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Unmonetize the Priceless

A reflection upon reclaiming the priceless

There are few things in life as luxurious and as fulfilling as a lazy Sunday spent reading a great book, and I recently indulged myself by reading Moby Dick, which, amazingly, I had never read. I think we probably underrate the power of fiction, and especially classic fiction in the modern world.

We've become a rational, nihilistic, free-market society driven (mostly) by commercial interests. These interests will, if we're not careful, eat up everything in sight. The companies engaging in commerce will even eat up our souls if we allow them inside of us by giving them too much of our sacred attention – if we pay attention to them. If there is an almighty dollar to be made, then someone will try to make it.

If the love of money is the root of evil, then despite the good things that capitalism can accomplish, it has this one particular achilles heel. To not eat up everything, capitalism relies upon a society that values the sacred, the truthful, and the beautiful as more valuable even than profit margin. But those are values that modern capitalism seems to have (mostly) abandoned: “God is dead” 1, the media lies, and things that used to be beautiful are ugly. Buildings, street signs, statues, art, and cities used to be beautiful. But the chase for the lowest cost function over form has slowly degraded our man-made environment to the point that everything new, everything beautiful, everything good, everything enriching runs a risk of being turned into the lowest common denominator: being turned into a cheap commodity if there is a buck to be made. My heart aches every time I see a new construction project start knowing I will be treated to big boxes of ugliness where nature’s beauty stood for millions of years. Buildings of the 19th and early 20th centuries were works of art compared to what we build today.

It's not really software that's eating the world, it's commerce. We even have a word for this phenomenon: "monetize." If you undertake any endeavor, someone will ask you, "how do you plan to monetize that?" As if I should monetize my priceless hobbies.

Still, I’m not anti free market. I’m pro freedom in all its aspects. Only maximum freedom enables maximum growth (including growth of beauty). The answer isn’t to “fix the system.” A free market isn’t perfect, but it’s better than all the alternatives. The free market used to build beautiful things. What changed? We did. Hence, the answer is to fix ourselves. The system is a reflection of us.

We can't, individually, fix society, but we can fix ourselves. And if enough of us fix ourselves, that is a movement. As commerce eats the world via “monetization,” that trend, in a Zen way, points to the very way out. It points to the very way you can embrace humanity: Embrace happiness. Embrace enlightenment. Embrace the priceless.

Here is the secret: look for the things that cannot be monetized and you will find the very things that are priceless.

There isn't much money to be made in classic literature that is out of copyright, for it is no longer (greatly) monetizable. It is now, simply, art for art's sake. And so: read fiction. Read classic books. Go outside. Notice beauty. Spend time listening to music – really listening – the listening is the point. Music is art and not only for background noise. Enjoy the blissful flavor of a sip of wine. Pet your dog or cat and look into her eyes and connect with the consciousness of the universe that powers all of us, your dog included. Enhance your brain with literature and give up listicles. For your soul’s sake: stop scrolling and look around you! There is still an unfathomable amount of beauty all around you!

And Create for the sheer joy of creation and not for the "likes" you'll get on Instagram. The only like that matters is that of the person who created the work. God saw, for himself, that his his work was good, he didn’t post it on Instagram to find out if it was.

These things and infinitely more are there for the taking, and they are gifts from God. Give unto God what is God's and don't worry so much about how to monetize what is Ceasar's.

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