How's it going my Dudes? It's been a while since I have written an actual blog post aside from posting drone videos or Blocktunes updates. But, I came across a post this morning on X that put into words something I've been chewing on for a long time. It's that nagging feeling in the back of your brain that something is deeply, fundamentally, cosmically wrong with the way the world works. You know what I am talking about. You buy groceries, you pay your bills, you go to work, you come home exhausted, and somewhere in the quiet moments you think to yourself: wait, who is this all actually FOR?
Well, buckle up, because it's time for my inner Walter to come out for an Undudely Rant... Which might have to happen a bit more so I can get things off my chest, lol. Going straight up 'Earl Pitts' style, lol, IYKYK.
Here's the post that lit my fuse from KateriSeraphina on X, it was translated from French, so the wording may be a bit off:
"The bicycle is the slow death of the planet."
A banker made economists think when he said:
"A cyclist is a catastrophe for the country's economy: He doesn't buy cars and doesn't borrow money to buy them. He doesn't pay for insurance policies. Doesn't buy fuel, doesn't pay for the necessary inspections and repairs of the car. Doesn't use paid parking. He doesn't cause major accidents. Doesn't require multiple highways. He doesn't become obese. Healthy people are neither necessary nor useful to the economy. They don't buy medicines, they don't go to hospitals or doctors, they add nothing to the country's GDP. While every new McDonald's store creates at least: 30 jobs, including 10 cardiologists, 10 dentists, 10 diet and nutrition experts, as well as the people who work in the store itself, obviously."
So choose carefully: a bicycle or a McDonald's? It's worth thinking about...
PS: Walking is even worse because pedestrians don't even buy bicycles!
Read that again. Sit with it. Let it stew in your brain like a nasty McRib in your digestive tract.
The quote above is obviously satire, but it's the kind of satire that makes your blood run cold because it's absolutely, undeniably true.
Think about it. What does our economy actually reward? What does it measure? We use this magic little acronym called GDP, Gross Domestic Product, as if it's some divine indicator of human well being. But GDP doesn't measure happiness. It doesn't measure health. It doesn't measure whether people are thriving, whether the air is clean, whether communities are strong, or whether anyone actually wants to be doing what they're doing.
GDP measures transactions. That's it. That's the whole game.
A forest that stands untouched? GDP contribution: ZERO.
A forest that's clear-cut, processed into paper, sold in a store, thrown in the trash, and hauled to a landfill? GDP contribution: ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching.
A person who grows their own food, walks everywhere, builds their own home, and lives in a tight-knit community? GDP contribution: basically nothing.
A person who buys a car on credit, pays interest on a loan, buys gasoline every week, pays insurance premiums, pays for parking, pays for repairs, pays for medical bills caused by a sedentary lifestyle, pays for blood pressure medication, pays for a gym membership they never use, and eats fast food five times a week? GDP contribution: YOU BEAUTIFUL ECONOMIC ENGINE, YOU.
This is not a system designed for human flourishing. This is a slot machine, and we're the coins.
Here's something that will keep you up at night: Nutrition education in U.S. medical schools is an absolute joke. And I'm not being hyperbolic. Studies have shown that the vast majority of medical students in the United States receive substantially less than 25 hours of nutrition education over the course of their entire training. Many receive almost none. I have family in the industry that will verify this.
Let that sink in for a hot minute. I know I need a dab... HAHA.
We have a medical system that will train doctors for 8 to 12 years, teaching them every detail about pharmaceutical interventions, surgical procedures, diagnostic protocols, and billing codes. And then hand them a degree to treat a population dying from diet-related chronic diseases caused by our giant industrial food industry... without teaching them how food works in the human body. Just go to a hospital and look at the food choices they offer. Donuts, pastries, coffee, and then the cafeteria is filled with nothing but processed shit, which is the SAME processed shit they feed to patients. I mean it's not even food.
Heart disease. Type 2 diabetes. Obesity. Metabolic syndrome. Hypertension. Many forms of cancer. These are conditions that are profoundly influenced by diet. And our doctors, the people we trust with our literal lives, are sent into the field without the most basic tools to address the root causes of 90% of health issues out there.
But they sure as hell know which pill to prescribe. They know which blood pressure medication to cycle you through. They know the referral chain that will send you to a specialist, who sends you to another specialist, who sends you to a pharmacy, who sends you a bill, which you have to pay ON TOP of the what you give to the scam insurance companies.
Now, I'm not here to bash individual doctors. Most of them got into medicine because they genuinely want to help people, but their path was diverted along the way. They're just cogs in the machine too. But the machine itself? The machine was built to manage disease, not prevent it. Because there's no money in healthy people. There's no money in cured people. There IS money in chronic, lifelong customers.
