The Cost of the Value

It’s fascinating how we’re willing to redefine the deeper meaning of almost everything in our shared reality—except money.

Money seems untouchable, the one solid foundation we refuse to question. It's a sacred concept, fiercely protected (at least in our minds). Innovation can roam freely, altering our health, lives, land, space, elders, and children, but radical change in the financial sector—or in the way we collectively perceive the economy—feels almost forbidden, at least for "ordinary" people.

We might reconsider our morals, deny our values, or dismantle cultures. We might transform our bodies, societies, and environment in unimaginable ways (often without fully understanding the consequences), yet it seems we can’t even entertain the simple idea that the value we attribute to money—and the way we use it—could also change profoundly.

And maybe, just maybe, addressing the deep incoherencies in our financial system would be easier and simpler than trying to change both Nature and Humanity. We are deeply transforming society, cultures, and the environment, all while bending them to fit within an artificial system built on fictional money. Changing the world and human beings is acceptable; changing how humans create, perceive, and use money is not.

We are willing—and indeed, we actively do—change our bodies, our God, our communities, even the lands we live on. Yet, we can’t seem to transform the deeply limiting beliefs in our minds about what money is and how we might use it more wisely.

We’ve separated the macro economy from the micro economy, and they operate as if they aren’t truly interconnected. Every economist is aware of this disconnect, and they seem perfectly at peace with it.

Some are specialists in macroeconomics, others in micro. Both work to increase the global wealth factor, but they struggle to understand why the overall economic system doesn’t function properly. Why do we continue to grow poorer, even as macro and microeconomic figures appear stable and steadily increasing on their charts?

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Today's economy is about numbers, rarely about the real meaning or systemic coherence behind them.

Every scientist, mathematician, and especially every economist knows that numbers can be used to justify anything. Manipulating numbers is one of the simplest, most efficient techniques for brainwashing people and controlling their behavior.

Numbers, on their own, lack meaning. It’s humans who give them logic, coherence, and sense. A sharp mind can easily manipulate numbers and the meanings attached to them in ways you might never imagine.

It’s our brains that make numbers "talk," influencing our beliefs, judgments, and behaviors. Numbers themselves don’t speak. (If they do happen to talk to you, that’s a different discussion—one I won’t cover here as it’s outside my expertise and current interest.)

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If your project doesn’t generate financial value or contribute to economic growth or wealth creation for your community, it’s destined to fail. The real market won’t even look at you or take you seriously unless you’re creating new money or adding "economic value."

The market is about numbers, not meaning. Meaning is the cherry on top—nice to have if you want easy money—but before talking meaning, the numbers need to speak for themselves.

Typically, the “economic” aspect is the first gate to pass when presenting any new project or initiative. The financial architecture and its ability to generate more money over time is the first thing we check when deciding whether to invest. If it doesn’t promise to make more money, no one will care to listen to the potential social or environmental benefits.

It’s nonsense to say that Nature or Humanity, or their authentic needs, drive today’s innovation.

Money drives it, rules it, and dominates most innovation strategies. And because, for many people, money has become more important than other humans—or even the quality of their natural environment—we collectively seem to accept this money-driven framework for decision-making as entirely normal.

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When we talk about sustainability in a simplified model, we usually refer to three interconnected aspects: Economy, Society, and Environment.

So, you have a complex system with three main subsystems: 'money,' 'humans,' and 'planet.'

Before you can understand or transform the mechanics and dynamics of a complex system, you need to gain clarity on its key parameters and gather data on the main subsystems.

(Stay with me. I promise to do my best to keep this as simple and digestible as possible, even though it's a deeply complex and potentially triggering topic. I can't promise to succeed, but I'll certainly try.)

So, three main subsystems.

Planet

The planet has existed for about 4.5 billion years, following the same 'almost' predictable cycles and patterns of evolution. How Nature works its magic and ensures our survival is still a scientific mystery, and it will likely remain so for a long time.

It is the most stable of the subsystems, with the most rigid boundaries over which humans have no ultimate control. Nature dictates the ultimate 'order' more than humans ever could, no matter who those humans are.

