A Personal Approach to the Modern Economy

Understanding the modern economy, your role in it, and where we go from here.

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, and the inherent way people lived their lives, and looked at themselves, has never been so profoundly influenced by the leverage of the modern economy, as it today.

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. In the process, we will dive into some economics, history, and depth psychology, and finally, some plan ole common sense. If you’ve read this far, your time may already be a sunk cost, so we might as well double down now, in the hope of a meaningful future return (excuse the economics pun).

A Big Picture View

Business and life once truly seemed a zero-sum game. 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 increased its animosity toward creditors, 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 honour 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 in the fifteenth century became the first place in Europe that offered financial innovations 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 this seed. A 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. Money, labor, value, and trust are moved around in an attempt to better allocate resources. A person usually integrates into it for a simple reason: survival. In ancient tribal societies, you didn’t exchange money, you exchanged effort. Hunting, gathering, child-rearing, building alongside people you knew. In that world, your “economy” was your community. A little different from the complex textbook theories we tend to associate with economics today, but quite true.

In a complex society of millions, the personal web linking the local community 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.

Historically, labor was local and usually familial. 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 structural barriers which remain involve access. And we move up to the top tiers of the economy, it is no longer so much about where you are born, but about how you navigate the gates of education, capital, and social networks. The economy has become a vast signalling mechanism, telling us which contributions are valuable and which are replaceable (according to its own “religion”), and in doing so, it begins to dictate not just what we do, but how we view our own worth.

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.

The electrician enters the economy through skilled labor and local relationships. The gates here are largely open, offering a viable path for those without elite credentials or extensive backing. This role provides immediate utility and social connection within a community. However, the trade-off is structural: the income ceiling is firmly fixed, and the work remains tied to physical presence. It is a path of stability and tangible service, but one with limited upward mobility.

The surgical doctor represents the path of institutional permission. Entry requires passing through a narrow, decade-long funnel of education and certification. This high barrier to entry acts as a filter, often favoring those who can afford the upfront debt and the delay in earnings. Once inside, the doctor gains high social status and professional security. Yet, despite the prestige, the role remains linear: income is tied to the clock (one patient at a time).

Finally, the investor operates on the path of access to capital and performance. Access to this corridor is the most tightly guarded, often requiring elite university networks or significant personal wealth just to get in the room. On rare occasions, individual sponsorship by an already established investor may raise someone up through the ranks. This role has the most uncertainty around it, yet unlike the doctor or electrician, the investor’s progress is not linear but has the potential to be exponential; they use capital to create more capital. This role offers the highest degree of social influence and time flexibility, but it operates on a "eat what you kill" basis. It is a world of high velocity where the gates are hardest to open, but the potential for scale is virtually limitless.

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.

In all cases, skilled work is skilled work. Yet, as we move up the ladder of the economy, 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. And with that abstract (and arguably, intense sentence), a word to the wise— this essay is now going to become increasingly psychological.

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 mind learns to anticipate and process vast swathes of information, and trains to filter noise from what’s fundamentally important. Their nervous system is prepared for alertness. Their breathing becomes controlled and rhythmic, an anchor of calm with a portfolio constantly moving up and down. 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. The character changes follow. 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. It is role we wear, in order to 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 economy has 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 (a useful illusion) 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 observes your role, and then 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 of identity, however, reside 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 increasingly relegated to the shadow of our selves by the prevailing outside environment, 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 as a Mirror

The economy is not an external machine; it is a scaled reflection of the human psyche.

Historically, the economy was bound by human rhythms: energy was constrained by the body, and economy activity slowed when either internal or external resources were depleted.

However, the modern era introduced a profound divergence: credit.

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 sleep deprivation—may temporarily increase output, but they create deficits that eventually become systemic and structural. We are biological beings living in a leveraged system that never sleeps.

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 profound tension between economic tempo and human sustainability.

Value and Values

How much better is the life of the upper middle-class investor who sits on a chair, in front of several black screens, inside an enclosed opulent office for 10 hours a day, and spends another 4 hours staring into a 6.3 inch glass device, to the mid-tribesman who is out much of the day in the forest foraging for food?

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 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.

Over time, this process of the economy does more than allocate labor efficiently; it shapes how people understand their worth, their potential, and their place within the wider social order. Where the economy begins as a practical exchange of effort for money, 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.

The economy is standardising human activity so cooperation among strangers becomes possible at scale, and with that comes an increasing human price. Activities that are difficult or inappropriate to quantify, market, automate, or monetise (caregiving, teaching, community building, ecological stewardship, inner development) tend to be undervalued, despite their foundational importance to whole human flourishing.

The Self and The Economy

If the economy exerts such a profound force in sculpting our identities, often before we are even conscious of having one, then perhaps it is time to invert our approach. Instead of an "economy-first" life, where we offer up our vitality as raw material for growth, we must adopt a "self-first" orientation. However, by this I don’t mean a self-centred egoist approach. Remember, that’s how we got started down this road via Adam Smith. This is a call for an expansive, radical awareness of one's own internal landscape. All of it, or at least as much as we can. We intentionally direct our energy inward, as we interact with the outside world, before we spend it outward.

What are my values? To bring the whole of our self out of the clouds, we must ask questions that exist outside the realm of utility. Where does my attention naturally settle when there is nothing to achieve? What physical and emotional rhythms does my body inherently crave? Which quiet instincts, forgotten curiosities, or unresolved tensions still live within my shadow? What brings me a sense of deep, unhurried aliveness? How does my nervous system actually feel when it is tethered only to the present moment?

Once the self is brought out of the clouds of unconsciousness, the task of integrating into the economy becomes a conscious negotiation rather than a blind submission. We can compartmentalise our roles without becoming them. There will certainly be periods of unbalanced activity. Yet, by truly knowing what balance is, through experiencing a good deal of who we are, we will never let ourselves stray too far and intuitively when the time is ripe to reel in the extreme activity.

A Personal Approach To The Economy

Ultimately, to understand the economy is to understand growth—and to understand growth is to recognise 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. Of course there is much more that makes us whole.

The closeness and relationship with family. A connection to nature and ongoing relationship with it. 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, simply 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. 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 community 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, while fear is abundant. There is so much repression of what we actually need, and so many distractions and drugs covering it up. Yet they 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.