into because it makes our lives a little bit easier. It allows us to convert our
values into something universal when we’re dealing with one another. You
love seashells and oysters. I love fertilizing soil with the blood of my sworn
enemies. You fight in my army, and when we get home, I’ll make you rich
with seashells and oysters. Deal?
That’s how human economies emerged.^4 No, really, they started because a
bunch of angry kings and emperors wanted to slaughter their sworn enemies,
but they needed to give their armies something in return, so they minted
money as a form of debt (or moral gap) for the soldiers to “spend” (equalize)
when (or if) they got back home.
Not much has changed, of course. The world ran on feelings then; it runs
on feelings now. All that’s changed is the gizmos we use to shit on each other.
Technological progress is just one manifestation of the Feelings Economy.
For instance, nobody ever tried to invent a talking waffle. Why? Because
that’d be fucking creepy and weird, not to mention probably not very
nutritious. Instead, technologies are researched and invented to—yep, you
guessed it!—make people feel better (or prevent them from feeling worse).
The ballpoint pen, a more comfortable seat heater, a better gasket for your
house’s plumbing—fortunes are made and lost around things that help people
improve upon or avoid pain. These things make people feel good. People get
excited. They spend money. Then it’s boom times, baby.
There are two ways to create value in the marketplace:- Innovations (upgrade pain). The first way to create value is to replace one pain with a much
more tolerable/desirable pain. The most drastic and obvious examples of this are medical and
pharmaceutical innovations. Polio vaccines replaced a lifetime of debilitating pain and immobility
with a few seconds of a needle prick. Heart surgeries replaced . . . well, death with having to
recover from surgery for a week or two. - Diversions (avoid pain). The second way to create value in a marketplace is to help people
numb their pain. Whereas upgrading people’s pain gives them better pain, numbing pain just
delays that pain, and often even makes it worse. Diversions are a weekend beach trip, a night out
with friends, a movie with someone special, or snorting cocaine out of the crack of a hooker’s ass.
There’s nothing necessarily wrong with diversions; we all need them from time to time. The
problem is when they begin to dominate our lives and wrest control away from our will. Many
diversions trip certain circuits in our brain, making them addictive. The more you numb pain, the
worse that pain becomes, thus impelling you to numb it further. At a certain point, the icky ball of
pain grows to such great proportions that your avoidance of that pain becomes compulsive. You
lose control of yourself—your Feeling Brain has locked your Thinking Brain in the trunk and isn’t
letting it out until it gets its next hit of whatever. And the downward spiral ensues.
When the scientific revolution first got going, most economic progress
was due to innovation. Back then, the vast majority of people lived in
poverty: Everyone was sick, hungry, cold, and tired most of the time. Few
could read. Most had bad teeth. It was no fun at all. Over the next few
hundred years, with the invention of machines and cities and the division of