Adapting Our Systems to Serve Life

We All Want to Live Well

Every human being longs for safety, dignity, and a future worth living in.

We want the work of our hands, hearts, and minds to matter—not just to the marketplace, but to the people and places we love. We want our children to inherit a planet that sustains them, and to know we did what we could to leave it whole.

And yet, the United States today feels like it’s sailing backward into a time when poverty itself was treated as a crime, and when those who struggled to survive were met with a boot instead of a helping hand.

This cruelty—this racism, immigrant-hating, and violent discarding of fellow human beings—is no accident. It is the predictable outcome of a mechanical, soulless system we built and have allowed to harden around us. A system that trains us to believe the masses themselves are to blame for their suffering, while the wealthy few who control governments, media, and even moral narratives refuse to share the abundance that ALL of us help create.

When the wealth generated by the many flows only upward—when workers and their families see their labor enrich those who hoard rather than those who need—the problem is not with the people doing the work. It is with an economic design that privileges the accumulation of money over the flourishing of life.

We have commoditized existence itself. We keep balance sheets that label human beings as “assets” or “liabilities,” and we reward or discard them accordingly:

• A pregnant woman who can produce more workers? An asset.

• A robust adult who will work for less than they need to thrive? An asset.

• A capitalist who can multiply money into more money? The ultimate asset.

• A bureaucrat willing to rubber-stamp destructive policies for short-term gain? A highly profitable asset.

Meanwhile, the long-term care of people, animals, and planet is reviled as a cost to be avoided. Many at the top hope simply to die before the party ends—before the land is poisoned, the air is unbreathable, the commons are gone, and our children bleed in wars fought to protect private wealth.

So the denial goes on. Climate change is ridiculed. Efforts to restrain unfettered profiteering are smeared as “socialist” or “anti-freedom.” Nations with healthier relationships to life are mocked or vilified. And the playbook of force-based plunder continues, even as the biosphere shows increasing signs of excessive depletion, pollution, and collapse.

But maybe—just maybe—the path to survival does not lie in accelerating the very destruction that threatens us.

Maybe the real solution begins with changing our collective attitude toward work, human creativity, community, and the rest of the living world. Maybe the time is NOW to recraft our social systems to align with the reality of life on Earth and the biosphere that we depend upon for our continued survival.

Ideologies often fail when they collide with reality. And reality is speaking to us now—in rising seas, burning forests, empty shelves, and restless hearts.

If our cherished systems cannot feed the hungry, shelter the vulnerable, and restore the Earth, then they are not sacred. They are broken, profane, life-negating.

And it is time—perhaps even long past time—to adapt, expand, and evolve them to serve the only living world that we actually have.