On Work & Economy: Is this really as good as it gets?

Thu Sep 04 2025

Context

My first encounter with “work” wasn’t creation. It was compliance.

I remember clocking in at my first job, a teenage version of me, standing behind a counter, logging hours, counting minutes until the shift was over. The task itself didn’t matter. What mattered was being present, following instructions, filling the slot. My paycheck wasn’t for what I made, it was for the time I surrendered.

That was my first lesson about work: it was less about output than about feeding a record in a computer somewhere. Input my hours, output some money. What happened in between, whether I learned something, grew, or created anything of meaning, was irrelevant.

Later, in corporate life, the pattern was the same. Reports written not to illuminate but to prove activity. Meetings held not to decide but to signal importance or focus or attention. Targets hit on paper while nothing really transformed in the space they were reporting on. The rhythm was always the same: input → output, with the middle amputated. No furnace, no transformation, just performance.

I didn’t have the words for it then, but I see it now: the natural triad of work: effort, metabolized into creation, expressed as contribution, had been hijacked. The middle was, once again, gone.

Work had become an assembly line of appearances. Labor in, credentials out. Hours in, money out. Identity tied not to what I had made, but to what I had performed and how well I stuck to the script.

And the strangest part was how normal it all seemed. Everyone around me was running the same loop, as though this was just what life was and what they were busy with was the most important thing they could’ve been doing in that moment.

You work to live, you live to work, and somehow that’s supposed to be enough.

But it isn’t.

The Natural Triad of Work

Strip away the offices, contracts, and payroll systems and work is one of the oldest, most natural processes humans engage in. Long before we had “jobs,” we had work. And it followed the same triadic rhythm as everything else.

Raw effort, attention or resources applied to the world serves as input.

The furnace where effort is metabolized into something new: skill, craft, relationship, growth as Transformation.

With contribution, creation, something that lives beyond the moment of effort as Output.

At its root, work isn’t about wages or titles. It’s about turning effort into, often tangible, meaning.

Think of a farmer. They plant seeds (input), tend soil and endure seasons (transformation), and harvest food (output). Each stage carries weight, but it’s the middle, the waiting, tending, learning, that makes the harvest possible.

Or a carpenter. They don’t just cut wood to make a table. They wrestle with resistance and grain, learn the strengths and flaws of material, metabolize physcal experience into craft. The finished table isn’t just an object; it carries the carpenter’s transformed relationship with their medium.

Even parenting is work. Sleepless nights, endless questions, constant care. The input is obvious. The transformation is slower: patience tested, love stretched, contradictions faced. And the output is not just a child who grows, but a parent who has grown too.

This is what work looks like when the triad is intact. Effort doesn’t just pass through a machine to be measured and exchanged; it becomes fuel for creation, coherence, and contribution. For transformation.

Work is not supposed to be a loop of labor-for-money. It’s supposed to be alchemy: effort transformed into meaning.

The Amputation: From Craft to Compliance

Somewhere between the farmer’s field and the open-plan office, the furnace went cold.

The natural triad of work: input → transformation → output, got amputated. The middle pole, transformation, where effort turns into meaning, was stripped out. What’s left is a binary loop: input → output. Labor → wage. Time → money.

But this shift wasn’t accidental. It was engineered and is an upkept requirement for our current economic model to keep making sense.

The Industrial Cut

Factories in the 19th century didn’t need artisans, they needed compliant hands. Bells, shifts, quotas. The system was designed to bypass transformation. There was no patience for growth, mastery, or dialogue with materials. The task was repeatable, the output measurable, the worker interchangeable.

Craft was amputated into compliance.

The Ledger Hijack

Once the furnace is gone, something else steps in. Ledger logic takes over. Every hour becomes a unit. Every effort a number. Every worker a record in an account book. Work stops being lived transformation and becomes an entry on a payroll.

It doesn’t matter if the work grew you, challenged you, changed you. What matters is whether it balances on the ledger.

The Hollowing Effect

The result is what most of us know as “work” today. Days measured by hours, not meaning. Constantly checking the clock to see if you can take a break already. Outputs measured by numbers, not transformation. Key performance indicators and business intelligence reports, cross-sell opportunities and product enhancement strategies. These all feed everything but yourself. Identities are reduced to titles, hierarchical achievements and paychecks, not lived contribution.

This is why burnout spreads even in well-paid jobs. Why people feel alienated even when “successful.” Why careers can leave you exhausted but unchanged.

The triad is missing. Effort skips straight to output. No furnace, no growth, no change. Just loops of compliance.

When work is amputated of transformation, we don’t become makers. We become units.

The Economy’s Loop: Money as the Perfect Binary

If work lost its furnace in the factory, the economy cemented the amputation in the ledger. Money itself became the ultimate binary interface: have / don’t have. Credit / debt. Profit / loss.

On the surface, money is neutral. Just a tool for exchange. But when it becomes the measure of all things, it reshapes the triad of economic life.

