Transmute your energy, attention and work into wealth, meaning and prosperity...
Sep 11, 2025
Most people misunderstand what economics is. Especially artists and dreamers like myself. People who think that economics is for accountants, profit-chasers, suit-wearers, hedge-fund ghouls and greedy capitalist pigs.
But thatâs a tragic error. Let us explore the dynamics of exchange and attention to understand ourselves and the world around us. I will be employing an alchemical lens which means I am paying attention to the ways that individuals and organisations, every one of us, can transmute their energy, attention and work into wealth, meaning and prosperity.
1. Transmutability, Mutation and Exchange
Letâs start with some statements. Time equals energy equals money equals work equals calories; or, at least, those things are mutually exchangeable. Wealth equals the things that you invest in multiplied or divided by your circumstances. Let's break down these simplifications with a series of definitions.
You can exchange money, which is a kind of potential energy, because you could spend it on anything, and it gives you a degree of power. Even at the level of buying something from a shop: you choose what to buy, you create a result using your money, which you spend. Demonstrable power to influence the outside world. So, we have another axis: spendable versus, in some way, more permanent. Do you follow so far?
Then we factor in incentive. The movement of money throughout the entire society â˘â˘â˘ which is the entry point of economics â˘â˘â˘ is governed by incentives. Incentives govern the shape of the economy, its motion, its transformations. Itâs governed by incentive, fundamentally. Including the incentives of people to manipulate the economy. That is a complex area in and of itself.
But really, that is only the first level of what economics truly is. The reason I like my system is because it has multiple layers of abstraction, from the abstract to the pragmatically useful, personal and psychological. Energy is the most abstract. It is motion and potential which means that it is the force of change, which exists along the axis of time. However, although energy is dynamic it is consistent and persistent. Percy Shelley said it best: ÂŤNaught may endure but mutability.Âť
2. Energy
Energy isnât created or destroyed. Over time, things appear to lose energy, but really theyâre reaching a more balanced energy state. Fundamentally, you can look at particle physics for that by examining the field of entropy.
So yes, energy is the most abstract, and we start there. But it goes down to psychology, to incentive, to how you feel, what you buy, and why. Even deeper: where you put your energy. What you're interested in. Attention. Attention is the other equals.
3. Time
Time is a kind of potential energy, except it actually is finite. Time is where all finitude comes from, the other axis of the very entropy described in particle physics. Energy moves through transformations over time. Time is like a current: a liquid through which things travel. We perceive it somewhat metaphorically as motion: the movement of a clock hand passing through various measurable instants. Time therefore appears as a kind of energy as well; it is uncontrollably finite, at least from our perspective.
That is why how we spend our energy is extremely important, and why economics is extremely important. If you donât think so, you donât know what economics is. It is a highly theoretical, philosophical, mathematical, abstract, artistic, and beautiful realm of study. It is not just about making money, even if people enter the field with that motive. This in and of itself is interesting, because it means that economics remains one of the most widely studied topics in certain countries, classes, and psychological types, due to its own set of incentives as a field of study.
So, Time is the ultimate substrate alongside energy. They form a kind of yin-yang. Energy moves through time, and time requires energy â¨which includes matter⊠to have shape. Thatâs why it is valuable. It is not just ÂŤstuff;Âť itâs mutually transformable, mutually intelligible, mutually exchangeable. Some would even argue that this equation includes love, though I choose to keep that out of it. Love is more complex, mutualistic, more spiritual and mysterious. I would like to respect that mystery, there is no need to unweave that rainbow or reduce it to economic abstraction.
4. Work
The kind of work you do is governed by incentives. Your capacity and desire to do something difficult, shaped by your desire to earn money. The more difficult and rare a skill is, the more value it has. This is part of what makes AI so terrifying: it short-circuits peopleâs internal sense of their own value relative to the world and their own potential; this devaluation occurs not just financially, but in terms of respect and social power.