Remember high school economics? If you even had an economics class, and many schools don't require one, you probably learned about supply and demand curves, maybe some half-baked version of the Federal Reserve, and that inflation is when "prices go up." You probably did NOT learn about:
You weren't taught any of this. And neither was I. Because if we all understood the actual mechanics of how the economy works, who it serves, who it extracts from, and how the extraction is made to feel normal, we'd be in the streets with torches.
Instead, we were taught just enough to be good workers. Enough to show up on time, fill out the paperwork, pay the bills, and not ask too many questions.
Here's the thing that burns me up. We live on a planet that, for the vast majority of human history, provided everything we needed. Water. Food. Shelter materials. Medicine (real medicine like plants that people actually understood). Community. Meaning.
And then, at some point, a relatively small number of people, let's call them what they are: greedy, fearful people, figured out that if they could convince everyone else that they owned the resources, and that everyone else had to pay to access them, they'd never have to work again.
So they built a system.
They enclosed the commons. They privatized the land. They created titles and deeds and contracts and courts to enforce them. They invented financial instruments that turned debt into a product. They created a money system where they could issue currency and charge interest on it, meaning that every dollar in existence comes with a debt attached to it, and the debt is always larger than the money supply. Which means the game can never be "won" by ordinary people. There is always more debt than money. By design.
Then they built an entire culture through advertising, media, education, and social conditioning to convince us that:
And round and round we go. Working jobs we hate to buy things we don't need to impress people we don't like to feed a system that is literally killing us, and calling it "progress."
Let's go back to the quote that started all this. The bicycle rider is "bad for the economy" because they don't consume enough. The McDonald's customer is "good for the economy" because they generate a cascade of downstream economic activity, jobs in fast food, jobs in cardiology, jobs in dentistry, jobs in dietetics, jobs in pharmaceuticals, jobs in hospitals.
This is presented as if it's a clever observation. But it's actually a confession.
The system is telling you, plainly, what it values. It values your consumption. It values your illness. It values your dependence.
It does NOT value your health. It does NOT value your autonomy. It does NOT value your time, your joy, your relationships, or your freedom. Those things don't show up in the spreadsheet.
A person who rides a bicycle, eats food they grew or bought from a local farmer, spends time with their family, doesn't need a car loan, doesn't need blood pressure medication, and doesn't eat fast food is, from the system's perspective, useless. It's a problem, a leak in the machine.
And that should make you furious.
Here's where I want to get a little philosophical, because I think it matters. The people who built this system, the ones who enclosed the commons, who created the financial architecture, who designed the economy of extraction, they weren't just greedy. They were afraid.
Fear that there wouldn't be enough. Fear that someone else would take what they had. Fear that if they didn't hoard, they'd be left with nothing. And that fear drove them to build a system that would guarantee they'd never have to feel that fear again, at the expense of literally everyone else.
And then they convinced the rest of us to feel the same fear. To believe that there isn't enough. That we have to compete. That we have to hustle. That if we don't keep running on the hamster wheel, we'll fall off and be devoured.
It's a system built on scarcity consciousness in a world that is, for the most part, abundant.
There IS enough food. We throw away nearly 40% of it in the United States.
There IS enough housing. We have millions of vacant homes while people sleep on the streets.
There IS enough medicine. We have the resources to treat and prevent the vast majority of chronic disease. We just don't, because it's not profitable.
The scarcity is manufactured. The urgency is engineered. The fear is a feature, not a bug.
I'm not going to pretend I have a five-step plan to dismantle the global financial system. I'm one person with a blog and a lot of justified anger. But I'll tell you what I think the starting point is, and it's maddeningly simple:
The story that money is real. That consumption is virtue. That illness is just bad luck. That the economy is a neutral force we can't question. That the way things are is the way things "have to be".
Every one of those beliefs is a chain. And every one of them was put there by someone who benefits from you believing it.
The more of us who start seeing the machine for what it is, an extraction engine disguised as a society, the harder it becomes for the machine to keep running.
So I say fuck em! Ride the bike. Grow the food. Question the bill. Read the label. Refuse the loan if you can. Support the local farmer. Cook the meal. Walk and get fit. Talk to your neighbor. Teach your kid where food actually comes from. Ask your doctor about nutrition and watch them squirm, or hell, learn about your own health and stop going to these quacks. Read about how money is created and feel your stomach drop and become someone that wants to go back to a barter and trade system, lol.
In a system that profits from your sickness, your debt, and your dependence, being unprofitable is the most radical, defiant, beautiful thing you can do in my personal and Dudely opinion! I for one, am done with it. Time to live my own life, and if you have followed me throughout my journey here on Hive, you know I am not one to shy away from doing my own thing.
Alright, off the soap and time for a good dab.
Until next time, you know what to do!
Be cool, be real, and always abide with YOU my dudes!
