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Nerd Cheat Sheet: – Money — It’s a Gas
We all want to feel valued. It is one of the earliest currencies of human connection.
From the Oscars to today’s talent shows, we recognise the same desire:
to have our work seen, judged, and raised up by others.
A compliment feels good, because it makes our purpose feel real.
But a compliment is also superficial.
Real self-worth only forms when what others say aligns with what we quietly know to be true.
Good feedback should feel like looking in a mirror:
clear, proportionate, and unexaggerated.
The challenge is believing what we see rather than what we hope is there.
Many of us underestimate how visible we really are.
We look for compensation—for applause, for comparison, for something that reassures us we are at least keeping our heads above water.
We feel caught in the rat race, comparing ourselves to others, when the real race is simply making the best of ourselves.
Where Do We Find Contentment?
Success is difficult to define because every life is different, but we can still use a simple model to explore proportion.
Imagine a hard-working person with a modest but stable salary—enough to replace their car every three years using about fifteen percent of their income after tax and state deductions.
Nothing extravagant. Just a reasonable benchmark for financial equilibrium.
Now contrast this with a second scenario: someone who works far longer hours—arriving at eight in the morning and leaving at nine at night, five days a week, for nearly the whole year.
The cheat sheet that accompanies this section shows the calculation, but the trend is what matters:
- that working 50% more hours does not produce 50% more income,
- that in the model, the higher earner receives ten times the effective reward,
- and that this extra reward must come from somewhere—typically from a much wider social group who pay into the system that enables such roles.
Using Dunbar’s number (approximately 150 people—the natural size of our social circle), we can see the imbalance clearly.
If one highly paid “talented” individual earns ten times more than the norm, the effective cost, spread across those 150 model citizens, becomes noticeable.
Not catastrophic — but distorted.
The talented individual receives a level of reward that no amount of extra effort alone can justify.
The scaling no longer reflects human biology or real contribution.
It reflects leverage.
This is not an argument against talent or reward.
It is an observation about proportion and sustainability, not a call to limit ambition.
It is also a question of quality of life. Long office hours and sleep leave a person with perhaps three usable hours a day—time only for travelling to and from work and eating two basic meals.
My wife and I often notice a strange pattern in modern entertainment, especially American television.
The protagonist’s life is presented as “ordinary,” yet it floats far above the reality of a model citizen.
They live in spacious city apartments, dress flawlessly, eat out freely, and spend their evenings in bars or cafés—while still advancing effortlessly in demanding careers.
It is a lifestyle available to only a small fraction of real people, yet it is shown as normal.
This creates a quiet distortion.
We are invited to feel we recognise ourselves in these characters, but the world they inhabit is built on wealth, time, and freedom that even most professionals never experience.
It can leave us feeling as though the wool has been pulled over our eyes—as if we are failing to live up to a standard that never truly existed.
The Fantasy Feedback Loop
The danger is not that entertainment creates fantasy—that has always been part of storytelling.
The danger is that the fantasy has drifted so far from the lived experience of the model citizen that it no longer offers relief, but distortion.
It pulls the string of expectation tighter and tighter until it begins to fray.
Rather than helping us cope with reality, it quietly undermines it.
When everyday life is measured against a fictional world of effortless wealth, perfect balance, and unlimited emotional bandwidth, dissatisfaction deepens.
People begin to feel that something is wrong—not with the fiction, but with themselves, or with society at large.
It is the modern version of Peter and the Wolf: repeated signals that do not match reality.
The more often the illusion is repeated, the less credible the real world feels.
And when genuine social tension finally appears, it arrives in a population whose expectations have already been stretched far beyond what any system can deliver.
When Assumptions Break
For most of human history, production and consumption happened within the same small social sphere.
If inequality grew too sharp, the feedback became immediate and unavoidable.
The famous phrase “let them eat cake” is historically uncertain, but it symbolises something real:
the moment a hierarchy becomes deaf to the conditions that support it.
The modern world has changed this dynamic.
Production happens in one place, consumption in another, and the social feedback loop that once regulated fairness has weakened.
Strain hasn’t disappeared—it has simply grown quieter.
This pattern mirrors something we see in physics.
Newton’s laws describe most of the world we interact with.
For everyday engineering and even for most of space travel, Newton is enough.
But when speeds become extreme, or gravity becomes intense, his assumptions break.
Light bends.
Time stretches.
Reality behaves differently.
In many ways, simple capitalism is now falling freely through Einstein’s universe—moving so quickly and with so little friction that it can no longer feel the gravity that once kept it balanced.
Beyond Newtonian Economics
The free market remains the best system we have discovered.
But, like Newtonian physics, it only behaves perfectly within a certain range.
It assumes:
- that no participant becomes so large they distort the system,
- that no reward grows faster than real contribution,
- and that no individual gains leverage far beyond the scale of their biological limits.
But we have exceeded that range.
Technology, globalisation, and financial acceleration allow individuals and companies to operate far beyond the traditional speed and scale of human contribution.
At this level, the assumptions of the free market begin to bend.
Reward no longer maps cleanly to effort, risk, or talent.
Value curves around concentrated power
just as light curves around massive stars.
This is not a failure of capitalism.
It is a recognition that the system is now running at relativistic speeds.
Old rules stretch, distort, and sometimes break.
The solution is not replacement, but understanding—and responsibility.
The Responsibility of Talent
This section is not a call for communism, nor a judgement of ambition.
It is a call for personal governance.
Modern systems can reward an individual far beyond what any one human can biologically contribute.
The question is not whether these rewards should exist.
The question is what we do with them once they arrive.
If my abilities, timing, or position allow me to gather the value of ten ordinary lives,
how much of that should I actually take?
How much burden can I ethically place on the group that supports me?
Where is the line between healthy ambition and systemic gluttony?
These are not political questions.
They are personal ones.
They live in character, not ideology.
Talent creates the possibility of asymmetry.
Responsibility determines how we carry it.
An Honest View of Purpose
In the end, most of us are not searching for applause—we are searching for meaning.
Recognition belongs in our social circle, where people know us well enough to see the truth.
Purpose comes from contribution, not from bank statements.
If we look to wealth for our worth, we are looking in the wrong place.
But if we look to what we genuinely add to the world—
our relationships, our integrity, our craft—
then purpose becomes something we can finally touch.
📖 Series Roadmap
- Forward: A Little Background
- Introduction: Action, Reaction, and the Human Paradox (16.09.2025)
- Looking Back in Time: The Development of the Human Brain (23.09.2025)
- Abstract Senses: Enhancing the way we see the world outside (30.09.2025)
- Bias as a Concept & Climbing the Stairs: Pattern Recognition & Everyday Tasks (07.10.2025)
- Abstract Feelings and Abstract Senses (14.10.2025)
- Motivation (04.11.2025)
- The Social Knowledge Base (11.11.2025)
- Potential (18.11.2025)
- The Subliminal Way We Go Through Life (26.11.2025)
- Taking Responsibility (02.12.2025)
- Fishing for Complements (22.12.2025)
- Peter and Fermi (22.12.2025)
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Nerd Cheat Sheet: – Money — It’s a Gas
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