Blog
(Serving Life Series – Part Two Finale)
I was born on a small island called Pico, in the middle of the Atlantic.
We lived in a tiny house with no running water, on land leased for 99 years from an actual “land lord.” From the beginning, I understood that even the ground beneath our feet could belong to someone else.
Money wasn’t something we had, and it wasn’t something I thought much about. It was simply there, deciding what was possible, shaping what could be dreamed. Still, I didn’t chase it.
Years later, when I became a vice president in the corporate world, that illusion began to dissolve. Between the sale of my business and my salary and bonus, I earned more than I had ever imagined, enough to erase all practical worries. Yet the more I made, the more I felt how deeply money had replaced life as our measure of meaning.
The numbers made sense, but nothing else did.
Most of my conversations had turned into calculations. Relationships became transactions. Meetings revolved around numbers: budgets, forecasts, targets — as if life itself could be balanced like a ledger. The turning point for me was when I found myself ‘laying off’ committed people who had been working hard because of decisions made by those who held the purse strings.
That was the moment I realized how thoroughly our lives were organized by money — how easily human care can be overruled by calculation.
In 2013, the city of Detroit began shutting off water to thousands of homes. Mothers filled buckets from fire hydrants. Children carried bottles to school. The city owed billions to bondholders; residents owed hundreds in unpaid bills. Under pressure from Wall Street, the water department made its choice: cut water to the people, not the investors.
The pipes still carried water. The rivers still flowed.
But the story had changed. It wasn’t about thirst or health anymore. It was about debt.
That’s what happens when a symbol begins to outrank life itself.
We say things like, “If they don’t pay, they should face the consequences.”
That reaction makes perfect sense inside the money story: a world where debts are moral facts and punishment is the balancing entry. But notice how easily our sympathy bends toward the account book. The story of tokens runs deep; it teaches us to measure worth by what can be priced rather than by the needs that make life possible.
After land was fenced and time was sold, money rose as the universal token — the symbol that could stand for anything: water, labor, care, even trust.
At first, it may have been a convenience, a way to ease exchange. But over time, the symbol began to feel more real than the life it represented. When people say, “We can’t do it, there’s no budget.” They’re not describing physical limits; they’re describing the boundaries of a story.
Budgets are beliefs about what deserves to live.
Through the Story Lens, money feels natural, even moral: it keeps things organized, measurable, efficient. Through the Life Lens, it’s a fiction that has escaped its frame — a stand-in for energy that now decides where energy may flow.
Money didn’t just represent life — it began to replace it.
We built this world on a root story of Necessary Control — the belief that exchange must be centralized and regulated to prevent chaos. It’s reinforced by the myth of Human Flaw — that we can’t trust generosity or reciprocity, so trust must be priced. And it expresses itself through Rational Supremacy — the conviction that numbers are more “real” than needs, relationships, or ecosystems.
A farmer burns crops to keep prices stable.
A hospital refuses care until credit clears.
Governments subsidize fossil fuels while declaring there’s “no money” for clean water.
The absurdity isn’t economic — it’s existential.
Life doesn’t run on balance sheets; it runs on flows. Energy moves. Water circulates. Nutrients return to the soil. Money, in its early form, mirrored that rhythm. Now it also stops it. We hoard the symbol and starve the source.
The world overflows with food, yet millions go hungry — not for lack of supply, but for lack of currency. Forests fall so digits can rise. We’ve mistaken the measure for the meaning.
When tokens replace trust, control replaces connection — and that control soon demands its own machinery.
Through the Life Lens, money is neither good nor evil. It’s a story — one that worked until it didn’t. It represents energy, but it is not energy.
The Life Lens begins when our stories stay bound to the realities of life itself. It asks that our symbols — money, property, contracts, even progress — remain in service to the living flows they describe. Through this lens, the test of any story isn’t how logical or efficient it sounds but whether it keeps life moving, whether it nourishes, regenerates, and connects.
When we treat money as life, we forget how to exchange life directly — through trust built on relationship and belonging, reciprocity, and shared stewardship. When we remember that money is a tool, not a truth, we can rewrite the story.
But the story can change — because we can.
Communities already are.
Local currencies circulate care.
Mutual-aid networks share without accounts.
Collaboratives exchange contribution instead of profit.
The shift isn’t from money to something else — it’s from control to connection. From counting life to serving it.
I think back to that little house, to the sense that what was essential was somehow owned by someone else. It’s a story that has been told so well that we’ve come to live through it.
But beneath every dollar, every contract, every fight for market share, there is something more fundamental: the pulse of life itself — giving, receiving, adapting, becoming.
That is the real economy — a living economy.
Because every story unbound from life seeks to control it — and every story rooted in life learns to serve it.
And that is where this journey turns next. Toward how we might remember that flow and restore balance, not by rejecting our tools, but by returning them to their rightful place: in service to life.