I was in line for coffee at Peets. Six bucks for something that used to cost pocket change.
The guy in front of me was working
an investment app like he was playing a slot machine. And,
on the surface, it almost seemed normal. Not just the price of the coffee, but
the vibe: Everything’s an asset now. Your house, your retirement, your side
hustle, your attention span.
Finance stopped being a support system for the economy and
quietly became the main character. Instead of helping businesses make things,
it increasingly makes money from money. And it’s very good at it.
Corporations used to talk about building products, expanding
operations, hiring people. Now they talk about “maximizing shareholder value”
like it’s a sacred chant. Which often translates into stock buybacks,
cost-cutting, and a kind of corporate calorie restriction: trim the workforce,
boost the share price, repeat. It’s like running a restaurant where you slowly
replace the food with accounting tricks but still expect five-star reviews.
To be fair, the system rewards this behavior. Executives are
paid in stock. Investors want quick returns. Markets react to quarterly
earnings like toddlers on sugar. So companies optimize for that. You don’t need
a conspiracy when incentives are this loud.
Meanwhile, regular people are pulled into the same orbit.
Retirement used to mean pensions. Predictable, boring, almost comforting. Now
it’s 401(k)s, index funds, and a vague sense that you should probably know what
the S&P 500 did today. We’ve all been conscripted into being part-time
financiers, whether we signed up or not. It’s like being told you’re now
responsible for flying the plane mid-flight, but don’t worry, there’s a YouTube
tutorial.
There’s also this strange side effect where everything
starts to look like a trade. Housing isn’t just shelter; it’s an investment
vehicle. Education isn’t just learning; it’s ROI. Even companies that clearly
make physical things behave like hedge funds with a side gig in manufacturing.
The real economy, the one with stuff you can touch, starts to feel like a
supporting actor in its own story.
And then there’s inequality, which shows up like an
uninvited guest who refuses to leave. When profits flow more toward financial
channels than wages, the gains tend to concentrate. If you own assets, great.
If you don’t, you’re mostly watching the scoreboard from the sidelines. It’s
not exactly subtle.
It isn’t just the imbalance, it’s the way it reshapes how we
think. There’s a quiet cultural shift where everything becomes a calculation.
Is this worth my time? My energy? My “personal brand”? We start to sound like
spreadsheets with opinions. Even creativity gets nudged into metrics -- views,
clicks, monetization -- as if its main job is to justify its own existence in
dollars.
I get the appeal. Finance is efficient. It’s scalable. It
promises control in a world that feels increasingly chaotic. But it’s also a
bit like using a chainsaw to butter toast. Impressive, sure, but maybe not the
right tool for everything.
I don’t think the answer is to romanticize some pre-finance
golden age, that ship sailed a while ago (probably leveraged and sold in
tranches). But it does seem worth asking whether we’ve let the logic of finance
seep too far into places it doesn’t belong. Not everything needs to be
optimized, traded, or turned into a yield.
Sometimes a house should just be a house. A job should just
be a job. And coffee, expensive or not, shouldn’t feel like a symptom of a
system that’s constantly trying to turn your morning into a market opportunity.
Or maybe that’s just me, standing in line, watching someone
refresh a stock app while the barista mispronounces my name.
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