No one listening to this has ever lived a single day without them. So they feel inevitable, like oxygen or seasons.
They are not.
And what’s more: creating a full market economy — where land, labor, and money are all bought and sold — requires demolishing what came before.
In England, for example, there was the enclosure movement. Land that had been held “in common” (for grazing, foraging, fuel gathering) was enclosed by fences and privatized over hundreds of years, with parliamentary acts peaking in the late 1700s and early 1800s.
People who had used the commons to graze animals, gather fuel, and supplement their food suddenly lost that access. Without it, they had no choice but to sell their labor to survive.
That’s not a market emerging naturally. That’s a market being forced into existence.
This is what happens. Markets don’t arise spontaneously. They require states to enforce property rights, protect contracts, and discipline labor. They’re built — and then protected — by power.
And once they’re built, what the state enforces determines:
- who they prioritize
- what they ignore
- and what, and who, they sacrifice
We’ve talked about this before: markets are excellent at allocating prices. But they’re terrible at seeing care, restraint, or long-term stewardship.
Here’s what that looks like in practice:
Prevention almost never gets prioritized. Prevention doesn’t generate profit — it just avoids future costs that aren’t on anyone’s balance sheet yet.
Burnout spreads. Extracting more output from fewer people looks like efficiency because the human cost doesn’t show up in the quarterly report.
Housing becomes an investment vehicle and not just shelter. When you can make more money treating housing as an asset class than as a place for people to live, the system will choose the asset class every time.
Health insurance companies create things like “medical loss ratios.” Paying for your healthcare is literally called a loss on their balance sheet. The point isn’t care. It’s profit. You’re not a patient, you’re a revenue stream with an acceptable claims rate.
We’re still burning fossil fuels even though we know better. The system can’t see 50 years ahead. It can barely see past the next earnings call. Future collapse is another “externality.” Present profit is what counts.
None of this happens because people don’t care — but because the system literally can’t see what caring looks like.
When the rules say “maximize shareholder value,” care becomes inefficient. Restraint becomes a competitive disadvantage. Long-term thinking becomes a reason to get replaced.
So the outcomes we keep seeing — the extraction, the exhaustion, the short-termism, the inequality — those aren’t accidents.
They’re what the system was designed to produce.
Neoliberalism (Without the Academic Bullsh*t)
So how did this logic end up everywhere?
After the Great Depression and World War II, many countries built public systems, regulated markets, and strengthened labor. Unions had real power. Corporate tax rates were high. Public investment was substantial. The basic idea was: maybe markets alone shouldn’t run the whole show.
Some people were deeply uncomfortable with that.
These weren’t villains with twirly mustaches or white cats. They didn’t have cartoon devils on their shoulders. They were smart people who genuinely believed that concentrating power in governments would eventually slide into authoritarianism — so they concentrated it in markets instead.
To them, the answer was simple: let markets do the organizing.
Government wouldn’t disappear — it would switch jobs. Instead of providing things directly, it would protect markets, enforce contracts, privatize public goods, and stay out of capital’s way.
I don’t know about you, but that sounds exactly like the world I’ve lived in my entire life.
That worldview eventually got a name: neoliberalism.
For a long time this idea lived in think tanks and universities, not fringe exactly, but not policy either.
Then the 1970s hit. Stagflation. Oil shocks. Economic chaos. The old system seemed broken, and neoliberalism showed up with clean, confident answers that fit on a napkin:
Privatize this.
Deregulate that.
Cut taxes.
Weaken unions.
Basically: just get out of the frickin’ way and let markets do their thing.
And it worked! Not because the ideas were morally better, but because they were coherent, repeatable, and easy to scale. Politicians could explain them in soundbites. Economists could model them. Wealthy interests could fund them.
By the early 1980s, neoliberalism wasn’t theory anymore. It was policy.
Reagan and Thatcher led the way, but it spread everywhere — across parties, across borders, across ideologies. Even center-left governments adopted the framework. Markets became the default solution to nearly every problem.
And here’s what actually changed:
Before neoliberalism, wages tracked with productivity. When companies made more, workers earned more. After neoliberalism, that link broke. Productivity kept climbing, but wages flatlined. The wealth went somewhere else (straight to the top).
Before neoliberalism, unions were strong enough to negotiate. After, they were systematically broken. Reagan fired striking air traffic controllers. Thatcher crushed the miners. The message was clear: labor was no longer a partner. It was a cost to minimize.
