Money Dependence
Is flourishing compatible with a system that exploits deficiency as its fuel?
Through years of applying my change models in practice—especially via social entrepreneurship—I came face-to-face with a deep dilemma around money. While my work had always aimed at supporting people's well-being and agency, I gradually recognized a paradox: the healthier, more whole, and more at peace people become, the less needy they tend to become — therefore, less spending.
Insights from wellbeing studies, medicine, positive psychology, degrowth literature, and East Asian philosophy all confirmed this: when people are holistically well, they don’t need very much.
This also aligns with what I’ve witnessed in traditional practices like kung fu, meditation, and Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), and in the transformation of young people who deeply engage with Learning by Caring. In these states of flourishing, people’s desires are few and their needs are simple. But this raised a difficult realization.
🌀 A Hidden Paradox in the Market Economy
In business practice—including courses on entrepreneurship and revenue modeling—I saw the inverse logic play out: income is generated through others’ unmet needs. The more whole and self-sufficient someone becomes, the less they need to buy. In other words, to sustain a business, your customers must remain dependent or incomplete.
This leads to a generative—but troubling—mechanism:
Spending manifests incompleteness; flourishing is a state of completeness. If income depends on spending, then people must remain incomplete for the economy to continue.
This creates a systemic and moral tension: if everyone became truly well—physically, mentally, spiritually—the demand for many products and services would collapse. Therefore, in a purely market-based system, widespread human flourishing is economically unsustainable.
This logic underpins more than individual businesses—it’s foundational to the entire market economy. If people's survival depends entirely on money, then, in principle, they must be kept in a state of need in order for metabolism (exchange, income, survival) to occur. This may help explain the proliferation of distraction, overwork, chronic illness, and generalized dissatisfaction in consumer societies.
🌾 Two Metabolisms, One Broken
Historically, humans sustained themselves through two primary forms of metabolism:
Metabolism with Nature — Directly working with the land, rivers, forests, and animals to meet survival needs (e.g., hunting, farming, fishing, foraging).
Metabolism with Other Humans — Exchanging goods, services, and gifts, often to meet social and emotional needs or enhance community abundance.
Today, most of us have lost the direct means to metabolize with nature. Our survival has become completely dependent on the second form: exchange with other humans mediated by money. But if human-to-human metabolism becomes the only channel for survival, then being whole, well, and content becomes a liability—not an asset. Without unmet needs, the system stalls.
🧭 Rethinking Livelihood
This realization calls for something deeper than currency innovation—it calls for livelihood transformation. If we are to move toward real peace and collective well-being, we must explore models that:
Decouple survival from chronic consumption
Enable people to thrive without needing others to remain unwell
Reimagine economy as a support for flourishing, not as a mechanism that exploits its absence
I continue to explore this through research and experimentation, particularly in dialogue with:
Decentralized, P2P, and open-source civic tech movements
Post-growth, indigenous, and regenerative economy communities
This work is still early, and I plan to deepen it once earlier models—such as Allocation Dependence and Learning by Caring—reach fuller maturity. But already, this insight about Money Dependence challenges me to ask:
Can we design economies that don’t depend on our pain? Can we restore human-nature metabolism, and build new forms of mutual support beyond transaction?
This is the edge I now stand on.
See also
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