To understand the modern economy, you really need to comprehend just a single word. Growth. Today, just about every government news report, company vision and individual human goal tends to be centred around the idea of progress and growth. Without it, we won’t survive, right? This was not always so. In fact, for much of history, the economy stayed the same. Yes, global production increased, however this was primarily due to demographic expansion, the settlement of new lands, and more natural resources being exploited. Some local, temporary improvements in productivity occurred, yet these gains were sporadic and not sustained globally. Per capita production remained largely static.
In this piece, we will start with a panoramic, macroscopic view of the world and economy at large, gradually narrowing focus to the individual’s role within it, and finally to the inner life of the individual themselves and attempt to weave that back into the larger fabric of the world with a reconsidered perspective.
A Big Picture View
Business and life once truly seemed a zero-sum game. Of course, one artisan’s profit may rise, yet it would be at the expense of another’s loss. Venice might flourish but only by weakening Genoa. Rome prospered by looting Carthage. The pie could be sliced many ways, yet it rarely grew. For the pie to grow, something had to come forward from the future, into today. That something would eventually be called credit: the idea that tomorrow’s wealth could be borrowed and spent today. Yet for centuries, lending against the future was regarded with deep suspicion. Usury was strongly discouraged, often condemned as sinful, and outright forbidden to members of the clergy. Even as banking spread across Italy by the thirteenth century, the Church—the dominant cultural force at that time—did not relax its stance, instead, it doubled down, warning that to profit from interest was to profit from time itself, which belonged only to God.
Then came the Scientific Revolution and the ideal of a different kind of progress. Over the past 500 years, the acceptance of ignorance, our ability to learn from it, and the creation of a deterministic future inspired by science, meant a growing trust in the prosperity of tomorrow and the broad enabling of credit. And credit meant borrowing from the future, to fuel more growth today. If you do want to make an argument that capitalism started anywhere, northern Italy in the Late Middle Ages is as good a time and place as any. By the fifteenth century, it was no longer the most populated and urbanised place in western and central Europe. That honor was stolen by the Netherlands. However, it was still the region with the biggest commercial and industrial economy. The fact that international finance and trade permeated the economy caused it to also be the site for several innovations. Northern Italy became the first place in Europe that offered things like the bank deposit, the bill of exchange, the check, and the letter of credit.
Then in 1776, in what would come to be seen as a revolutionary text, Adam Smith argued in The Wealth of Nations that artisans should reinvest excess profits beyond their familial needs to hire more hands and expand production. Our modern religion of capitalism emerged out of the seed that had etched into its DNA the possibility of economic progress. Profit, Smith said, would then fuel more profit, leading to more people being hired and more production, ultimately lifting collective wealth. Today, this seems obvious in our capitalist world, but Smith’s claim—that private greed drives public benefit—was radically new. In the past, medieval princes wearing colourful silk robes flaunted wealth through spectacles, gifting, wars, and grand cathedrals. By contrast, the modern elite—CEOs, financiers, tech geeks—don muted Loro Piana sweaters and Zegna navy suits and spend the bulk of their time and resources on expanding their workforce, enabling new technologies, maintaining positive EBITDA and that sacred word, growth.
Where capitalism began as an economic model explaining money and investment, it has since grown into an ethic shaping how we act, educate our children, and even think. Its core belief: economic growth is the highest good—or at least the foundation on which justice, freedom, and happiness depend.
What Is an Economy?