Earth is the macro-natural system that ensures we can breathe, eat, explore, procreate, and continue doing whatever we are doing. It’s our collective sandbox where we all play together. No one has the control or authority to change the deeper principles and laws of how this shared 'sandbox,' called Earth, operates. We have no power over her. She is the ultimate 'boss' of this shared space, making everything else possible for us.

Earth or Nature wasn’t created by humans; therefore, it cannot be transformed at will or controlled by them. In fact, humans are just a subsystem within Earth's macro-system. It’s not Nature vs. Humans.

Humans are part of Nature, but Nature is always bigger. Humans exist within the larger system we call Earth. They are not equal in power and cannot 'own' or 'control' the planet or its natural cycles.

No Nature or no Earth, no humans either.

Society

What is society? It’s humans doing things in a collaborative and co-creative manner. The bigger the things we create and the larger the groups we form, the more powerful the societies we can build.

Society is far more flexible and malleable than the Earth or Nature. This is something we can actually impact. We create societies and civilizations. We co-create our traditions, cultures, and collective values. We build social systems that further our humanity. We create education, health, religion, business, and other systems to build a strong, wise, and happy community for us to live in.

While society is more flexible and changeable than Earth, meaningfully transforming it is still a real challenge. Changing our core limiting beliefs, values, or cultures is very hard, and we are often resistant to change. We tend to bend the rules or attempt to control Nature to validate our self-made mental ideologies, rather than changing outdated limiting beliefs about our society.

Society is something we can change and transform. It’s not easy, but it’s possible. Humans have ultimate creative power over what their culture, society, and civilization are and what they value.

Humans have existed for approximately 300,000 years. Civilizations have existed for about 5,000 to 6,000 years.

We can observe how much we’ve changed and evolved since then. However, when you deeply observe the macro-cycles of human civilizations, you can easily see how hard it is to transform for real. We seem to follow the same predictable cycles of decline throughout our macro history.

We evolve, but in the bigger picture, we still repeat the same mistakes. We build, destroy, rebuild, and restart the process over and over. This cycle seems to make sense to us as a collective.

Why is the 'destruction' part of the process necessary to continue co-creating and evolving together? Do we need to destroy something to keep creating?

Economy

This is the most recent, the smallest, and the most fictional of all three subsystems of sustainability. It has the highest flexibility and the most influence on public opinion, politics, civilizations, and our shared natural environment. Planets or humanity weren’t created by us, and there’s much we still don’t understand about them.

But the economy is a purely man-made concept. It was created by a few and adopted by almost all. It’s completely invisible, virtual, and has no intrinsic value.

You can’t breathe money, eat money, or make love to money. You can’t buy true freedom, health, or happiness with it. The real value of money lies only in the value we assign to it in our minds and in the collective perception of our shared reality.

Money is just a tool.

We value money because it can fulfill our personal needs for survival, emotional safety, and future thriving. It allows us to build deeper connections with people around us without fearing for our survival, and it gives us a sense of false 'independence' in fulfilling our needs without relying on 'others.'

Money has value because it ensures our future survival and serves as a strategy and a tool we collectively use today to meet our basic personal and collective needs.

The economy is the subsystem that is the easiest to radically change, and it’s the one we have complete power and authority over. It’s just mathematics, programs, and models—nothing real.

The Earth is governed by physical laws. Humans and societies are often at the mercy of emotional struggles. But money is purely mental. That’s why it’s so flexible and malleable. We can do whatever we want with money. We created it, we assigned value to it, and we can change it if it no longer aligns with our needs and beliefs.

You cannot change the Earth. Changing other humans? Good luck with that. But money—this is something you actually have power over. We all do. And collectively, we can ensure that our micro and macro economies are interconnected in coherent and meaningful ways.

Earth is a planet, a macro-system with a complexity we aren’t even close to fully understanding, let alone controlling.

