The Extraction Economy
Excerpt from The Comeback Stack
LIFE ASSETS: The Only Way to Light Up Your Life
and Love It Again
You Are Better Than Burnout
Author’s Note. Read This First.
Before you begin with this excerpt, I’ll lay out what’s already been covered. In Sections One and Two of the book, readers discovered the inner framework that makes every comeback possible. Both sections are devoted to recognizing your Life Assets (the inner resources you’ve accumulated that enrich your life, and that are valuable and exchangeable with the world around you).
Within your portfolio of Life Assets, we focused on two:
- Your Values. The personal ideals, organizing principles, and natural priorities that keep you sane and true to yourself.
- Your STACKWINS. The unique collection of your Skills, Talents, Aptitudes, Competencies, Knowledge, Wisdom, Insights, Nature, and Strengths.
Together, these two Life Assets form the foundation of who you are, and give you the tools to experience success and satisfaction in everything you do.
This excerpt begins at a key moment in the book when I list the six megatrends found in the second of the four clusters of megatrends. Here you see only six of the twenty global pressures shaping how you live, work, and feel. While I have chosen to isolate these six into a group, and I have given that group a name, the megatrends included are not mine; nor are they theories. They are measurable forces acting on your brain, body, and choices every day. Each one is insidious, sneaking into your life, putting demands on you, pressuring you to comply.
You are about to put words to the feelings of stress that have been pulling you off your own path. Cluster by cluster, you’ll be able to stand back to see all twenty megatrends; then, you will have a hint of where your energy has been leaking. And I hope you’ll have a sense of indignant rebellion: you do not need to live by anyone else’s idea of success, happiness, or purpose.
Excerpt Series: The Comeback Stack
LIFE ASSETS: The Only Way to Light Up Your Life and Love It Again
You Are Better Than Burnout
Excerpt Table of Contents
Part 1: Your Shield Against the World
Part 2: The Systems That Profit from Your Energy
Part 3: Sovereignty Drift
Part 4: The Extraction Economy
Part 5: Broken Bonds and Busted Foundations
Part 6: The Body and Spirit Hijack
(You’re reading Part 4 of 6.)
Cluster One: Sovereignty Drift
The Financial Loss Trap
Definition: You are stuck in a world of constant catch up. Even with a good salary, or your own business, your income stagnates while housing, school, gas and most things cost more expensive than ever. Taxes are out of control and rising.
The Trap: Accepting spending as normal, and thinking you must buy what you’ve been told to buy, pay for what some committee decided is your responsibility to pay.Abdicating your voice, believing you have no say while you work more and harder, just to cover what the system requires…and takes.
The Lie: You need what’s been hyped. Your elected officials will steward your money well without any oversight. If you just earn more, work harder and earn more, you’ll finally be safe.
The Truth: Financial freedom begins when you claim your priorities. It expands when you put your voice into the system, and speak out about what you want… and need… and how your money gets spent. Stewardship of your money is your responsibility. Part of your financial freedom is refusing to stay silent about systemic theft.
The Cost: When you sense that you can’t fulfill your obligations, you lose hope that you can feel safe, and the anxiety of trying to stretch becomes oppressive. Wondering where it really goes weighs on you. It’s no wonder you feel like working is becoming pointless, or that you resent wanting the things you once dreamed about. Of course, you feel helpless if your money is the target of someone else’s plan for spending. It’s exhausting pushing back against the systemic pressure.
Alternative nomenclature for this megatrend: Economic anxiety, inflation fatigue, financial stress syndrome and the cost of living crisis.
The Over Consumption Culture
Definition: The good life is sold as comfort, food, entertainment, wine, clutter, and more places to go. The dopamine hit of getting what you want used to feel like proof you had arrived, but it has become unsatisfying, and now it’s almost impossible to keep up. It feels difficult – or maybe risky – to figure out what to let go of.
The Trap: Believing that achieving more means attaining, collecting, buying, and experiencing more because that’s the right thing to do.
The Lie: Indulgence is luxury.
The Truth: Whatever you consume will end up consuming your space and time, and it’s up to you to decide what’s worth that.
The Cost: When you feel over full and tired of managing everything from your body weight to your mental weight to your physical stuff, it’s hard to find the energy, attention, and enthusiasm you want to feel for your life. It’s no wonder you feel like you are buried under a heavy pile, and you feel like you need a second person to help you manage your stuff. Of course, you feel overwhelmed.