What is the economy, anyway? What is its fundamental purpose? The economy is fundamentally a system of exchange — of labor, value, and trust. A person usually integrates into it for a simple reason: survival. Food, shelter, healthcare, experiences — these require participation in the market. In ancient tribal societies, survival came from direct participation in community: hunting, gathering, child-rearing, tool-making. You didn’t exchange money — you exchanged effort. In a complex society of millions, this personal web has tended to break down. You don’t personally know the farmer who grew your food or the engineer who maintains the power grid. Instead, you enter the economy, exchanging specialised labor (or time) for generalised currency, such as US dollars. To “enter” the modern economy is to step into the grand network of human productivity, where each person tries to convert their energy into livelihood through the common medium of currency. A child is born into a specific environment with limited immediate economic access. Their first “economy” is their family — who feeds them, who pays the bills. The second is their community — school, local jobs, visible careers. Historically, this was destiny. If your father was an electrician, you became one. If you grew up near farms, you farmed. Economic roles passed down through proximity. But the modern global economy has disrupted that axis. First with the Industrial Revolution which led to a massive mobilisation of citizens into cities, and then the subsequent introduction of mass education and access to information. Then, today, with the advent of the internet the prospects for learning and growth are even more immediate, allowing a person born in a remote village to learn programming or currency trading or medical research, while connecting them to global value chains rather than just local ones. Theoretically, barriers have fallen. In practice, many remain.
The Electrician, The Surgical Doctor and The Investor
Consider three pathways in the modern economy: the electrician, the surgical doctor, and the investor. Throughout history, the higher the status, wealth, and leverage of a role, the more tightly its gates to entry have been controlled. What has changed over time is how those gates operate. Before the Industrial Revolution, barriers were rigid and inherited. However, barriers have always been made of a combination of skill, capital, networks, and institutional permission. And today, while they appear more open, they are still very real, just disguised as neutral systems like education, social relationships, and capital requirements.
The electrician enters the economy through skilled labor and local relationships. The gates are mostly open. Many enter at a young age or after immigrating to a new country without appropriate credentials. The ceiling for income is quite firmly low. Social status tends to be limited. Yet, this role also offers the potential for health that white-collar desk bound roles don’t. The electrician is on the move with his body throughout the day. He is constantly interacting with people in a typically lighthearted environment and offering a beneficial service that is tangibly felt daily. The level of pressure to perform, while always present, does not necessarily contain a high level of leverage much of the time, meaning the nervous system is activated yet rarely overwhelmed.
The surgical doctor on the other hand enters through a narrow and long funnel of education and institutional certification. Entering medicine requires substantial upfront investment and this cost can filter out capable individuals who can’t afford the debt burden or delay in earnings. And while medicine is formalised, it is still relational. Recommendation letters, research placements, shadowing opportunities — these often come through building personal connections. After at least a decade of education and apprenticeship, they may have paid off their education debts and started earning a meaningful salary. The surgical doctor tends to be well regarded in the social status hierarchy which can open new and wider doors for their children and relatives. They offer a meaningful, at times potentially life-saving, service to its people. However, growth is linear: one patient, one diagnosis, one hour at a time. And when a doctor needs extended rest, income stops. Moreover, the leverage associated with this role, the potential for something “going wrong”, their potential for reputational damage, can be high. This, along with possible long hours and long nights (especially early on in the career), can commonly lead to deteriorating health and an out of balance nervous system.
Finally, the investor enters the economy through social and capital networks and performance history. Apart from the actual skills necessary to be successful, to invest and trade at scale, you either need your own substantial capital or the trust of people who will give you theirs. Even getting in the door often requires elite university credentials or internships that are themselves gate kept by socioeconomic status. On rare occasions, individual sponsorship by an already established investor may raise someone up through the ranks. Ultimately, progress is an “eat what you kill” mentality, where the size of your capital and your performance track record is what matters. Growth has the potential to be exponential, in that consistent performance leads to compounding capital, and one eventually may reach a point where their level of capital can translate into a level of influence in broader society. With all this mind, the flexibility afforded to the investor in terms of time and options, as well as the potential leverage at stake, requires a level of discipline and focus that is difficult for most to sustain. It can be easy to become lost in the push for more growth or amidst the plethora of options on hand, while the hidden effects of burnout and self-sabotage because of an overused nervous system are common.
