Inflationary habits
Lot of people begin poor. They get educated and then they find a way to make money. They end up becoming very picky and choosy about how they live their life. Right from spending money on clean water, rich food, great entertainment, best clothes, exotic travel destinations, buying assets, all open up large pockets of economy.
It is similar to the inflationary universe where the galaxies keep moving away from each other and go on expanding. The people who became newly rich fuel others increasing the Forbes list of billionaires and the unpublished list of millionaires.
We are often grown to lookup the billionaire achievers in awe and become one by virtues like tireless hard work, perseverance, ingenuity and vision.
There are situations where this chain is broken with frauds and irregularities. Bad loans happen when the businesses do badly. Specifically, when businesses build stuff that is not needed by anyone. Making high budget bad movies that bomb at the box office, investing in R&D that end up as sinkholes and so on.
If every product we make becomes very useful and creates a market, the economy will end up inflating with a lot of rich people around making ceaseless demands on goods, often exotic and unnecessary. Thanks to the fact that we have only a few super heroes with resourcefulness to do this job.
The long tail of fancy goods and the choice you have on even a desk light points to the inflationary universe. And indeed we have been growing in spite of blackholes like bank collapses, pandemics, terrorism and wars sucking the money arresting this inflationary economy.
The more goods we make, the more we increase climate change that result in our own extinction. Imagine this, even the act of settling humans on other planets making science and rockets to escape the destruction of earth will accelerate the very process we are trying to escape.
You cannot ask people to sit idle and do farming as we have already catalyzed the expansion of economy in the name of progress. Also, that model is a failed one from the erstwhile USSR.
Conscious individuals can move towards a minimalistic lifestyle even though they can afford a lot of things by curtailing their desires. But this is like a drop in the ocean.
Capitalism gives you this short term goodness where everyone can fulfill their desires, but human greed goes against nature in the long run head on. When you cross a threshold of damage done, you cannot even reverse it. Nature cannot be resurrected by us no matter how much bank balance you have.
In a way we are caught between our greed to expand this universe of possibilities and spurring our consciousness around restraining our actions to save this planet.
How do we solve this?
Assuming Governments add a tax on every transaction that ends up above a certain carbon footprint threshold, the extra money collected will end up being spent to satisfy our greed with activities that can wipe off the gains from reduced carbon footprint activity.
The best way would be to use that money on increasing the nature, planting trees or on projects that use renewable energy resources. This kind of taxing high carbon footprint activities and ploughing it back on actions that improve the climate is the way we can keep a check on the inflationary economy and at the same time improve our chances of living here for some more time.
There is no way earth is going to exist forever. We are here by an extreme degree of chance witnessing the grand spectacle of this universe unfolding itself in all its glory. We can only extend this by our activities a little, for future generations to witness and who knows, to uncover the secrets if that is what the universe wants from us.
