The Economic Future I See: One Without Jobs

Jobs are going away. I’m not the first person to think this, and this wasn’t a realization I came to independently. I remember my friend from college, Dave Olverson, sharing this thought on the drive back from a wedding upstate, when we were around 30 and living in New York.

Dave had come to believe that most of us would ultimately become ‘content creators.’ I kind of hate that term, but I think Dave may be right.

Political candidate Andrew Yang has projected that this will happen as well. He discusses this forecast at length in his book, which was a New York Times Bestseller.

I read it last year, and found that I agreed with a lot of the conclusions Yang had reached as to what’s going on in the U.S. on a sort of macroeconomic level (which maybe makes sense to a certain extent, in that he also has a background in the world of tech).

But we diverge when it comes to a solution.

Yang’s thing is Universal Basic Income, or UBI, which I also see to be impending (and good). Notably, it seemed to me (and others) that the necessary governmental economic intervention that happened during COVID ushered in a more welcoming environment for UBI’s ultimate acceptance… even in a country as anti-progress as the one I live in often shows itself to be.

Per his book, Yang thinks the solution to the “problem” of disappearing jobs has to be UBI, in large part because he believes only an entity as powerful and wide-reaching as the federal government can effectively counteract what he views to be an imminent crisis.

But I’m not so sure that governmental intercession is the only option.

**

A few weeks ago, in the current, ongoing session of our course, Cryptocurrency & How to Trade It, one of our students, Peter (who is also an old friend - we were once held overnight in a Kenyan jail) shared an interesting thought with my teammate, Michael, in a class homework assignment.

The first exercise we do in the course focuses on an examination of one’s personal values and financial goals. I ask class participants to do this because I find that getting very clear on this, and grounding yourself from that place, is the best position from which to make trading decisions - whether you’re investing in cryptocurrency, or traditional assets.

To paraphrase, Peter had said that he was okay investing in more traditionally-styled cryptocurrencies, because his sense was that inequities within the economic system would be addressed through grassroots-driven policy change (rather than outside of that).

Peter’s take got my mind working, bringing a few murkier notions I had been mulling over into sharper focus.

**

Have you ever played Sid Meier’s Civilization series? The best version was Civilization IV. 😊

I kind of tortured myself with this game for years. I was introduced to it by a guy I dated in my mid-twenties, who was really into denigrating women. He would do it in a variety of ways. A particularly effective one was about undermining a person’s sense of her own intelligence.

At root, I think he loved women, and he even talked about how he preferred their company to that of men, which he was embarrassed to admit (because it wasn’t cool). He hadn’t yet healed his shit, and was replicating the abuse he saw his dad lay on his mom for decades.

I think I Law of Attraction-ed that relationship in at that time because I needed to shore up total confidence in my own mind, and that was the ultimate outcome.

Back then I didn’t yet know about Vipassana meditation, and therefore hadn’t yet released an unhealthy habit-pattern (the word for this in Pali, the language of the Buddha, was ‘sankhara’) that was one of the earlier ones to go: a resistance to earth logistics. I hated planning, and had a lot of trouble just getting around. It seemed to be impossible for me to be on time when it required travel through physical space, and I had a wide, well-deserved reputation as a flake. Constantly abusing alcohol didn’t help (needless to say).

Civilization is a turn-based strategy game, requiring logistical forethought. It was the kind of game that a guy like my old boyfriend, who deeply overvalued the “rational,” seemed to be very good at, and I didn’t have the patience…even though I wanted to show my nerd boyfriend how “smart” I was too.

(Sidenote: Like 10 years later, after I’d cleared the logistics-related sankhara, I got obsessed with this game, and have now beaten it on ‘Emperor’ level, which I only realized in hindsight was like, 5 levels harder that what that guy was playing it on back in the day. Who’s the nerd now, Steve?!)

The point I’m struggling to get at is this: Civilization is about societal evolution through the development of new ‘technologies.’ One tech you ‘discover’ through play is Nationalism.

It can be easy to forget, but nation-states are something males in power made up. Nation-states haven’t been around that long, and like everything else, they won’t exist for all time.

**

How does this relate to Andrew Yang’s ideas about UBI, the widespread disappearance of jobs, and my friends Dave and Peter’s projections about our economic future? What does it have to do with the intervention - or obstruction - of our current version of government?

I think it’ll eventually mean that, with the Rise of Feminine Energy, all systems founded in excessive, unhealthy masculine energy - including governmental ones - will fall away, to be supplanted by something healthier and better.

True democracies are created by the people….but in our current system of nation-states, the money the people use is then issued by a government that is centralized, and interested in controlling its own monopoly on the generation of currency to the extent that it makes it ‘illegal’ to create alternates.

This binds us to governmental whims. When I look at the future of Seeds, the scariest obstacles I see to what I view to be inevitable mainstream use is the interference of an ignorant centralized government seething with misofem.

The creation of The United States of America was largely propelled by a desire for a separation between church and state.

Why do we not also have a separation of state and money?

I think money as a concept will probably stick around. It’s easier to pay in dollars than to find someone with the bar of soap you need who wants the loaf of bread you baked as it’s fresh out of the oven. And as jobs go away, we’ll still need money to cover our basic needs. If Seeds is able to scale as we hope, our community can help to provide this.

Then, without jobs - and that scarcity-driven preoccupation with survival that the old system perpetuates - to distract us, it becomes harder to avoid facing what we need to heal. COVID gave us a preview.

So without jobs, more of us can undertake what I have found to be the single best healing practice there is. Vipassana.

What shape will all of this take? I don't know how a government imbued in healthy feminine energy would look. It’s so terribly far away from where we are now, I can’t even glimpse it.

But on the money side, I see Seeds playing an enormous part. And our small and mighty team is trying our best to prepare now, to make sure we’re ready.

-Rachel