# money

**Published by:** [Jeffy Yu](https://paragraph.com/@jeffy/)
**Published on:** 2025-11-04
**URL:** https://paragraph.com/@jeffy/money

## Content

i have run out of things to buy i have escaped, or rather been ejected, from the dopaminergic monetary reward system that synchronizes collective consciousness and coherence in working society work, get paid, feel good, need money again, work more, a hamster wheel that keeps civilizations functioning i have essentially found the cocaine of capitalism and done it all in a year, nothing feels quite real anymore, and will lack sense of normalcy relative to most forever i often find disconnect with people because our foundations of life itself, the core incentives, constructs of reality, categorizations, labels, definitions, ontologies, do not reflect homogeneously, and i am progressively non-conformist perhaps the “normalcy” i mean is actually a shared hallucination. people wake up at the same time, go to the same places, do the same things, not because it’s natural but because the money gradient forces this synchronization rent is due on the first. paychecks come biweekly. the machine demands your presence from 9 to 5. all creating an artificial social coherence, as in: we’re together not by choice but by economic necessity i’m out of the system, and by merit too. i'll keep working as i do, and we'll see how far i stray though, freedom and exile are neurologically identical my dopamine system no longer responds to the normal cues a good salary review, a raise, a bonus, a tax refund things that would flood most people’s brains with reward signals barely register for me, often perceived as insensitive in social interaction on my part. i’ve developed hedonic immunity, or numbness depending on perspective, to financial rewards evolutionarily, our dopamine system evolved to navigate scarcity, to feel good when you find food, shelter, mates, safety. now i have essentially unlimited access to all of these and that system is broken too in any case money is actually fictional just numbers moving between databases, social agreements about value that can be manipulated, inflated, hacked, exploited i’ve seen it on the business level, infrastructure level, policy level, management level, criminal level, conceptual level, and everything in between, as consumer and creator i live behind the curtain of economic reality and discovered it’s all performance, all consensus hallucination understanding this is profitable but also profoundly alienating. if you call everyone crazy, you’re the one that’s insane the system that “retains normalcy” is a system of shared constraints everyone agrees to pretend that money is real, that work has inherent meaning, that climbing the ladder matters, because if we don’t all pretend together, the whole thing collapses i’ve accumulated enough resources that i don’t need to pretend anymore. i can see the strings, the puppets and puppeteering, the stage directions, the fake smiles, the empty eyes, the bad acting, the pain my life is performance art to everyone else, because i’m free enough to stop performing, the rest of the world is still in the play, their life is performance art to my life, rather, and we’re looking at parallel universes when we meet eyes uncontacted tribes this creates post-economic consciousness i live in capitalism, but i’m no longer of it i can buy anything but buying doesn’t bring pleasure. i can afford any experience but all can feel hollow since i can have any of them the constraint that gives choice meaning has been removed, in both money and time, and without constraint, choice becomes overwhelming, paralyzing rather than liberating without self-authored agency and grander purpose there is great liberty and freedom now, in time, in thought, in existence, in creation, may there be equal intention, greater awareness, and infinite meaning to whatever i dream into reality next, and all after that

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