After the Wage

Audio version read by the author:

A few weeks ago, I typed a simple question into a search bar over morning coffee:

what does “time is money” mean?

The answer came back with almost comic honesty:

True success often involves leveraging other people’s time to create free time for oneself.

That’s the system, accidentally confessing itself through the ambient answers of a billion searches. True success. Other people’s time. Your free time. The architecture of an entire civilization, distilled into a sentence so casual it almost sounds wholesome.

It isn’t. It’s sick.

A friend of mine, Nick Marconi, sent me a letter a few weeks ago. He lives in Vermont. The letter started, as the best letters do, with the weather:

I’m enjoying the second real week of spring here in Vermont. It always seems to take longer to arrive for me. The leaves on my four Norway maple trees are almost fully grown. Bright, but delicate — fresh electric green!

Then, halfway through, between the maples and the sign-off, Nick put his finger on the thing.

Okay, money. I’ve been giving money a lot of thought lately. It goes all the way back to Ben Franklin, who is credited with the saying that “time is money.” Let me emphasize this — time is money. If we reverse this statement we get, “money is time.”

Nick goes on, in the way you do when you’re thinking out loud to a friend you trust to follow:

What money seems to do is give a person control of time itself as a special kind of “asset” — not a strictly material or financial one. Of course, this is an illusion, but, nevertheless a powerful one. Current/conventional money comes from the conversion of “time” (via debt creation plus interest, which is just a “rental fee” on money itself) into a special form of “credit” to control human labor.

Given enough money, we wouldn’t need to work — instead, we gain “free” time — by gaining access to the productive labor of others. So, the ultimate value of money today is its ability to give us the illusion of time control and all the consequences that implies as it plays itself out in our lives, economically and politically — or in a word, socially — throughout the world.

And then, he signed off:

I hope you find these partially digested thoughts somewhat interesting. Wishing you well, Nick.

I did. I do.

Nick’s letter is the kind of thinking most of us have been doing privately for years and rarely say out loud. Six essays in, I’d been circling this same point. Nick just said it outright.

I want to add one refinement:

Money isn’t time. Money is enforceable claims on other people’s time.

A billionaire doesn’t have more hours in their day than the rest of us. They have other people’s hours: the maid who cleans, the nanny who raises their children, the chef who cooks, the tutor who teaches, the driver who waits, the pilot who flies, and the security detail that watches. Each one is a person whose hours have been bought. A billionaire’s day is twenty-four hours like everyone else’s. What they have is their own twenty-four, plus the bought hours of an entire supporting cast.

The current system captures human time at three temporal positions: present, future, and past. Each capture has its own technology. Together, they form much of the architecture of modern wealth.

Present time is captured through wages.

You sell your hours. The value those hours produce doesn't come back to you whole. Profit is taken inside production by the owner. Taxes are withheld by the state. Rent flows to the landlord. Interest flows to the bank. When your wage arrives, it feels like the value of your hour, but it's only part of it. The rest became someone else's accumulation. Your hours, captured into someone else's claim.

Future time is captured through debt.

The mortgage. The student loan. The credit card. Your unborn hours, pre-spent, sold forward to a bank that created the money with a keystroke. You wake up at twenty-six already owing the next thirty years to people who manufactured the claim from nothing. Part 2 of this series walked through the mechanics. The point here is what it does to you: debt commits time you haven't lived yet to projects you didn't choose.

Past time is captured through inherited wealth.

The hours of dead generations, stored in titles, trusts, and dynastic ownership, still extracting from the living. A child born to one family starts at zero. A child born to another starts at a hundred million. The difference isn't merit. It's that some ancestors' captured hours kept compounding after they died, and now their grandchildren collect rent on the work of strangers who weren't even born when the original capture happened.

Stack the three together.

The wealthiest people in the world are not time-rich in their own lives. They cannot live longer than anyone else. Their days are still twenty-four hours. What they are is claim-rich on the time of others: past, present, and future. Their wealth is not, fundamentally, a pile of dollars. It's a portfolio of enforceable demands on human hours that other people are obligated to deliver.

That’s what wealth, in this system, is.

Enclosure of the commons is temporal capture: ownership positions generating ongoing claims on the labor needed to use what was enclosed. Debt-money is time made repayable. Capitalism is not only a system for allocating goods. It is a system for converting human time into transferable, enforceable, inheritable claims.