Before neoliberalism, financial markets were heavily regulated. After, those regulations dissolved. Banks that had been separated got merged. Risky speculation that had been illegal became normal. The financial system became a casino, and when it crashed in 2008, taxpayers covered the losses.
Before neoliberalism, public goods were publicly provided. After, everything became a market. Prisons, schools, water systems, even parts of the military got privatized. If it could generate profit, it should be run like a business.
Neoliberalism didn’t invent extraction.
But it made extraction feel normal… even virtuous.
It told us that privatization was efficiency. That deregulation was freedom. That tax cuts would lift all boats. That unions were the problem, not low wages. That the market would solve everything if we just got out of its way.
And now, decades later, we’re living in the world those ideas built.
I think you know: I’m not here to fight about ideologies. The only idea I really care about is whatever creates a great future for as many of us as possible. I’m here to say: look at the evidence. You feel the brokenness. This is how we got here.
A Necessary Detour: About “The Rich”
I want to pause and say something carefully, because I know what some of y’all are thinking right now.
You’re thinking it’s time to eat the rich.
And honestly? I get it.
When you’re exhausted, stuck, drowning in debt, and watching obscene wealth pile up at the top, anger makes sense. It’s human. It’s not wrong to notice that the outcomes are wildly unjust.
But here’s the thing I find myself wanting to say over and over (and usually don’t, because comment sections are terrible places for nuance): all elites are not bad people. And not all bad outcomes come from bad actors. And bad systems beat good humans every time.
That doesn’t mean no one behaves badly. It doesn’t mean power doesn’t corrupt. And it definitely doesn’t mean we should stop holding people accountable.
What it does mean is this: even the people at the top are operating inside a system that pressures them to behave in very specific ways. A system that rewards extraction. A system that punishes restraint. A system where slowing down or choosing long-term care often means losing.
I have spent 20 years in the private sector watching this play out right in front of me. A CEO who chooses long-term investment over short-term profit gets fired. Boards replace them with someone who will deliver quarterly returns because they think that’s their job. A company that prioritizes people over growth gets acquired and their culture gutted. Ben & Jerry’s tried to stay mission-driven and got forced into a sale to Unilever. Patagonia’s founder had to give the entire company away to a trust to escape the market’s pressure.
These aren’t villains failing to be good. These are good actors being crushed by the system.
If this were a conspiracy, it would be easier to fight. You could send James Bond into the volcano lair to take out the bad guy.
But it’s not.
It’s a system that works without any one person having to hold all the evil.
When the same outcomes repeat across generations, industries, and ideologies — when inequality keeps growing no matter who’s in charge — we’re not looking at a people problem.
We’re looking at a system design problem.
And system problems never get solved by swapping out the people operating the machine.
So let’s name it clearly: economics as we know it is a lie.
Not because economists are liars. But because the system pretends extraction is nature, suffering is your fault, and markets are gravity.
And this is also why everything feels broken.
Not because you’re broken. But because this operating system was designed to break you… while telling you it’s your fault.
The Optimistic Rebellion
So here’s where we land for today.
If the problem isn’t just bad people — if it’s not just greedy executives or corrupt elites — then blaming individuals, no matter how satisfying it feels, will never fix the thing that’s hurting us.
Systems don’t change when we swap faces.
They change when we challenge the incentives.
Also… outrage is not power. It’s what we get when a system keeps us reacting to its outputs instead of seeing the system itself.
So here’s the optimistic rebellion for us this week.
It’s not a policy, it’s a practice.
For the next week, whenever something makes you legitimately angry — a headline, a CEO quote, a housing story, a healthcare bill, a work demand — pause and ask one question:
What is the system rewarding?
Not who’s the villain.
Not who should be punished.
But:
- What behavior is being incentivized by the system? and
- What behavior is being punished by the system?
This approach helps pull us out of “outrage theater” and drops us into systems awareness, which is where real leverage lives.
And here’s what makes this bearable: Once you see the operating system, you’ll start finding others who see it too. You’re not crazy. You’re not alone. And you’re not the first person to notice this.
But the system survives by keeping us isolated — reacting individually to problems that are actually happening to everyone.
But once we see it together? Once we start asking these questions out loud, with each other?
That’s when we’ll gain enough collective will to start making a new system that can actually work for us all.
