Why The Bitcoin Standard made me cry

Reading time: 8 minutes

"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." - Jiddu Krishnamurti

I cried reading The Bitcoin Standard.

Not because it was sad, exactly, but because it explained something I'd been feeling for years without being able to articulate. This deep, persistent sense that everything is harder than it should be. That we're all running faster and faster just to stay in the same place. That saving feels pointless, planning feels impossible, and building anything lasting feels like swimming against a massive current.

Saifedean Ammous didn't set out to write a book about why modern life feels so exhausting. But that's exactly what he did. We're not failing at life. We're succeeding at an impossible game.

The System That Broke Time

For 5,000 years, humans lived under sound money systems that taught us to think in decades and generations. People built cathedrals knowing their great-grandchildren would finish them. They planted orchards they'd never harvest. They made investments in education, relationships, and craft that paid dividends across lifetimes.

Under sound money, patience was rational. Saving was rational. Long-term thinking was rational.

Since 1971, when the last link between money and gold was severed, we've been living under a completely different system. Fiat money systematically punishes long-term thinking and rewards short-term consumption. When money loses value every year through inflation, saving becomes irrational. When interest rates are artificially manipulated rather than reflecting real economic conditions, planning becomes nearly impossible.

This idea of burnout is SO MUCH MORE than working long hours.

Essentially, The Bitcoin Standard has made me realise that we're actually most tired from working hard in a system designed to erode the value of our work over time.

Every conversation I have with friends eventually turns to the same themes: Why is everything so expensive? Why does it feel impossible to get ahead? Why do our parents seem to have built wealth so much more easily?

We're not imagining it. Under gold standards, money held its value. A day's wages in 1900 could buy roughly the same basket of goods as a day's wages in 1950. Under fiat money, that stability disappeared. The things we need—housing, education, healthcare—have inflated far faster than wages.

We're exhausted because we're fighting an invisible tax on our labour that compounds every year.

Why Everything Feels Irrational

Yet, the exhaustion goes even deeper than financial difficulty. Fiat money creates a world where the signals that guide human decision-making become fundamentally corrupted. Interest rates, which should reflect how much people value present versus future consumption, are instead set by central bank committees based on political theories. This makes it impossible to know what investments actually make sense, what businesses should exist, what people actually want.

Stock markets become casinos driven by monetary policy rather than business fundamentals. Housing becomes a speculative investment rather than shelter. Everything becomes financialised, everything becomes a hedge against currency debasement, everything becomes a bet on what central banks will do next.

We're exhausted because we're trying to make rational decisions in an irrational system.

We're trying to plan for the future when the rules of money change constantly. AND we're trying to build wealth when the definition of wealth itself keeps shifting.

The Aesthetic Starvation

Perhaps the most devastating insight was about culture and beauty. Why does so much of modern culture feel disposable and ugly? Why can't I find a single contemporary TV show worth watching? Why do I keep turning to old favourites—Battlestar Galactica, The Office, Rome—things that were built to last?

Ammous traces a direct line between monetary systems and aesthetic standards. Sound money societies created Gothic cathedrals, Renaissance art, classical music—beauty meant to last for centuries. Fiat money correlates with brutal concrete architecture, throwaway pop culture, and what he calls "aesthetic degradation."

When money itself is temporary and manipulated, culture becomes temporary and manipulated.

When long-term thinking becomes irrational, creating beauty meant to endure becomes irrational. We live in environments designed for immediate impact rather than lasting beauty, consume culture optimised for viral moments rather than enduring meaning, and work in spaces that prioritise cost-cutting over human flourishing.

The ugliness isn't accidental. It's the natural result of a monetary system that punishes investment in anything meant to last.

The time anxiety aspect hits hardest for me personally. Reading about how sound money enabled long-term thinking made me realise how much of my own anxiety comes from living in a short-term world. I find it almost impossible to plan more than a few years ahead because everything changes so quickly. I buy clothes and frivolous trinkets, Uber Eats and other conveniences to stifle the growing panic and decision fatigue. I feel constant pressure to spend money immediately because holding cash feels like watching it evaporate. I struggle to invest in skills or relationships that might pay off over decades because the timeline feels impossibly long. I had thought this was personal weakness—lack of patience, discipline, or vision. But these might be rational responses to an irrational monetary system. We're such adaptable creatures that we've adapted to something broken.

Understand this: I'm not broken. We're not broken. The system is broken, and we're responding normally to abnormal conditions.

The Relationship Crisis

Sound money enabled people to make commitments across generations—marriages, business partnerships, community investments that assumed stability over time. Fiat money makes long-term commitments much riskier. When you can't predict what money will be worth, you can't make promises about future financial security.

The breakdown of traditional institutions—marriage, birthing multiple children, community organisations, long-term employment—might not be caused by changing values but by changing monetary reality. It's hard to build lasting relationships when the economic foundation keeps shifting beneath your feet.

The environmental destruction, the unsustainable debt levels, the infrastructure decay—these aren't separate problems but symptoms of a system that systematically favours present consumption over future investment.

Our generation inherited massive debt, inflated asset prices, and degraded institutions because the monetary system incentivised consuming the future to pay for the present.

The Bitcoin Hope

Bitcoin enters this story not as investment advice but as existential hope. Whether or not Bitcoin succeeds, it represents an attempt to restore the monetary principles that made long-term thinking rational for thousands of years.

Fixed supply. Predictable issuance. No central authority that can change the rules. No ability to fund present consumption by debasing future savings.

Bitcoin might fail for technical reasons, regulatory reasons, or adoption reasons. But the principles it embodies—sound money, long-term thinking, resistance to monetary manipulation—those principles enabled the greatest achievements in human civilisation.

Reading about Bitcoin through this lens isn't about getting rich quick. It's about imagining a world where saving makes sense again.

Where long-term thinking becomes rational again. Where building beautiful, lasting things becomes economically viable again.

What This Changes

I can't unknow what I learned. Every time I feel that underlying exhaustion, that sense that everything is harder than it should be, I think about monetary systems and time preference. This doesn't NECESSARILY mean becoming a Bitcoin maximalist or gold bug. But it does mean understanding that our personal struggles with anxiety, planning, and building wealth might not be personal failures but natural responses to systemic dysfunction.

It means questioning why we accept 2-3% annual inflation as normal when it systematically erodes working-class wealth. It means asking why interest rates should be set by committees rather than emerging from market forces. It means wondering whether the short-term thinking and cultural degradation we see everywhere might be symptoms of fundamentally unsound money.

I'm still tired. Reading The Bitcoin Standard didn't cure my exhaustion or solve my financial anxiety. But it gave me a framework for understanding why these feelings are so widespread, why this generation faces challenges previous generations didn't face, why building wealth and planning for the future feels so much more difficult.

We're trying to build wealth in a system designed to erode wealth. We're trying to think long-term in a system that punishes long-term thinking. We're trying to create beauty and meaning in a system that rewards disposability and speculation.

Of course, understanding this doesn't make the exhaustion disappear, but it does make it make sense. And sometimes, making sense of our struggles is the first step toward changing them.

I cried because I finally understood why everything feels so hard. Today, I'm thinking about what it might mean to live differently in a world where money itself has been broken, and what we might build if we ever figure out how to fix it. Whether that happens through Bitcoin, gold, or something we haven't imagined yet, the conversation starts with acknowledging how hard this all is—and why.

Vive le You,
Aimee

This newsletter is for people who refuse to play by broken rules. Let's build the Age of Abundance instead.

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