Clearly, the modern economy is not a flat landscape—it’s a set of corridors, each with its own rules, velocities, and ceilings.
People often sense they’re “in the economy,” but don’t always understand how differently it behaves depending on where they stand. And throughout history, the higher the status, wealth, and leverage of a role, the more tightly its gates have been controlled. In all cases, skilled work is skilled work. Yet, as we move up the ladder, the less it becomes about personal capability — it is shaped by three invisible currencies: economic capital (money), social capital (connections), and institutional capital (background and embedded knowledge).
As we rise up the rungs, we also enter into higher and higher fields of energy, and the incumbent level of tension, both internal and external, that we experience associated with this energy.
What We Do Shapes Who We Are
What we do in the economy does not just shape our income and social strata. It shapes our bodies, our minds, our relationships, and ultimately our sense of self. The deeper and longer we commit our energy and time to a single lane of the economy, the more rewarding it tends to become, and the more that lane sculpts who we become.
Take the investor. Their job is to manage risk, constantly weigh uncertainty, handle unexpected volatility, and make clear decisions often with large consequences. Their body learns stillness — long hours seated, eyes fixed on screens. Their mind learns to anticipate and process vast swathes of information, and trains to filter noise from what’s fundamentally important. Their breathing becomes controlled and rhythmic, an anchor of calm with a portfolio constantly moving up and down. Their jaw tends to tighten. Their sleep can change without conscious intervention. There is always something going on in the world, and the more leverage they have, the more any tiny shift can affect their performance, their salvation. Their nervous system is trained for alertness. Over the years, this produces a certain posture, a certain gaze, a certain point of focus in the face between the eyebrows. The character follows: seeing both sides of a coin; unconventionally open-minded yet brutally firm on limits; decisively committed when necessary, ambivalent when not; constantly seeking out new experiences, growth and wider limits. If they start to see financial success, the outside pull on their money starts to follow - they begin to develop personality complexes, often becoming exceedingly private, even paranoid, in no small part because of the dualistic nature of their work. These changes are not dramatic in a single year. They accumulate slowly, invisibly, the way water reshapes stone.
The economy does not just exchange money for labor. It quietly moulds day to day tasks into distinct nervous systems, personality traits, and relational habits. In the end, people do not simply choose jobs. They choose the long-term cadence of their own bodies and minds. And what they repeatedly do, day after day, eventually becomes what they look like and who they are.
The Building of a Personal Identity Through the Economy
Beyond the subtle formation of who we are from our life’s work, there is also the mask we bring to our social and professional obligations on a daily basis. The identity or persona is this social mask—the role we wear so we can be recognised and accepted by the world and in the economy. This persona has always been shaped a great deal by work and by social class. For most of history, a person’s identity, outside of the aristocracy, was almost inseparable from their trade. You were not just Thomas — you were Thomas the Blacksmith, Mary the Weaver, Samuel the Carpenter. Your name and your function were fused. To know what you did was to believe you knew who you were. In small, pre-industrial communities, this made sense because life was local and roles were stable. The world was not yet so remarkably specialised, and people organically had to be masters of many trades beyond their day to day work, in order to survive. They viscerally knew they were more than their identity, because they were actually doing those other things. Modern society has changed that. The industrial and professional economies have been built on specialisation. We now train for one narrow function and often perform it repeatedly for decades. One person installs new lighting at home. Another performs operations at the hospital. Another allocates capital. We outsource so much of our lives. This makes the system efficient—but it makes the individual, and the sense of identity, the persona, narrower, tighter.
As work has become more specialised and absorbing, the persona increasingly hardens around a single function, and over time this function comes to stand in for the whole person. We begin to experience ourselves, and to see others, primarily through what they do, what they produce, and how they perform within the economic system. The inner sense of being more than one’s role weakens, not because it disappears, but because it is rarely exercised or recognised. When most waking hours, social validation, and material security are tied to a narrow band of activity, the identity formed around that activity becomes both dominant and fragile. In this way, extreme specialisation does not only organise labor more efficiently—it quietly compresses the self, reducing the breadth through which people understand themselves and relate to one another.