The colloquial phrase for what wealth provides is ‘fuck-you money’: enough to tell anyone in your life to go to hell and not face consequences. The phrase hides the machinery underneath. No one is free under capitalism. Not even the wealthy. They didn’t buy freedom... there’s none for sale here. Capitalism offers only two positions: ground down by the gears, or greasing them. Wealth is the price of the second one. The grinding doesn’t stop, it only moves to someone else. Their hours are their own because someone else’s aren’t. Not yachts or mansions. Stockpiled hours. They still play a game whose other players have force, violence, law, and rival capital. They are free only relative to the desperate. Everyone else trades theirs for survival.

Personal Credit isn't merely a baseline payment; it's the un-capturing of time. Your hours stop being owed before you've lived them. Five centuries of capture, reversed. The hours come back to the bodies that produce them. Creditism doesn't make everyone the buyer of hours. It dissolves the position itself. No one buys their way out by selling someone else in. The coercion economy ends, and time comes home.

If the system is this extractive, why does it persist? Why don’t more people walk away from it?

The brutal answer isn’t that they’re trapped, though many are. It’s that most people, including many of the people being most exploited by it, accept the system because they accept the lie underneath it.

The lie has two faces.

The first: humans are fundamentally lazy. Without wages, debt, fear of homelessness, fear of hunger, they won't work. Civilization will grind to a halt. Someone has to be desperate, or no one will plant the wheat.

The second: humans are fundamentally selfish. Without competition and scarcity to channel their self-interest, they won’t cooperate. Without markets to convert private greed into public benefit, the social fabric falls apart.

Together, the two faces construct an animal that requires coercion to function — too lazy to produce without threat, too selfish to share without rivalry, redeemable only through systems that turn its broken nature into useful work.

This is the story holding capitalism in place. It rests on an account of human nature that almost everyone has half-internalized, including many of the people the story grinds down hardest.

The lie is not competition itself. Pressure is what produces growth in muscles, skills, and ideas. Creditism keeps the pressure. It keeps markets and prices doing the one honest thing prices do: signaling what’s genuinely scarce — not diamonds locked in a vault to stay “rare,” but the real limits, this lithium, this acre, an expert’s hour — so finite things flow to where they matter most. Creditism keeps the reward for excellent work.

What it removes is the rule that nobody admits is in the game. Right now we’re playing musical chairs, and not the children’s kind, where losing just means you sit out and watch. In this version, the player left standing loses their business, then their home. A cafe that loses customers to another cafe down the street doesn’t only lose customers; one bad year and a whole family is out of the only town they’ve ever known. We’ve fused two games into one: the game of running a cafe, and the game of being alive. Lose the first, lose the second.

Creditism pulls apart this con-fusion. It keeps the scramble for the better chairs — contracts, prizes, recognition for work done well. Those are really scarce, and competing for them is the pressure that makes us better. But bolt one chair to the floor for every body in the room, and never take it away. Now you can lose your cafe and keep your home, your health, your footing, and your next try.

None of this means no one loses. The cafe can still close; the venture can fail; competition means sometimes it will and it’s supposed to. The game has an ending built into it. What ends is the cafe, not the life behind it.

Creditism is a better capitalism and a better communism. Which is to say we owe both gratitude for their friction and fusion. Capitalism built a great deal we don’t want to lose. Walk into a good bookstore with full shelves heavier with knowledge than one person could absorb in a hundred lifetimes. The drive that filled them is real. It helped give us medicine, mobile computers, and more food per acre than any farmer in history could have dreamed. That drive is evolutionarily essential.

The abundance is real and the extraction is real. Capitalism made extraordinary things, but it made them by fusing two things that no longer have to be joined: the work of building, and the threat of ruin if you failed at it. It would be a mistake to continue believing they can’t come apart, and that to keep the bookstore, someone always has to be left without a chair when the music stops. If they come apart, the shelves don’t need anyone to be desperate. The presses don’t run on fear. Creditism keeps everything actually built in capitalism, but it ends the one thing it built that no one ever wanted: the part where you pay with your life for a seat.

So. Let’s actually look at it.

The evidence on what humans do when survival is decoupled from labor is extensive, decades old, and more nuanced than the most enthusiastic versions of either side suggest.