The Natural Triad of Economy

At its root, an economy is just another triad. Input in the form of resources, labor, creativity. Transformation in the form of production, innovation, community exchange. And output as value, sustenance, growth.

When the middle pole is alive, an economy is contributive. Farmers feed towns. Craftsmen turn wood into shelter. Innovators turn ideas into tools. Wealth is experienced as nourishment, not just accumulation.

The Amputation

Ledger logic slices out the furnace. Transformation gets abstracted away, leaving only numbers. Input is measured in costs. Output in prices. The middle becomes invisible. And the intended output goes lost while the numbers become the only focus of productivity.

You don’t ask if the work changed you, or if the product made life richer. You ask if it sold. You ask if it scaled. You ask if it “returned value to shareholders.”

The furnace is gone, replaced with extraction.

The Addictive Loop

Here’s what’s left. Workers feed time into the system. Capital extracts it as productivity. Wages recycle them back into consumption. And then the cycle spins again. And again. Ad infinity.

It feels like motion, but it’s really stasis. Input loops to output, endlessly, without transformation. It produces goods and services, but not growth of being or experience. Not personal enrichment or evolution. Money measures everything, but stalls meaning from forming. It results in nothing.

This is why economies can grow while people feel poorer. Why GDP can soar while communities fracture. Why we confuse movement with development.

An economy without essence doesn’t produce value. It produces volume.

The Modern Economy’s Amputations

The Gig Economy: Flexibility without Transformation

The promise was freedom, flexibility and being “your own boss.” But the reality turns out that you drive, deliver, click. You’re rated by stars and minutes. There’s no community, no craft, no growth of being. Just transactions in, cash out.

The loop rewards appearances (speed, smiles, ratings) and intellect (algorithms deciding efficiency), but misses the essence. The worker doesn’t develop skills or meaning, they’re consumed as a temporary function.

The gig economy doesn’t create livelihoods. It rents out fragments of people at the bare minimum price.

Financialization: Numbers Feeding Numbers

In theory, finance should lubricate transformation, pooling resources so innovation can happen. But in practice, it has become a self-referential loop.

Stocks rise because stocks rise. Debt multiplies debt. Derivatives gamble on derivatives. Inputs are no longer resources or labor, they’re just numbers in a system. Outputs aren’t goods or sustenance, they’re numbers too.

The furnace of transformation, making something useful, nourishing, enduring, is gone. What remains is spectacle trading on spectacle. A global casino where, as always, the house is rigged to win.

Finance is the purest ledger logic: numbers transformed only into more numbers, feeding nothing beyond themselves.

Bullshit Jobs: Work without Essence

As anthropologist David Graeber pointed out, entire sectors exist where the actual work doesn’t matter. People file reports nobody reads, sit in meetings with no purpose and ‘work hard’ to maintain bureaucratic appearances.

Hours are exchanged for salaries. Nothing meaningful happens, nothing changes. Just an endless repeat of the same cycle, with faux meaning interwoven into the everyday, masquerading as quality, or purpose, or worse yet: achievement.

The result is a quiet, mostly unknown, spiritual violence. People know their work is empty, yet they must pretend it matters: bills have to be paid. Appearances and compliance are rewarded. Intellect justifies it with jargon. But essence, transformation of self and world, is gone from this sphere of existence.

Bullshit jobs are the clearest signal of an economy addicted to motion, not meaning.

Consumerism: The Output Loop

An economy amputated of essence produces goods as outputs, but without the furnace, they don’t transform into experience.

So you buy the thing. It doesn’t change you. You buy again. Clothes become fast fashion, not craft. Food becomes quick calories, not nourishment. Entertainment becomes bingeable noise, not story.

The loop spins faster, producing more without enhancing anything. Consumption becomes addiction: calories in, calories out, no nourishment.

Consumer culture is the economy eating itself alive.

The Work/Identity Collapse

In a furnace economy, your work shapes your being, not just your résumé, but your sense of who you are. In a binary economy, work collapses into branding. A degree becomes a credential you are proud of, not a transformation you underwent. A job title becomes a signal of achievement, not a lived, experienced vocation. LinkedIn becomes a theater of appearances, intellect certifying itself with bullet points, essence is nowhere to be found.

We don’t transform our work into selves anymore. We curate ourselves into appearances to sell back into the loop, to comply, to earn money. To repeat the endless cycle while our souls silently starve.

The throughline is the same in each case: the furnace is missing. Inputs loop into outputs, but nothing truly changes. The economy mostly produces volume, not value.

Historical Context: From Furnace to Ledger

The earliest economies were agrarian. Work then was inseparable from being. The farmer planted, tended, and harvested not only to survive but to metabolize a relationship with the land. The soil taught patience, the seasons taught rhythm, and the harvest fed not just bodies but rituals, festivals, and stories. Input was seed and labor, but the furnace was craft and care. The output wasn’t just food, but coherence. In this early form, the furnace was intact. Work transformed both the worker and the world.

