Capital(ism) Punishment
From Exploitation to Solidarity
What if the soul-crushing exhaustion so many of us feel isn’t personal failure—but the result of a system built to extract?
This post is one of the foundational pieces in the We Can Stay Human series. It picks up where Spiritual (De)Formation and How Well Do You Cog? left off, turning now to the cost of exploitation, and the myth that capitalism equals freedom.
We trace the widening wage gap, the unbearable cost of living, and the myth of meritocracy that keeps us running toward a dream dangling from a yacht.
But we also imagine something different. A world beyond false binaries. A future where we co-create solidarity, restore the commons, and build new ways of living from the soil up.
If you’ve ever felt the invisible hand tightening around your throat, or wondered if there’s more to life than being a cog in someone else’s machine, this one’s for you.
What to Read or Listen?
The Full Story
Growing up, I was told the story like it was gospel. My dad, who we joked was conservative enough to make Rush Limbaugh look like a liberal, insisted that minimum wage jobs were never meant to provide a living wage. They were for teenagers, he said. Just pocket change for sodas and sneakers as you learned the essential skills of what it means to be a worker. These jobs weren't about paying rent, not for insulin, not for feeding a child.
But reality tells a different story. Walk into any coffee shop, call a ride-share car, or glance into a hospital break room and odds are good you'll see people with degrees, credentials, and ambition—stocking shelves, driving Ubers, pulling overnight shifts. This isn't about "paying dues" or climbing some mythic ladder. It's about an economy that funnels educated workers into jobs that barely pay the bills.
In 2025, more than 41% of recent college graduates in the U.S. work jobs that don't even require a degree. According to the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity, nearly one in four Americans (about 66 million people) are functionally underemployed or earning wages far beneath their skill set.
After all the late-night lectures and sky-high tuition bills, many workers zigzag through the job market not chasing the American Dream, but simply searching for stability. "Just get a degree and you'll be set," they said. Now résumés land in ghosted inboxes while bills pile up. This isn't about laziness, it's structural failure that breeds disillusionment where ambition should flourish.
Let's examine the math. In 1968, the U.S. federal minimum wage hit its inflation-adjusted peak, it'd be about $13 an hour in today's dollars. If minimum wage had kept pace with productivity, it would be $22–$23 an hour by now.
Meanwhile, the "average" hourly wage in America for regular workers hovers around $29. But that glossy number hides a darker truth: the median (what most people actually make) is significantly lower.
And it's not because productivity has declined. To the contrary, it's surged 69% since 1979. That’s a far cry from the inflation adjusted 18% increase in worker pay.
The Cost of Living Crisis
To make matters worse, those few additional dollars you might be making, don’t go nearly as far as the cost of living has fundamentally detached from what people earn, creating a massive decoupling between working hard and actually getting ahead.
The changes are staggering. Home prices? In 1979, the median single-family home sold for about $61,000 (that’s just over $278,000 in current dollars). But in 2025, the median is over $430,000—well outpacing both inflation and wage growth.
Rent? It’s tripled since the late ‘70s. A record half of renters now spend 30% or more of income on housing. Cost-burdened once meant a quarter of renters; now it’s the majority.
College tuition? Average public university tuition was around $808/year in 1979, now soaring past $11,500, a roughly 300% inflation-adjusted jump. Private colleges regularly charge over $40,000. Collectively, student debt just crossed $2 trillion.
Healthcare? In 1979, a typical employer plan for a family was a few hundred dollars a year; in 2025, it’s over $22,000, including premiums and out-of-pocket costs.
Even groceries eat up more of our earnings: food-at-home prices are up about 287% since 1979. Childcare routinely costs $14,000 a year, more than a year of in-state college tuition.
Transportation? A new car cost $6,000 in 1979, now the average is over $48,000, an 8-fold increase.
Bottom line: As productivity and corporate profits soared, every basic need (housing, education, health, mobility, care) has risen faster than pay. The essential math is this: We’ve created a world where necessities become luxuries for the people who make everything run.
The Extraction Economy
So where do the profits from that productivity go?
As we, the masses keep chasing the carrot of security on the treadmill of endless labor, hooked on the hope that if we work hard enough we will eventually make it, the uber rich sit on their yachts and sip champagne from offshore tax havens, enjoying the benefits of the system they rigged for their benefit.
