Money/Intelligence/Energy/Humanity
048.
What Will Abundance Feel Like? (You Won't Feel It.)
Also on YouTube.
Sets up a distinction the abundance thesis usually collapses: the mechanical story of how goods and services trend toward zero marginal cost, versus the psychological experience of living through that transition. The landing point is that abundance registers as the absence of a tax that used to be paid – cognitive load, metered minutes, trips to the library – rather than as felt euphoria, which is why the future always looks impossible from inside the present.
Takeaways
- 01
Abundance is experienced as the absence of a tax that used to be paid – cognitive, monetary, or temporal – not as felt euphoria, which is why the destination always looks impossible from inside the present.
- 02
Scarcity does not disappear when material goods get cheap; it migrates to whatever remains genuinely constrained – time, attention, trust, standing, meaning.
- 03
The mechanical story of how prices fall and the psychological story of how humans experience that fall are two separate things and should be held separately.
- 04
Power in an honest-money world tends toward the relational and reputational rather than the coercive, because the coercive kind depends on proximity to a money printer that no longer exists.
- 05
Categories like 'lazy' or 'high-performing' are partly artifacts of the current monetary and credentialing system; a different substrate would surface different capacities and different definitions of contribution.