You choose how to spend your time to accumulate energy. Then what do you do with that energy? Spend it on expensive things for social signaling? Why would you do that? Youâre signaling that you have earned, inherited or created value. I am not saying thereâs no market manipulation or bad actors. This isnât a justification for hoarding. Evolution explains such behavior easily.âââââââ
5. Money
Money is the crystallisation of value and energy into a spendable token. That token is a symbol of the work and effort theoretically required to obtain it. The big question around money from an individual perspective is how you will spend it. Letâs say you buy something generative. You buy a guitar. Then you write a song with it that hits number one. That guitar was a generative investment. You spent money on something that created more money. But if youâre just socially signaling, you're probably spending on things that donât create money and maybe do not even create much value, except in how others perceive you.
However, sometimes the signal doesnât even come across, especially if it is false. If you do not have the abundance of resources that your image implies, people can sense that. Evolutionarily, we are wired to display resource abundance. Survival depended on it for most of our history. That impulse is in us genetically and subconsciously.
So if you spend all your money on expensive dresses every week, maybe even going into debt, eventually you canât keep up. You start to look out of fashion not because you lack taste, but because people can sense the performance is unsustainable. They see the attempt to signal which masks the true non-abundance of resources.
6. Value
I want people to see time, energy, and value as the same:
â¨time = energy = valueâŠ
â¨incentive = attentionâŠ
â¨work = money = caloriesâŠ
Attention is part of how we seek incentives. But attention can be manipulated. It adapts â to rapid or slow changes. And so on.
I want people to see those elements â˘â˘â˘ especially the latter ones â˘â˘â˘ as mutually exchangeable. Mutually intelligible. Not the same but tradable.
And additionally, to unite those ideas, we must understand peopleâs sense of hierarchy and their resource signaling tactics. The symbolism of abundance, the cost of goods, the rate of exchange, how much you get paid; all of this is governed by our collective sense of scarcity and abundance, shaped by incentives and the manipulation of them.
7. Political Ramifications and Reflections
Communism
One major issue with communism is that it does not grasp these dynamics deeply enough. It assumes the preservation of exchange rates â¨and therefore incentives⊠regardless of societal structure. But we know this fails. It tends to flatten society into a tall column of power, wrapped in gigantic bureaucratic machinery, surrounded by hordes of the poor and resentful. Yes, there is a communist art scene, fairness is a legitimate value, and the left is full of nuance. I am oversimplifying the left which has many political, economic and socio-cultural positives across countless sub-ideologies. But pure Marxism misses something essential.
Libertarianism
On the other side, libertarianism allows a different kind of gigantism. If the left-wing dystopia is a bloated bureaucracy with a dictator, the right-wing dystopia is corporate gigantism. Corporations manipulating markets, influencing governments, writing legislation, infiltrating regulatory bodies and effectively becoming phantom states.
This is amplified by the virtualization effect of technology, which multiplies their reach and power.
Money is a kind of power. Now we are seeing a new psychological tyranny. That is the right-wing dystopia.
Because of their power, governments are incentivized to collaborate with these companies. But this often becomes a parasitic relationship, or worse: one where governments are overwhelmed by the corporations.
To me, the solution may be vague but the direction in which it lies is obvious: we must be wary of both dangers and both toolsets. Ultimately, however, we need to build something else.
A.I, Virtualisation and Reflections
That virtualization effect is so important. Elon Musk himself said that companies are giant cybernetic collectives. The companies now have unavoidable incentives to automate, cut costs, remove jobs. We are seeing new power structures emerge. The East India Company was one thing, maybe the largest company ever. But now we are in a world where small businesses are increasingly hard to establish and sustain. Eric Weinstein, managing director of the Peter Thiel Investment Firm, remarks solemnly: AI will break capitalism.
We will see how that shapes us socially and psychologically.
I must ask that we all be mindful that AI and automation erode peopleâs sense of being a valuable scarcity in themselves as human beings. We have to be very wary of the psychological effects of that dehumanisation.
I have heard compelling comparisons to the mouse utopia experiment which are worth investigating, if youâre ready for something unsettling.
Thatâs my Economics 101.