Alternative nomenclature for this megatrend: Hyperconsumerism, affluenza, conspicuous consumption, excess lifestyle syndrome, acquisition anxiety, luxury addiction
The Surveillance Economy
Definition: Every tap, click and scroll is recorded, analyzed, and sold until your life is reduced to a data point. You’ve been fed back into a system that boxes you in until your attention is no longer yours. The algorithm has shaped what you see, and maybe even what you believe.
The Trap: Believing that if you leave your data and devices on, that you’ll be safe. Behaving as if you’re not being watched leads you to think your thoughts are really your own.
The Lie: You want what’s on your feed, and you are choosing where your mind is being drawn and directed.
The Truth: When your attention is being commoditized, it’s up to you to protect your psyche. Freedom comes when you move with your armor on, conscious, intentional, and aware of when to shut off, and how you want to participate and engage.
The Cost: When you’ve been influenced to believe that your choices are yours – but they’re not – you’ve lost touch with what you really want. It gets harder and harder to say no, and more challenging to identify your own priorities. The fog of manipulation is thick. It’s no wonder you feel like a pawn in someone else’s game. It’s no wonder that at the end of the day, you don’t feel satisfied or proud of the way you’ve spent your time, attention, money. Of course, it makes you feel like you haven’t accomplished what’s important to you, and the wish for the quiet of your own true interests borders on longing.
Alternative nomenclature for this megatrend: Digital capitalism, data harvesting, attention theft, algorithmic manipulation.
The Trust Deficit
Definition: Competing media, polarized news, industry placed fact checkers, aggressive experts and feeds contradict each other and fill the airspace with “official” narratives.
The Trap: Seeking counsel and insight, but allowing someone else to weave the data into truth without your thinking or questioning.
The Lie: An outlet, committee, or authority figure is incapable of exaggeration, half truth, manipulation, or lies.
The Truth: The only trust that matters is what you have with yourself. How you take in data, weigh it, and shape it into meaning cab only be done by you, for you. Trust in yourself goes beyond any official narrative. You are tasked with asking quality questions and seeking understanding.
The Cost: When you feel betrayed, it impacts your identity. If you’ve defined yourself as being a good patient, good citizen, or loyal employee… If you’ve been willing to put your trust in others – the so called experts – your world crumbles at the thought of being used. It’s no wonder your definition of what defines being good is in flux. When the myth of an infallible authority breaks, it leaves you feeling skeptical. Of course, you feel disoriented, uncertain, frustrated, and you don’t necessarily know how to figure out what information is trustworthy. Who is lying, and why?
Alternative nomenclature for this megatrend: Information overload, truth fatigue, institutional distrust, epistemic crisis.
Pharma Overreach
Definition: Pharma is everywhere, advertising and promoting their products in media programming, online, at sports events, on buses, billboards, and everywhere you look. They profit by keeping people hypochondriacal, and sick. They interrupt healing with pills for symptoms where the root cause is never addressed.
The Trap: Believing that doctors or the system act independently of pharma’s profit engine, or thinking that you are not influenced by the advertising indoctrination that demands you seek medical attention, even for things that are normal, natural challenges to your body and mind.
The Lie: Your health lives in a prescription bottle.
The Truth: Your body is designed for vitality and longevity. The basic ingredients for survival do not include drugs and surgery. Pharma does not create life or health. It exploits fear and natural cycles of biological expression and aging.
The Cost: When pharma profits from your sickness, it becomes their revenue stream. Your healing gets sidelined, and you’re left dependent – and sick – instead of independent and restored. It’s no wonder you don’t feel well. If the approach has been to meet every symptom with a pill, your vitality has been completely overlooked. Of course, it’s hard to know where to begin when the majority of information you’ve been exposed to has come from the very source that’s destroyed your health.
Alternative nomenclature for this megatrend: Medical industrial complex, pill pushing culture, symptom suppression and pharmaceutical dependency.
Wellness Capitalism
Definition: Your wellness is bought and sold. It’s been turned into an industry that has monetized your lack of knowledge about your body. The industry markets hope in healing, then presents it as something that only an expert can deliver. Someone keeps trumpeting that hacks and quick fixes are possible.
The Trap: Handing over your vitality to an industry that encourages you to think of your health as something that can be handled in parts. It tells you to look into things instead of to look inside. It tells you to think holistically, yet sells you something that helps one part of you and harms another.
The Lie: Biohacking, testing, or a magic formula will generate or guarantee your wellness.
