I think the worst thing about this world is being limited by money.

It's not because money equals happiness. That’s a shallow argument, and frankly it fails to understand the nuances and dynamics of money entirely. It is because the lack of money collapses freedom into nothing.

When you don’t have money, choice evaporates. You don’t stay in bad jobs, bad relationships, bad environments because you want to. You stay because leaving is not an option. Life stops being something you actively shape and becomes something you endure.

Scarcity eats time. Most of your attention goes to survival. Rent. Food. Transport. Taxes. The future narrows to the next obligation. There is little room left for learning, creating, resting, or thinking clearly. The mind is occupied before it ever gets a chance to be curious. Maslow's Pyramid of Needs illustrates this very well, although it never specifically names "money" as the factor that prevents people from reaching the upper tiers of the pyramid, I think it is entirely possible to defend that stance.

What would you do if you had enough money to survive, and to not have to worry about where the food on the table tomorrow would come from? I think you would begin to wonder, as I did. Self-realization would happen, for you also. But you're busy paying bills, so you can't be bothered with it. It's nonsense to you, because psychologically you don't exist on the upper levels of Maslow's pyramid. And you're right. It is nonsense to you, where you exist.

But if one removed the constraints money place on your life, it would cease to be nonsense.

The lack of money does not just affect you psychologically but also physiologically. Constant financial stress keeps the body in a permanent state of alert. Anxiety, depression, shame, exhaustion. Fight or flight without release. Over time, that becomes illness. Poverty is not merely an economic condition. It can be said to be a nervous-system condition and when it causes stress over time, then we get sick. So money is a contributing factor to disease.

Part of what makes this completely intolerable is that the system reinforces itself. Wealth accumulates upward. Those with little are not only constrained, they are judged and blamed. They are treated as if their position is evidence of moral failure rather than circumstance, structure, or bad luck. In essence, they become enslaved by the lack of money.

And perhaps the most tragic part is what never comes into existence.

Ideas that never get time to form. Art that never gets made. Solutions that never emerge because the people capable of imagining them are busy surviving. Human potential is everywhere. Opportunity is not. I wonder how many Einstein's have existed among the poor, who never got to express themselves because they were busy surviving.

Money does not make life meaningful, but lacking it can prevent a life from ever becoming one’s own. I wonder if you are owned by money. This is not just an economic problem. It's also a loss of human possibility. And of human dignity.

Money is said to be wealth. I see it creating poverty. Not just financial poverty, but intellectual and creative poverty.

Do you understand what money truly is?

It is chains, and it is freedom from chains. Having it, one is free. Not having it, one is a slave.

Who would enslave their fellow man? How can all be free if money inevitably both frees and enslaves?

Redistribute it. Most people hear “Redistribute money” and immediately imagine chaos, because they conflate coordination with coercion. But money is not neutral coordination. It is conditional permission to live. Slavery isn’t defined by whips. It’s defined by lack of exit.

And lacking an exit, you can be exploited. As Epstein has proven in abundance. Extreme wealth plus extreme lack of exit creates asymmetry so severe that the worst abuses become possible, even predictable. A system that removes exits creates hunting grounds.

Money must stop deciding who gets to exist without fear. So what might be the solution?

Universal Basic Assets.

The exit from our current "nervous-system condition" requires a fundamental decoupling of survival from labour. By automating every role capable of being performed by machine intelligence and distributing a single, non-transferable share of every existing corporation to every living human being, we shift the global economy from a hierarchy of exploitation to a massive, automated cooperative. In this model, the "dividend" of human progress is no longer hoarded by a fractional elite but is distributed as a birth-right. This isn't the stagnant bureaucracy of the 20th-century state; it is a dynamic market where bad companies still fail and innovation still thrives, but where the "profit" of that innovation provides the floor upon which every human stands.

By transforming "citizens" into "universal shareholders," we effectively pay-wall the base of Maslow’s Pyramid once and for all. When the machines provide the food, the shelter, and the logistics, the "conditional permission to live" is replaced by an unconditional right to exist. Poverty, as a physiological state of emergency, evaporates because the "lack of exit" has been removed. You are no longer owned by your obligations; you are a co-owner of the infrastructure that sustains you.

This requires a great shift in the world. Wealthy people would lose their wealth. Their power would evaporate. That is why it has not happened yet, despite its obviousness. But you would gain freedom from it. The power that would evaporate is the power they hold over you. And that is why you should fight for it. Unless you enjoy your servitude.

The Great Inheritance

We have been conditioned to believe that "earning a living" is a moral law of nature. It isn't. It is a legacy of scarcity. In an age of autonomous production, "earning a living" becomes a redundant cruelty. We are the heirs to thousands of years of human innovation. From the first wheel to the latest AI. That intellectual and mechanical labour belongs to the species, not a handful of zip codes.

The transition to a Universal Shareholder model will not be a polite request. It is a fundamental threat to those who use "lack of exit" as a tool for control. Wealthy interests will call this "chaos," but they are merely defending their right to provide "conditional permission to live."

We are currently choosing to pay-wall our own survival.

We can choose to stop.