You're Not Bad With Money. The System Is Mining You | Ali Katz

So what nobody ever told you is that the system is designed in an extractive way that's actually mining us, those of us that are contributing to the system through purchasing goods and services, those of us that are contributing to the system in the form of workers working for the system, but being paid as little as possible so that the corporations and their shareholders can make as much as possible so that the CEOs can get paid outsized wages, so that the shareholders can make short-term profits at the detriment to all of us that are paying for the goods and services for the corporation to employ workers and pay them as little as possible.

Those workers then need to receive governmental benefits to be able to support ours- themselves, and it's our taxes that are paying for those governmental benefits.

The entire system is designed for extraction, and we're the ones that are being extracted from.

So it's not that you're bad with money.

It's that the system has been designed to make you think that you're bad with money so that we take the blame instead of rising up and seeing that there's something that we can do about this.

We can change the nature of the game, but we're gonna have to see it before we can make the change.

That idea that we're being mined was brought forward by my friend Lisa Peterson.

She's a CFP, the author of the book Mindful Money.

We'll have her on the podcast so you can hear more from her.

But that also came from one of my longtime teachers, Charles Eisenstein, and he first brought this idea forward when he helped me to see that we're paying for the very things that we used to share in the past.

Childcare needs to be commoditized.

Really, the entire care economy is being commoditized in a way where we have to go to work to pay for the kind of care that we used to be able to get for free.

Everything has been commoditized in a way that makes all of us feel as if we don't have enough.

We're counting what we have in zeros and ones, the numbers in our bank account instead of in our relationships, instead of in what we can give to each other because we can't give to each other anymore because we have to charge for everything.

There's no longer a sharing economy, a gifting economy.

Instead, there's just a financial economy.

But again, this is something that we can change when we recognize that the zeros and ones are replaceable.

It's our time, energy, attention, relationships, health, our natural resources that aren't.

And so when we stop sacrificing our non-renewable resources and recognize that money's infinite, we can step into our roles as creators of the economy, and we can recognize that as creators we have the opportunity to actually change the game, and that's what I wanna talk to you about now.