Economics of Human Energy

Thoughts about how money and human energy relate

Despite my tendency to procrastinate, I’ve gotten (mostly) good at not being late for things because I spend a lot of my energy trying to not let other people down.

TRUSTWORTHY TRUST

How much energy is lost for the sake of trying to maintain some level of “adulting”?

What is the value of work in a world on the cusp of automation, and how will humans redefine their relationship with it?

Our Centaur Future - A RADAR Report

Work isn’t valuable. People are. People can set a value on the work that is done, therefore, they are the most valuable piece of the equation. Work for the sake of work has no value.

Games can therefore be understood as imagination infrastructures—engines for imaginative engagement. There are so many games out there these days, endless virtual worlds, that the utopian potential of this medium to break far beyond the limited possibilities for collective imagination in “normal” society also seems endless.

What does it look like... See more

Rahel Aima • Imagination Infrastructuring for Real and Virtual Worlds

Games of imagination are the cheapest way to explore future possibilities

We are always telling stories, whether we realize it or not. We might as well get good at it. Good stories win people over. They provoke and inspire and inflame the human spirit. It’s a tremendous source of power.

visakan veerasamy • a matryoshka of possibilities

Stories → Power

Money is an important heuristic for groups to measure their capacity to support their work properly and not burn people out. Money is not the be all end all, but people get really put off by how it's been so co-opted by the capitalist, extractive system that we're trying to escape. My theory of change is, instead of running away from it, we need to... See more

Divya Siddarth • Building Capacity for Exit to Community

Collapsed states are simpler states, so anyone working towards a simpler state — and anyone telling an intelligible tale is doing precisely that — is working towards a collapse. The failure of a world begins with a failure of the imagination to comprehend increased complexity, and an urge to retreat to greater simplicity.

every story is a degrowth story

I don’t think this is necessarily degrowth, it’s compression. This feels like simplicity is a return to understanding of what’s valuable after building on top of it. It’s the flower budding, blooming, wilting, and blooming again. It’s cyclical and growth oriented, because uncapped growth is deadly to the environment and will be rejected.

It's hard to sit there complaining about paying money if you can see it costs $300 get the accountant to file that thing we need, and that the person you enjoy talking to gets paid this much. Seeing it all transparently is quite powerful.

Divya Siddarth • Building Capacity for Exit to Community

Money spent that goes to people you like makes it easier to spend money

Cost effective is the wrong way to think about value

Each technology not only unlocks a new state of expanded acceleration (that will be hardcoded into our lives as the new basis for our survival), but will also be used as the basis for new technologies to continue that process. The vast majority of people do not experience this technology as ‘liberating’ them. Rather, they experience it as something... See more

Our Centaur Future - A RADAR Report

Because we don’t think about valuing the work to be done in the future, only the work to be done now, we don’t give people space to explore what the future holds. Instead, we stress people out by giving them vague possibilities of an uncertain future with no time to explore them. By giving people the time, space, and freedom to explore what the future might hold, they will find abundant futures that are bright and exciting. Those are the futures they will work to actively create.