This is where the persona also starts to become externally engineered. Society does not just observe your role — it projects a character onto you. The investor is expected to be one way, the doctor or electrician another. These expectations press inward from the outside. If a person resists, friction forms. But if a person complies, gradually, subtly, the role reshapes their self-image. They begin to perform not only the work, but the personality attached to the work. Over time, the difference between performance and identity can blur. A person becomes what they are treated as. This over-identification with the persona is a psychological danger. The persona is necessary — it allows us to function in society — but it is not the whole psyche. When the mask takes over completely, other parts of the self are pushed into shadow.
The Building Blocks of the Self
The human self is not a single, unified thing, but a layered structure formed through interaction with both inner life and outer demands. One layer is this social face—the persona—shaped to meet the expectations of family, culture, and, increasingly, the economy. This is the part of the self that learns how to be employable, competent, and legible to others; it adopts the language, habits, and values required to function within a given role. Beneath this surface, however, lie aspects of the person that are less easily accommodated— enduring patterns that orient a person toward care, connection, exploration, responsibility, creativity, and belonging long before any economic identity takes shape. These inner patterns seek expression through relationship, contribution, and participation in the living, natural world, and they continue to operate whether or not they are consciously acknowledged.
The task of our lives requires more than just being participants in the economy. It asks of us to confront these aspects that have been relegated to the shadow of our selves, of noticing and withdrawing unhealthy projections, and integrating subconscious contents without being possessed by them. Meaning emerges when opposites are held rather than resolved too quickly, allowing symbols, dreams, and imagination to mediate growth. And meaning strengthens when we don’t rush to eliminate inner tensions, but allow time and imagination to help us integrate them. Growth happens when conflicting needs—effort, rest, ambition, contentment, discipline, play, independence, belonging— are allowed to coexist long enough for a deeper balance to emerge.
In modern economic life, many of these deeper impulses are increasingly channeled into abstract substitutes, most notably money, success, and accumulation. When economic roles narrowly reward accumulation and performance, the persona becomes aligned with endless expansion, while other aspects of the self receive little space or acknowledgment. Over time, this can produce a sense of inner imbalance: progress without satisfaction, motion without grounding.
This dynamic is ultimately lived in the body and the mind, which carry the costs of prolonged imbalance. When the signals of fatigue, stress, or disengagement are repeatedly overridden in service of external demands, the body often becomes the first place where tension is expressed—through disease, illness, or chronic strain—while the mind may narrow toward vigilance, comparison, and control. These responses are not failures of resilience, but indications that the organism is being asked to operate beyond its natural rhythms of exertion and recovery. The economic model of things would have the person take medication or undergo surgery or any host of modern medicines, yet it bares the question— would much of it be necessary if the human self was allowing it’s own natural self-regulation to take place?
The task of becoming and being our whole self, then, is not merely personal but contextual: it involves holding together the many parts of the self while operating inside an economic system that tends to trigger only a narrow slice of who a person actually is.
The Economy and The Self
An economy transforms human work, creativity, and physical resources into goods and services people can exchange today or securely expect to access in the future.
Fundamentally speaking, an economy rearranges and redirects energy and matter using human knowledge. For example, agriculture turns soil, water, seeds, and labor into food. It is able to make this transformation because human innovation has discovered (and automated) ways to make it happen. And it does so at different levels, to which humans ascribe subjective value. Both a double cheeseburger from a fast-food chain and a beetroot, kale, and pumpkin seed salad from a farm-to-table restaurant are considered food, yet they reflect different production processes, resource inputs, and intended outcomes. The latter typically commands a higher monetary value and offers greater biological value, supporting health and long-term human functioning. The economy functions not only by enabling exchange, but by sustaining the conditions under which people feel able to commit effort and trust the future. This an important point, because life absorbed in the economy instills in people a mindset centred around rational commitments and the future. Many aspects of life outside of the economy which hold tremendous meaning for humans, on the other hand, exist beyond the rational mind and predominantly in the present moment.