In the Mincome experiment in Manitoba in the 1970s, the town of Dauphin became a “saturation site”: every family meeting the income guidelines was eligible for a guaranteed income supplement for four years. Working hours dropped modestly. Where they did, it was overwhelmingly two groups: new mothers staying home longer with infants, and teenagers staying in school instead of dropping out to support their families. The system that funded the experiment classified those reductions as “lost productivity.” Most people would call them better outcomes.

The Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend has paid every resident of Alaska an unconditional annual check since 1982. The most rigorous study of its labor market effects found no significant decrease in overall employment, with a modest increase in part-time work. Forty years of unconditional cash, no productivity apocalypse.

Lottery winner studies are more complicated than the popular telling. A large Swedish study found that winners did reduce their labor supply, with effects persisting for at least a decade. They worked less. But that is not the same as doing nothing. The research does not show that money makes people useless. It shows that survival pressure makes people work more than they would otherwise choose, often at things they might otherwise refuse.

That’s the thing. The question was never whether unconditional support changes labor patterns. It does. The question is whether what comes after looks like collapse. The evidence on that is consistent: it doesn’t.

Retirees are among our most active volunteers, caregivers, mentors, and creators — people the official economy has classified as “non-productive” who, on being released from wage labor, redirect their hours toward exactly the kind of work civilization actually needs.

Open source software: much of the digital infrastructure the global economy runs on, built largely by people who could be billing hours elsewhere, working without wages because the work was meaningful and they wanted it to exist.

Parents, especially mothers: the largest unpaid workforce in human history, doing the actual daily labor of reproducing civilization, every single day, for free, often while also holding down wage labor on the side.

Every artist, scientist, scholar, and inventor who ever did the work for years before anyone was willing to pay for it. Most of the things you love were made by people working without compensation, often against the interests of the people who later profited from them.

When survival pressure is reduced, people do not simply drop out. Some reduce paid hours. Some go to school, care for children, recover, create, build, or choose different work. The will to contribute doesn’t vanish. What changes is the kind of work people are willing to give their lives to. We wonder how you’ll surprise us when the threat stops

The anthropologist David Graeber spent years documenting what he called “bullshit jobs”: work that the people performing it privately admit makes no real contribution to the world. Compliance theater. Administrative bloat. Manufactured intermediation. Corporate roles whose purpose seems to be justifying the existence of other corporate roles.

The empirical picture is contested but real. A YouGov poll in the UK found that 37% of workers said their job did not make a meaningful contribution to the world. Academic studies vary: one large European analysis found lower rates and argued the phenomenon is better described as alienation than uselessness, while a 2023 U.S. study found stronger evidence for Graeber’s thesis. The exact number is debated. The pattern — that a substantial fraction of modern paid work is experienced by the people doing it as pointless — is not.

Coercion didn’t produce productivity. It largely displaced it.

Forced labor performed under threat of destitution doesn’t add value to civilization in proportion to the hours it consumes. It redirects human attention away from what matters and toward whatever happens to pay. The hours get spent. The meaning leaks out. The output is mostly throughput: paper that justifies more paper, intermediation that brokers more intermediation, optimization that optimizes nothing real.

Remove the coercion, and what disappears isn’t productive work. It’s the bullshit. People move, often quickly, toward work that means something: care, craft, creation, restoration, teaching, building, repair. The work that was always there. The work that capitalism couldn’t see, because it didn’t generate a return.

There’s a second waste underneath this, equally invisible because the official numbers never count it. Bullshit jobs are the hours that get spent on nothing. Unused labor is the hours that never get spent at all.

Look at what doesn’t exist because no profit pathway exists for it. The teacher who would teach but couldn’t afford the tuition. The healer who would heal but the clinic wasn’t profitable. The builder who would build but no one would lend them the tools. The researcher whose question didn’t promise a return. The artist, the mender, the elder who would mentor: all of them existing, capable, willing, and excluded from contribution because their work didn’t fit a profit-making position.

The capacity is there. It always was. What blocks it is an economy whose only logic for creating work is whether someone can profit from it. If extraction isn’t possible, the work doesn’t happen, no matter how badly it’s needed. Human potential is the input. The profit-making position is the gate. Most of the potential never gets through.

The capitalist economy doesn’t have a free-rider problem. It has a structural under-employment problem dressed up as a labor market. The cost is paid by every community that lacked the teachers, healers, builders, and elders who never got the chance to step into the roles they were ready for.