The Truth: The language of your body is feedback, and when you pay attention to it, you become your own best counsel. Your wellness begins there when you listen and honor your body’s signals. You do need wise counsel from experts, but it’s up to you to work with them and not to outsource your wholeness to the marketplace. Beware of cookie cutter solutions.
The Cost: When your vitality is siphoned into trends, tests, supplements or hacks, your wallet gets drained and yet your body will not necessarily be restored. You lose money, time and health, as the wellness industry sells you a fix, but doesn’t deliver results. It’s no wonder you feel cynical, discouraged, overwhelmed or mixed up. If every promise of health turns into another product, it’s natural to doubt if wellness even exists and to wonder how it’s possible. Of course, you feel the urge to get a better doctor, and you get frustrated not knowing what that even means…or where to start.
Alternative nomenclature for this megatrend: Health commodification, wellness industry exploitation, biohacking obsession and optimization fatigue.
Now you’ve been through two clusters. You’ve discovered 12 of the 20 megatrends. How do you feel? I can tell you that in the process of writing this, by the time I got through this second cluster, I’d felt overwhelmed and furious all over again, and I’ve looked at this information hundreds of times.
So if you’re feeling unnerved, angry, or frustrated, I get it. You’re normal.
This is the hardest part of this book. You are coming face to face with the pressures that are coming at you every day.
You wouldn’t be human if you didn’t feel bewildered.
But, I want to assure you, it’s better to know exactly what they are than to not. Pressures and fears that have no name amount to being bogeymen. And in that case, all we can do is to cover our eyes and try to sing happy tunes. It may distract us for a while, but when we uncover our eyes and stop singing, we are still afraid. So, let’s talk about why taking a good, hard look at megatrends is necessary.
We cannot stop megatrends. They are the forces of the time we live in. Complaining about them won’t get us anywhere. Fearing them won’t help us. We cannot run from them. Either we look at them, name them, and state with precision what they mean to us, or we cry into our coffee and commiserate with others about how powerless and miserable we are.
Over the last 30+ years working with thousands of patients and clients, it’s those who empower themselves with perspective who win. Information is not enough. (It just clutters the mind. No one needs that.) The people who have taken the time to interpret the world around them, and shape their response to it feel the jolt of agency. And what has separated the happy, empowered individuals from the unhappy, miserable ones has been one thing only: those who have been able to look at themselves and account for what they have within them are able to deal with the pressures, and come out with their integrity, sanity, and personal sovereignty.
They have discovered that at the same time these big, heavy, challenging forces are present, they have the Life Assets that will protect them, orient them, and inspire them.
You can experience the same thing. You might as well. Your Life Assets are the only things you really have, anyway. No one can ever take them away from you, and they really do make it simple to solve your problems, handle your challenges, achieve your goals, and make your dreams come true.
The two Life Assets we’ve been addressing in this book (Your Values, and Your STACKWINS, i.e. skills, talents, aptitudes, competencies, knowledge, wisdom, insights, nature and strengths) will go a long way towards protecting your body and mind, restoring your sanity, and reinforcing your personal sovereignty. They act as both your shield and your tools to make your life exactly what you want, right here and now, despite the intensity of any megatrend.
Postscript: End-of-Part Reflection
You’ve now seen the second cluster, The Extraction Economy, containing six megatrends that have been overtaking parts of your personal life, interfering with your privacy, and overstimulating your nervous system’s natural defenses.
If you’ve felt your mind racing faster, looking for a solution, that’s a healthy response. Your mind seeks a way to protect, reclaim, and maintain its personal sovereignty. Every bit of tension you’ve had while you’ve read these words is proof that you are a human being. You are not an automaton. And though what you are processing may feel like pressure (you are not imagining it), it’s also empowerment. You’ve put a name to what’s been usurping your power. It’s no longer a nameless, faceless bogeyman.
In the next part of this series, we’ll move on to Cluster Three: Broken Bonds and Busted Foundations. In that section, you’ll discover the truth about why what used to hold us steady has started to feel like it’s cracking. It has to do with trust, leadership, and belonging, and will explain why so many people feel isolated even while surrounded by others, and why they wonder who or what to rely on.
Before you continue, pause. Take a breath. Your Life Assets are present within you to act as your stabilizers, to remind you what is important to you, and to give you the confidence to know how to handle any challenge that comes from a megatrend. You aren’t helpless. And you aren’t just resilient. You are powerful. And the more awareness you have, the more powerful you are.
Let’s get to it.