Now, individuals living at the pace of the modern economy can produce only a small fraction of what they need. I can’t possibly drop off and pick up my child from school daily, clean the house, produce my own fruit & vegetables, cook them, weave my own clothing, laze around with my lover each morning, while attending to my 8am-8pm five day a week (longer if you include emails) contribution to the economy. As a result production is divided across many specialised roles and coordinated through exchange. Prices, wages, and contracts align these separate activities by signalling what is needed, what is scarce, and what others are willing to give in return. The individual’s role in this greater entity that is the economy is closely tied to their perceived ability to add value. The more the economic system desires a particular skill, output, or form of problem-solving, the more that individual’s time and effort are rewarded through income, security, and opportunity. The ability and willingness to sell and market oneself or one’s work in the economy plays a crucial role. In this way, the economy acts as a vast filtering and signalling mechanism, continuously communicating which forms of contribution are currently useful, scarce, or replaceable. Individuals, in turn, orient their education, careers, and identities around these signals, adapting themselves to remain relevant within the prevailing structure. On a sullen note, smartphones and social media have enabled every human on this earth to market their own product and sell their own selves to the world. Over time, this process does more than allocate labor efficiently; it shapes how people understand their worth, their potential, and their place within the wider social order. What begins as a practical exchange of effort for income gradually becomes a framework through which individuals measure progress, success, and even meaning, binding personal development ever more tightly to the evolving needs and priorities of the economy itself.
As this notion of “value” becomes increasingly abstracted, it also becomes progressively detached from direct human experience and well-being. Value is no longer assessed primarily by whether work contributes to health, resilience, or the quality of everyday life, but by how efficiently it fits into existing systems of exchange, measurement, and scalability. The economy is standardising human activity so cooperation among strangers becomes possible at scale, and with that comes a human price. Activities that are difficult or inappropriate to quantify, market, automate, or monetise—such as caregiving, community building, ecological stewardship, or inner development—tend to be undervalued, despite their foundational importance to human flourishing. Conversely, work that optimises speed and volume, glitter and bright lights, or financial return may be highly rewarded even when it places sustained strain on bodies, minds, or social cohesion. In this way, the economy’s internal logic can drift away from the biological and psychological realities of the people who sustain it, creating a not-so-subtle misalignment in which individuals are incentivised to prioritise economic relevance over personal and collective well-being.
Economic development has reduced many external uncertainties, particularly those tied to nature and visceral human reaction, while relocating the uncertainty toward socially mediated and psychologically experienced forms related to income, social status, and personal responsibility.
The economy, is in fact, a scaled reflection of the human psyche.
Humans have always needed to produce, exchange, store, and share resources in order to survive. Early economies were relatively simple because the range of needs was limited, production was local, and the feedback between effort and outcome was immediate. In psychological terms, this mirrored a life in which energy, attention, and time were constrained by the body and the environment. People could not sustain effort beyond their physical limits, and when resources or strength were depleted, activity slowed or stopped. The economy therefore remained closely tied to human rhythms of work, rest, and recovery.
Modern economies retain these same underlying functions, but with one crucial difference that has grown over the past three to four centuries: they allow extensive access to credit, enabling societies to draw on future production in the present. Financial credit makes it possible to commit resources, labor, and attention now in expectation of later return, vastly expanding scale and complexity. The human organism, however, does not possess an equivalent mechanism. We cannot borrow energy, attention, or health from the future without consequence. Attempts to do so—through stimulants, chronic overwork, or sustained stress—may temporarily increase output, but they create deficits that must eventually be repaid through exhaustion, illness, or loss of psychological balance. In this way, a growing misalignment emerges between an economy that can continuously accelerate by leveraging future capacity and individuals whose bodies and minds remain bound by biological limits, creating tension between economic tempo and human sustainability.