Society is also a complex system, co-created by trillions of beings with free will and unlimited creative power over thousands of years. You have (maybe) some influence over society, but you can never truly change other humans. We all change and make decisions based on our free will. We are creators of our own reality, but we are co-creators of our culture.

No one can lead or transform a culture. Entire communities birth and co-create culture, not individuals, leaders or 'influencers.'

You can change whatever you want within your inner psychology, and you can heal all the childhood traumas of your ancestors, but none of that will change the society or culture of the people around you.

Even when you are 'healed,' 'woke,' and 'enlightened,' your boss, colleagues, government, partner, mother, friend, or banker probably aren’t. They likely don’t see or feel what you experience personally. They probably simply don’t understand.

And they likely aren’t willing to put in the same effort to 'change' the culture, society, or even question the deeper issues of how we build our civilizations today and why we do it this way. We’re willing to go to therapy for 10 years to 'change' or 'heal' ourselves, but we aren’t willing to take a few hours to collectively discuss what is making us so depressed, sick, and despaired in the first place.

We do little about the actual causes of our collective suffering, yet we invest millions in finding innovative ways to deal with it indefinitely, keeping it under manageable (often illusory) control with excuses like, 'It’s not so bad yet—it could be worse.'

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And do you know why we do this?

Because being stuck in a cycle of suffering holds significant economic value and potential for generating new 'wealth.' In short, suffering makes the economy thrive.

Addressing the true roots of suffering to eliminate it is actually highly destructive to the economy. The economy today isn’t built on creating health, well-being, performance, happiness, or meaning. It’s built on perpetual suffering, unconscious fears, insecurities, and the manufacture of scarcity.

The more disempowered and terrified people are, the more the economy thrives.

When people are healthier, happier, more loved, and more fulfilled, they actually contribute less to the growth of the economy. They buy less. They work less. Once they've discovered how to meet their needs in simpler, more authentic ways, money becomes secondary, and its value drastically diminishes in their perception.

They tend to value money less but care more (most of the time) about Nature and Humanity. Once they realize that health, happiness, and true wealth are rooted in relationships with others and the quality of our shared environment, they stop seeing money as a 'god' and begin to treat it as a tool.

They don’t exploit Earth or Society to generate more money. Instead, they use money to enhance Humanity in our communities and to help regenerate Nature in line with the natural physics of this world.

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To understand the complexity of sustainability more easily, you must see it through systems thinking. The economy, society, and environment are not three independent sub-systems, nor are they equal in scope or power.

The largest and most immutable system is Earth. Inside this macro-system, which we cannot control, lies a smaller one: Humanity. Humans, working in groups, organizations, and societies, are also complex macro-systems and hard to change. But humans, collectively, hold the ultimate control over this system. No one can transform it alone, but together, collective change is very possible.

Recently, humans have created an even smaller sub-system for their own pleasure, transactional efficiency and experimentation: the Economy.

The economy is a mathematical and purely mental construct, a collection of numbers to which we decide—consciously or unconsciously—to give meaning. Clearly, the economy is a smaller sub-system than either Humanity or Earth.

So, the logical systemic representation is this:

Economy is a sub-system of Society, and Society is a sub-system of Earth.

Earth (unchangeable) → Humans (hard to change) → Money (easy to change).

This is the pure logic of our shared reality, something each of us can observe, analyze, and comprehend. You don’t need to attend school, or even know how to read or count, to grasp this simple systemic logic of who holds power over what. No matter who you are or what you do, you already know what you can and cannot easily change in our collective reality.

That being said, despite this simple logic being evident to most, when you listen to the market, to politics, to technology, and to many people, it seems like they have this cycle completely upside down in their heads.

For some reason, we seem to believe we collectively live in an upside-down world, where the economy is the god, the most macro-system that governs everything else. Money can shape society, cultures, and even manipulate or control entire civilizations of humans. Humanity appears powerless in comparison.

In this inverted worldview, humans are a sub-system of the economy.

And Earth seems to be a sub-system of humans.

For some mysterious reason, humanity has decided it’s knowledgeable and powerful enough to control Nature, as if we are the gods of the Earth.