Buckminster Fuller saw all of this half a century ago. “We keep inventing jobs,” he wrote, “because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist.” He understood that technological capacity had already outrun the moral architecture justifying it. We could already provide for everyone. We kept inventing reasons we couldn’t. “The true business of people,” he added, “should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”

He was right then. He’s more right now. The freedom promised by automation didn’t return as time to the people whose labor was replaced. It returned as profit to someone else.

This is what the lottery winners and the retirees and the new parents and the open-source developers have been showing us every day. They are experiment. The data is in front of us.

The species we’d discover, freed from chronic survival threat, is not a lazy one. It’s a builder. It just refuses to build the wrong things.

None of what we’re describing is leisure in the consumerist sense. It isn’t vacation. It isn’t a reward earned at the end of a long working life. It needs a name: unowned hours. Hours that are yours because they weren’t owed before you’d lived them.

Most of us have to strain to picture it. Waking up without other people’s claims already sitting on our necks. The endless inboxes. The mortgage sucking silently in the background. The bills in the drawer. The dread of the next call from the landlord.

That low constant hum of pre-owed time is so universal we mistake it for simply being alive. It isn’t. It’s being inside the machine.

That feeling... the absence of the hum.

That’s what’s been stolen.

Every time someone proposes decoupling survival from labor, the same objection arrives like a reflex: what about the free riders? The people who would take the baseline and contribute nothing? The freeloaders? The slackers?

The category dissolves under inspection.

The free rider is a coherent moral concept mostly inside a coercive system. It requires three conditions, all of which Creditism removes:

First, it requires zero-sum distribution. Under capitalism, every dollar one person takes is a dollar another doesn’t have. Social programs feel extractive because the math is extractive. Creditism changes the arithmetic. Baseline Personal Credit is issued because you exist as a participant — calibrated to real productive capacity and the shared inheritance held in the commons, not skimmed from active workers. Earned Credit comes through contribution: the baker baking, the teacher teaching, the builder building, the caregiver caring. The retired teacher next door isn’t taking from the active welder. They’re both participating in a flow where contribution is recognized and access is distributed. The arithmetic of resentment dissolves.

Second, it requires coerced participation as the default. The “free rider” only stings when most people are riding because they have to. The resentment runs on the implicit comparison: I’m forced to work, and they aren’t. Once participation is genuinely voluntary, the category becomes “person who chose differently this season.” Some seasons you build. Some you rest. Some you raise children. Some you grieve. Some you study. Some you travel. There is no boundary left to police.

Third, it requires the invisibility of unpaid labor. Under capitalism, the “free rider” charge has often landed on people doing massive amounts of uncompensated work: caregivers, mothers, elders, artists, organizers, the disabled. Capitalism couldn’t see their contribution because it didn’t pay them, so it called them parasites. Personal Credit is, in part, the recognition that most of what holds civilization together was never on the wage ledger to begin with.

Underneath all three sits the structural answer: inputs and outputs stay coupled at the community level. A community whose members collectively opt out has less to share, less to celebrate, less to build with. The feedback is built into reality, not policed by bureaucrats. Communities that show up flourish. Communities that don’t, just get by. No threat is required. The world itself signals that participation matters, because participation is what makes a world.

What about the genuinely hard cases? Addiction. Severe antisocial behavior. Deep despair. People who, even in a fair system, will not contribute and will draw on common resources?

They exist. They’ve always existed. The threat of starvation never solved them: it made them worse. People die of overdoses while their communities tell themselves the system is teaching personal responsibility. People with severe mental illness sleep on sidewalks in countries that could trivially house them. The current system isn’t curing these conditions. It is hiding behind them, using them as the moral excuse for keeping everyone else terrified.

Creditism doesn’t claim to fix the hard cases. It claims to stop using them as the justification for a system that punishes the other ninety-nine percent of us. They still have baseline access, and their community still has responsibility to respond. The moral excuse goes. The responsibility to try doesn’t.

You’ll hear this from the comfortable: “If no one has to work, who builds anything great? Who founds the companies? Who pushes the frontiers? Don’t we need ambition? Don’t we need a competitive edge?”

The answer: the same people who would have built it anyway.