This isn't simple inflation. It's not "the market." It's a coordinated extraction of wealth from working people to shareholders. It's by design. It's not a meritocracy. It's an extraction economy.
That's capital(ism) punishment. A slow, sanctioned stripping of soul, body, and dream.
And it’s not just about low pay. It's about the machine that aims to turn us all into cogs. It's about the UPS driver collapsing in a 140-degree truck, or the Amazon worker stepping around the body of a dead coworker hoping it doesn’t cause them to miss quota. It’s the nurse sobbing in a storage closet while patients line the halls.
It's about how the dream has become a scheme— the hustle a grindstone that turns humans into husks.
And as it does, the wealth gap has grown from a crack to a chasm.
The Growing Divide
In the 1960s, CEOs made about 20 times more than their average employee. Today, depending on how you count, CEO pay at top companies sits at about 340 times the average worker. That’s not a typo, and not an outlier. Since the Reagan era, the top 1% have amassed nearly 38% of all U.S. wealth, while the bottom half of the country scrapes by with only 2%.
No Winners in This Game
And yet, even the exploiters are not spared. Because when your metrics become your morality, your soul starves on spreadsheets.
What happens to the CEO who sees their team as a line item? To the landlord who values portfolio growth over family shelter? To the policymaker who calculates compassion in campaign donations?
You become what you worship. And if profit is your god, your soul calcifies.
Studies show CEOs and executives face epidemic levels of burnout, depression and isolation. The problem is so severe, both John Hopkins and the Mayo Clinic now offer specialized medical programs just for executives.
Psychologists have coined terms like "wealth addiction" and "affluenza" to describe the particular alienation that comes with extreme privilege, where everything has a price but nothing has value.
And its not just the oligarchs who suffer, as scholar Suniya Luthar and colleagues have shown, affluent youth are likelier than their middle-class peers to suffer from anxiety and depression.
The oligarch's tragedy is that in building empires, they often lose their humanity. In accumulating everything, they end up with nothing of true substance. The extraction economy extracts from everyone, even its apparent winners.
Beyond False Dichotomies
And the ultimate irony, even though everyone in this system is losing, the mere suggestion that there might be alternatives to mass extraction prompts the unhinged response that there's only one other option: the tyrannical socialism of failed states. As if human organization exists on a binary: the mass exploitation of unfettered capitalism or Stalinist gulags.
But Capitalism and socialism are economic systems. Democracy and authoritarianism are political ones. The first governs markets. The second governs people. This false dichotomy paralyzes us. It frames any critique of capitalism as treasonous, any call for economic justice as a step toward totalitarianism. It's gaslighting on a civilization-wide scale.
Finding a Better Way
So what do we do?
In his 2020 presidential campaign, Andrew Yang reminded us: what gets measured gets done. He proposed we measure human thriving, not just GDP and the corporate bottom line, tracking measures of physical and mental health, housing stability, food security, community connection, and environmental wellbeing.
As I write this in 2025, change-makers are turning these ideas into reality. In New York City, legislator and mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani fights for free public transit, affordable childcare, and breaking up grocery monopolies. These practical policies show what's possible when we prioritize community over profit.
But as he campaigns, those with power are losing their minds, some even going so far as to say that a vote for Zohran is a vote for Sharia Law. Why? Because when power is shared, privilege feels threatened.
Building Alternatives
So what now?
We don't just critique the machine, instead we take the advice of Bill Mollison, founder of permaculture who wrote: "The greatest change we need to make is from consumption to production, even if on a small scale in our own gardens… hence the futility of revolutionaries who have no gardens, who depend on the very system they attack, and who produce words and bullets, not food and shelter."
How? As Buckminster Fuller put it: "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." Or in the words of Peter Drucker, "The best way to predict the future is to create it."
Models That Work
And some in our midst are already doing it.
In Spain, the Mondragon Corporation employs over 80,000 worker-owners across 96 cooperatives. During the 2008 financial crisis, when corporations worldwide were laying off millions, Mondragon cut executive pay first and preserved jobs through work-sharing. No one gets rich, but everyone thrives.
In Cleveland, the Evergreen Cooperatives transformed neighborhoods through worker-owned businesses providing essential services to hospitals and universities. Former inmates and low-income residents now build wealth through ownership while serving their communities.