That began to shift with the Industrial Revolution. Here the furnace was mechanized. Transformation no longer meant metabolizing skill or craft; it meant standing at a line, repeating motions, feeding machines that did the real work of turning input into output. The worker’s essence was no longer required, only their time. The furnace of transformation was amputated and replaced by efficiency. Work was no longer alchemy. It was an assembly loop.

Capitalism, in its early form, carried this amputation forward. Mercantilism gave way to trade and markets, promising risk, reward, and innovation. But under the surface the ledger was taking over. Value was no longer measured by transformation, but by profit and loss. Input became capital, and output became more capital. The middle process—the furnace where innovation, community, or personal craft might have lived—was tolerated only insofar as it served the ledger. The soul of work was shrinking.

By the late twentieth century, with neoliberalism and globalization, the furnace was gone almost entirely. Corporations became machines for maximizing shareholder value. They did not exist to enrich employees, communities, or societies into something greater; they existed to turn labor, data, and debt into quarterly profits. If the industrial revolution replaced craft with repetition, neoliberalism replaced repetition with finance. A job became a line item. A company became a balance sheet. This is the age where bullshit jobs exploded and financial markets became self-referential loops. The furnace wasn’t just amputated, it was completely ignored, forgotten in the dusty corner of an abandoned warehouse.

The digital age perfected this bypass. Platforms like Amazon, Meta, and TikTok turned the economy itself into an algorithmic loop. The raw inputs are no longer wood or coal or even human time in the traditional sense. They are attention, clicks, and data. Outputs are not transformed lives or communities but metrics: ad revenue, impressions, engagement scores. The furnace isn’t missing here; it has been deliberately engineered out. Algorithms are designed to skip transformation entirely, rewarding only surface (appearance) and metrics (intellect). Essence cannot survive in this architecture, there isn’t even a place for it.

What began as an agrarian furnace, transforming land and labor into sustenance and story, has over centuries been reduced into a ledger machine. Growth replaced transformation. Profit replaced wisdom. What once created coherence now loops endlessly, producing numbers that devour the very world they claim to measure.

Symptoms: How broken are we?

What does it feel like to live inside an economy where the furnace is missing? Where effort loops straight into output without transformation? Everybody knows this feeling, even if they cannot articulate it.

It feels like exhaustion that never resolves. You wake up tired, work all day, collapse at night, yet somehow feel you haven’t moved anywhere. Weeks blur into months because nothing changed into growth or story.

It feels like numbness disguised as busyness. Your calendar is packed, your inbox full, yet you can’t remember the last time something you did actually changed you in any way at all. The rhythm of life is frantic, but brings nothing, affects nothing.

It feels like identity collapsing into branding. You aren’t asked who you’ve become through your work, only what title you held, what credential you could display, what output you can prove. You become a LinkedIn profile with a weakening pulse.

It feels like depression masquerading as productivity. The body knows it’s starving, but at least the ledger keeps showing movement. You get promoted, you hit the numbers, yet deep down it feels pointless, because nothing changes, nothing grows, nothing moves. Only the balance sheet and income statement.

It feels like a life reduced to checklists and receipts. You consume, you produce, you consume again. But nothing is transformed into experience that changes you.

These are not minor side effects. They are the symptoms of a civilization running without its furnace.

An economy amputated of essence doesn’t just fail to nourish; it corrodes the very beings who keep it spinning.

Restoration: Reclaiming the Furnace

If the symptoms of our economy are exhaustion, numbness, and branding-as-identity, then the antidote isn’t more efficiency or higheer profits or enhanced productivity. It isn’t faster loops or bigger ledgers. It’s the return of the transformation engine.

Restoration begins wherever work ‘means’ again. Wherever effort transforms into more than just fiscal output.

It happens in craft: when someone makes bread not just to sell it, but to feel the texture, to learn the patience, to grow with the practice. It happens in relationships: when care is given not as labor but as love, transforming both the giver and the receiver. It happens in communities: when a group creates something together, art, gardens, rituals and emerges with more coherence than they began with.

Restoration scales, too. It asks us to design institutions that measure more than appearances and outputs.

• Schools that reward curiosity as much as grades.
• Companies that value what employees become through their work, not just what they produce.
• Economies that track nourishment and coherence, not just GDP.

Even technologies can be redesigned to slow the loop, to show process instead of only product, to reward depth instead of speed. None of this is easy. Ledger logic resists it because it can’t be tallied neatly. But without essence, we’re left with volume without value.

Restoring the furnace doesn’t mean rejecting work or economy. It means re-centering them on what they were meant to do: convert effort into meaning. To turn raw labor into growth, coherence, creation.

You can spend 25 years working in a job (banking, in my case) and when you finally turn around, what is there to see about the road you have walked? A balance sheet stabilized, an income statement optimized. But none of that belongs to you. Personal gains, yes. A salary, a house, things bought and sold. Yet more than half of it almost immediately cycles back to where it came from. That isn’t progress. It isn’t fulfillment. It’s an echo-chamber where even your own voice doesn’t return.

The furnace isn’t gone. It’s only hidden.

Each of us can re-light it in our own work. And when we do, we stop feeding ledgers and start feeding life again.