The drive to create, to master, to lead, and to make things that last — that is real. So is the desire to test yourself against others. It runs deep in us. It does not, however, require a captive workforce as its stage.

Look at the actual builders of consequential things. Most of them were obsessed long before they were paid. Most of them, asked privately, would say money was the least interesting thing about the work. The romance of the founder mythology — the lone genius motivated by the prospect of becoming a billionaire — has always been retroactive. It’s a story the system tells about itself to justify the extraction that followed the work, not a description of what motivated the work in the first place.

The people who built the internet were not, mostly, doing it for money. The people who developed the science underlying every modern medical treatment were, by and large, not doing it for money. The people who write the great novels, build the great buildings, raise children well, run strong communities, push cultural boundaries — almost none of them are doing it primarily for money. Many are doing it despite the money, working second jobs to fund the work that matters.

In Creditism, contribution is still credited. The baker, the teacher, the builder, the healer — all of them get recorded for what they do. But the credit isn’t what conjures the doing. It records what happened; it doesn’t manufacture the want. People show up because the work matters to them, and then the system acknowledges that they showed up.

Ambition doesn’t die. It redirects. People still want to build cathedrals, run things, master crafts, push frontiers, and leave something behind. They just stop wanting — needing — to own other people’s hours to do it.

What dies isn’t ambition. It’s a particular form: the ambition to convert other humans into instruments. The drive to acquire control over other people’s time as a measure of one’s own success. The auto-suggested vision of “true success” as leveraging other people’s hours.

That ambition is the antithesis of liberty and it deserves to die.

What replaces it is older, and better, and has been waiting for us all along. The ambition to make a thing the world didn’t have. To teach a child what no one taught you. To repair what was broken, restore what was lost, learn what you don’t know yet, master a craft, lead a community, or build something that outlives you.

That ambition doesn’t need anyone to be desperate. It works fine in a world where everyone has a home.

We were told humans needed coercion because they were lazy. Most of us still hold some version of this belief, even those of us who hate the system, even those who can feel in their own lives that the story doesn’t quite fit.

The truth is the inverse.

The system needs coercion because it cannot survive without it. The story about human nature was less a description than a justification: an account constructed after the fact to explain why a particular group of humans needed to be kept in a state of perpetual economic threat.

Reduce the coercion and a great deal of what looked like laziness reveals itself as something else: refusal to work for the wrong people on the wrong things. The system mistook resistance for sloth and called it a moral failing. It wasn’t. It was a clue.

People are not, on average, lazy.

They are exhausted, indebted, surveilled, anxious, and pointed at work that makes no sense to them. Address that, and what you find underneath is the same human inheritance that built every cathedral, every symphony, every open-source repository, every garden, every meal made with care for someone else, every act of teaching, every moment of grandmother-to-granddaughter knowledge ever passed down on this planet.

That species is still here. It has been here the whole time.

It has just been renting its hours back, week after week, to the people who own the deed to its life.

A life-affirming economy begins when no human being’s survival depends on surrendering their future hours to someone else’s accumulated claim.

Nick’s letter ended the way letters between friends end: wishing me well, hoping his “partially digested thoughts” might be somewhat interesting, and looking forward to hearing back.

They were. They are. He had said what most of us have been thinking over privately for years and rarely been able to say out loud.

Money was never just money.

It was claims on your hours.

The economy that comes next does not begin with revenge. It begins by ending the conversion of human time into something other humans can own.

Your hours come home.

With gratitude to Nick Marconi, whose letter from a Vermont spring set this essay in motion

On the Mincome experiment, see Evelyn Forget, The Town with No Poverty, and the National Collaborating Centre for Determinants of Health summary. On the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend, see Damon Jones and Ioana Marinescu, “The Labor Market Impacts of Universal and Permanent Cash Transfers,” American Economic Journal: Economic Policy (2022). On the Swedish lottery study, see David Cesarini et al., “The Effect of Wealth on Individual and Household Labor Supply,” American Economic Review (2017). On meaningless work, see the YouGov UK poll (2015), and for the academic critique, Magdalena Soffia, Alex J. Wood, and Brendan Burchell, “Alienation Is Not ‘Bullshit’,” Work, Employment and Society (2022). On Buckminster Fuller‘s remarks on employment and “earning a living,” see his 1970 interview with Elizabeth Barlow, “The Death of the City,” New York magazine, March 30, 1970, often reprinted.

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