Something in our language has gone numb.
We speak of the cost of living as if life itself were the problem—
as if breathing, eating, caring, aging, and belonging were excesses we must justify.
Everyone knows the phrase.
Almost no one questions it.
Yet language shapes perception, and perception shapes what we allow.
When we say the cost of living, we quietly accept a world where survival is conditional, where value is calculated, and where most people—nearly all life, really—are treated as an externality – marginal.
Not worth accounting for.
Not worth listening to.
Not worth sustaining.
This is not just economic.
It is somatic.
It is ecological.
It lives in bodies.
A Divided World Lives in Divided Bodies
We like to speak of polarization as something “out there”—political, cultural, ideological.
But division begins much closer.
It begins when we separate mind from body, economy from ecology, productivity from care, humans from the rest of life.
It begins when we design systems that reward extraction and call it success.
In such a system, it is not that 90% of us are explicitly buried.
It is subtler—and more dangerous.
We are rendered peripheral.
Our needs, rhythms, grief, creativity, and interdependence are pushed to the margins, while a narrow center defines what counts.
Exchange Happens on Peripheries
Here is a truth we rarely name:
Life does not regenerate at the center of control.
It regenerates at the edges.
In forests, the richest exchanges happen at boundaries—where root systems meet fungi, where decay feeds new growth, where no single organism dominates.
In bodies, health is maintained not by rigid control, but by circulation, responsiveness, and constant communication between systems.
When circulation is blocked, tissue dies.
When exchange is severed, systems collapse.
Our social world is no different.
A culture that concentrates power, wealth, and meaning at the center while starving the peripheries will inevitably call life “too expensive.”
This Is the Poison We Are Swimming In
The poison is not only inflation or policy failure.
The poison is a worldview that:
- treats care as a cost
- treats dependence as weakness
- treats wholeness as inefficiency
- treats living systems as resources rather than relationships
We breathe this logic daily.
We normalize it.
We internalize it.
And then we wonder why so many are exhausted, anxious, polarized, and disconnected—from each other and from themselves.
And Yet – Good Is Already in Sight
Here is where I refuse despair.
Because alongside collapse, something else is happening—quietly, persistently, often unnoticed.
People are remembering:
- that bodies are intelligent
- that health is relational
- that leadership can be rooted in care rather than dominance
- that economies can serve life, not the other way around
Communities are forming at the edges.
New languages are being spoken.
Old wisdom is resurfacing—not as nostalgia, but as necessity.
This is not idealism.
It is pattern recognition.
Life always reorganizes toward connection when given even the smallest opening.
A Different Measure of Value
What if the real crisis is not the cost of living—but the cost of disconnection
What if wealth were measured by:
- the health of our nervous systems
- the resilience of our communities
- the fertility of our soil
- the integrity of our relationships
What if we designed systems that honored circulation rather than hoarding, reciprocity rather than extraction, belonging rather than competition?
This is not a utopian dream.
It is a practical, embodied invitation.
Choosing the Living World
We are at a threshold.
One path continues to optimize for profit while life withers at the margins.
The other re-centers life itself—human and more-than-human—as the foundation of any viable future.
The good news is this:
The skills we need already live in us.
In our bodies.
In our capacity to listen, feel, adapt, and care.
The work ahead is not to invent something entirely new,
but to remember what we have systematically forgotten.
Life is not too expensive.
What is unsustainable
is a world that forgets how to live.