And just as there is no tangible proof that humans are able to live in a state of harmony and betterment within themselves over the course of history, there is no proof that the growth of the economy is working for the betterment of mankind. You might say that the billionaire today is better off than the decadent prince 500 years ago, who is better off than the member of the Roman senate 2000 years ago. By what metric? How are these individuals feeling about themselves over the course of their days, weeks, months, and years? Humans may be living longer on balance. They be evolved versions of theirselves, psychologically, physically. However, is the quality of life altered? How much better is the life of the upper middle-class hedge fund associate who sits on a chair, in front of several black screens, inside an enclosed opulent office for 12 hours a day, to the mid-tribesman who is out much of the day in the forest foraging for food?
A Personal Approach To The Economy
Ultimately, to understand the economy is to understand growth—and to understand growth is to recognize the human cost of pursuing it. Each person must find a role that aligns not just with their potential for economic expansion, but with their personal capacity to sustain that growth without losing themselves, their loved ones, and even their capacity to be present, to care and to love.
Just as it is imperative to cultivate the skills necessary to perform a job well, it is equally as imperative to cultivate the awareness necessary to remain grounded within ourselves through the process of evolution in our careers, and lives.
The speed of world and its economy has expanded exponentially in the past few hundred years. And while the initial construction of the economy was as a mirror of the human psyche, with the advent of credit that has changed. We don’t have access to credit on our inner energy and state of mind. We can’t “borrow” energy from the future. We have tried, with an abundance of stimulants like caffeine. But in excess it always comes back to haunt us.
Today, humans are able to allocate a great deal of energy into the economy because life is comfortable in large part thanks to the prosperity of the economy. We live in very protected worlds, compared to a life exposed to the whims of nature of people even a few centuries ago. And because the modern religion is capitalism, many people choose to channel this available excess energy back into their role in the economy.
Where we give our energy, whether consciously or unconsciously, reflects our priorities. A person allocating much of their energy and time to their role in the economy subsequently is signalling they prioritise money and social status. Of course there is much more that makes us whole.
The closeness and relationship with family is an area that has deteriorated meaningfully in recent decades as people have had the option to disperse all over the globe, chasing dreams and a better life. A connection to nature has almost evaporated for most people living an urban life, and not only a connection to the natural world itself, but that innate part of us that is a reflection of where we came from. We’ve come to rely upon science and medicine for our health, and in the process gradually lost touch of the medicine that is the awareness of our own selves, and how we’re doing, and how this or that is making us feel. Food is bought en masse in artificially lit department stores. How often do you see people actually making the time to truly taste the food they are eating, to engage their sense of smell and taste. More commonly, they eat in front of a phone engaging their thoughts and dopamine levels, over and over again. We all walk past each other down the street, heads down, unable or unwilling to hold eye contact with other passers-by, losing our connection to the greater world of people and life outside of our own small variable social circles. Sight is focused on tiny little black screens for 12 hours a day. Touch amongst people is rare. There is so much repression of what we actually need, and so many distractions and drugs covering it up— “Success”, parties, anti-depressants, adderall, Xanax, travel, TV, social media, you name it. Yet it can’t possibly do so, because all of who we are lives inside of us. In the health of our body, in the equilibrium of our minds, in the vibrance of our spirit, and in the aliveness of our heart.
Epilogue— the AI evolution to the economy.
We are seemingly transitioning to a new phase of the human economy right in front of our eyes. Where much of the economical world we inhabit today was founded upon the evolution of science and industry, the world not too long from now may be run by algorithms and machines. And just as the previous shift had meaningful impact on humans, so it is likely this one will do as well. How do we adapt?
Was an interesting read. I’d be curious to see your thoughts on how the notion of identity and the economy will evolve with AI
Thank you, good analysis