We have enough collective ignorance and arrogance to believe we can manipulate the natural laws, cycles, and rhythms of life and humanity itself. We think we can do it all—geoengineer our environment, gene-select our babies—and naively call this freedom or power. But in most cases, it’s quite the opposite.

We’re constantly making the impossible possible in our blind pursuit of more money and safety. We are indeed clever, smart, creative, and innovative.

But are we truly happier, healthier, and more physically, emotionally, and mentally safe? We might persistently believe we are being coherent and logical, but we are collectively stuck, viewing the sustainability process upside down.

Money (the Ultimate God) → Humans (egocentric demi-gods or powerless slaves) → Earth (the resource we can exploit to feed the egos of demi-gods and sustain the Ultimate God).

This is the real philosophy and official discourse shaping how we see sustainability in corporate and political spheres across much of the world today.

We use deep-seated fears about our collective survival as a strategy to manipulate the masses, enriching ourselves financially in the process, while claiming to 'save' the economy, even as we further destroy our shared Nature and Humanity.

It makes no sense.

But no one seems to care. We say, 'It’s a chicken-and-egg problem,' and then we change the subject. But in this situation, neither the chicken nor the egg has any real value, meaning, or relevance. We don’t actually care about either. They both lose and don’t really matter in the grand scheme of things.

What we care about is how much money we can make by manipulating the 'chickens' and artificially controlling how many 'eggs' they produce. We also profit by controlling who gets access to those eggs and by judging the 'corrupt' or 'immoral' chickens.

Globally, today, money controls and abuses both the chicken and the egg. This isn’t an efficient way to address our collective challenges or to solve the simple existential paradoxes of life. We aren’t supposed to choose between them or harm either. It’s not about OR—it’s about AND.

We could use money to ensure that both are healthy, happy, and safe: Nature and Humanity, Earth and Society, the chicken and the egg.

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It’s very simple.

For Nature to survive, exist, evolve, and thrive, neither Humans nor the Economy are mandatory.

For Humanity to do the same, Nature is essential, but the economy is still not necessary.

For the economy to exist, both the Earth and Society are required.

This is the real interdependence in the 'sustainability' world.

Nature needs only herself to thrive.

Humans need Nature and other Humans to live and evolve. They cannot do so without the resources and energy the planet provides.

The economy needs both Nature and Humanity just to survive—the planet and the people.

If you want to simplify sustainability or make a complex macro-system coherent with this kind of interdependence, how would you proceed?

Imagine you are responsible for optimizing an ecosystem of only three elements: Environment, Society, and Economy. When these three elements are efficient and coherent, we could consider ourselves 'sustainable.' If this were your system of interest and your objective was to make it more performant, which sub-system would you choose as the baseline to evaluate your progress?

Today, to gauge how effective and performant we are in terms of 'sustainability,' we mainly measure economic benefits and financial outcomes. Economy becomes the solid baseline, while the other two—Humans and Nature—are just dependent variables in that mathematical equation.

However, the Economy is a poor and volatile, human-created and human-powered tool. It should never be used as the baseline for anything. It is the most flexible and fictional variable in the grand formula of 'sustainability.' It doesn’t represent anything real. It is the only thing we can authentically control. This is what we should be changing before attempting to change other humans or Nature herself.

If we value the Economy more than Society and the Planet, we risk losing the very things that make money—and even Life—possible. But by valuing humans, their authentic potential for creation, Nature, and the quality of their shared environments, we can invent all sorts of economic systems, markets, finances, and whatever else we desire to support our shared happiness and health for as long as we wish.

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We are the ones to grant ourselves the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, the courage to change the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Be wise in knowing which battle you are choosing when you engage in the 'sustainability' world. Are you truly changing what you have the power to change? Or are you naively and blindly fighting something that will never be within your control?

Who depends on whom for our collective survival? What requires what to continue living and thriving in the future?

Who should be doing what, and how, to make the entire macro-system more coherent, meaningful, enjoyable, and sustainable for all of us?