The successful Market Basket grocery chain shows another way: fair wages, employee profit-sharing, and internal promotion while keeping prices 10-15% lower than competitors. When corporate raiders tried to dismantle this model in 2014, workers and customers united in solidarity until their people-centered leadership was restored.
The Power of Solidarity
The time has come for us to reclaim our land, our labor, our love. To build networks of mutual aid. To garden. To gather. To grieve. To rise.
Solidarity is not just a slogan. It's community land trusts ensuring affordable housing. It's time banks where neighbors exchange skills instead of dollars. It's childcare rotations so parents can enjoy date nights. It's carpools to the night shift. It's union halls and backyard harvests. It's buying someone's groceries or covering their medicine when times are tight.
And it's asking: how can we use powerful new tools like AI not for further extraction, but for liberation? Will we stand by idly as these new technologies move us into a future that looks like Ready Player One where we escape into virtual worlds while reality crumbles? Or a Star Trek future where technology frees us to explore, create, and care for one another?
We have been punished long enough. But there is another way. From exploitation to solidarity. From extraction to investment. From capital(ism) punishment to collective resurrection.
The choice is ours. Here are three ways you can start right now.
Three Paths Forward:
1. Reclamation (Daily Survival Practice)
For 60 seconds each morning, place one hand on your heart. Breathe deeply. Ask yourself: "Where am I being extracted today? What parts of my humanity am I surrendering for a paycheck?" Name it without judgment. This small act of awareness begins to break the spell.
2. Resistance (Weekly Soul Practice)
Once a week, connect authentically with someone whose labor usually goes unseen - a delivery driver, custodian, cashier. Not as charity, but as equals. Ask about their work, their dreams. Listen deeply. Then ask: "How can we support each other?" These small bridges of humanity create the foundation for collective power.
3. Rebellion (Life Practice)
Transform whatever resources you have - skills, time, space, money - into seeds of a different system. Join or start a cooperative. Convert your lawn into a community garden. Organize a neighborhood childcare exchange. Host skill-shares. Support union drives. The future isn't built in manifestos but in living experiments that prove another world is possible.
A New Measure of Success
These aren't just individual acts of defiance - they're practice for the world we're building together. A world where we measure success not by extraction but by connection. Not by accumulation but by distribution. Not by what we own but by how well we care for one another.
Till next time, We Can Stay Human.
Bibliography
Economic Indicators, Wages, and Inequality
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2025, April 30). Employment and Earnings Tables, March 2025.
U.S. Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED). (2025, June 30). Federal Minimum Hourly Wage for Nonfarm Workers for the United States.
The Labor Market for Recent College Graduates. (2025). Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Beyond the Numbers: The Reality of America’s Underemployed. (2025). BET News.
America Warned of Millions Who Are ‘Functionally Unemployed’. (2025). Newsweek.
Compensation Ratios and Wealth Distribution
Economic Policy Institute. (2024). CEO pay has skyrocketed 1,209% since 1978: CEO-to-worker pay ratio is now 344-to-1.
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. (2024). Distribution of Wealth in the U.S. Since 1989.
Housing and Cost of Living
U.S. Census Bureau. (2025). Median and Average Sale Prices of New Homes Sold in the United States.
Statista. (2025, February 11). Average price of new cars in the United States from 1979 to 2025.
Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. (2024). The State of the Nation’s Housing.
Rent, Tuition, Student Debt
U.S. Census Bureau. (Various years). Historical Income Tables: Households.
National Center for Education Statistics. (2025). College Costs: Historical Data.
Federal Reserve Bank. (2025). Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit.
Institute for College Access & Success. (2025). Student Debt and the Class of 2025.
Healthcare, Groceries, Childcare
Kaiser Family Foundation. (2025). 2025 Employer Health Benefits Survey: Annual Family Premiums.
U.S. Department of Agriculture. (2025). Cost of Food at Home Data Sets.
Child Care Aware of America. (2025). The U.S. and the High Price of Child Care.
Productivity and Pay
Economic Policy Institute. (2023). The Productivity–Pay Gap.
Psychological and Social Research
Klotz, A. C., (2023, May 18). More than 50% of managers feel burned out. Harvard Business Review.
Mayo Clinic. Executive Health Program.
Johns Hopkins Medicine. (n.d.). Executive Health Program.
Luthar, S. S., & Barkin, S. H. (2012). Are affluent youth truly “at risk”? Vulnerability and resilience across three diverse samples. Development and Psychopathology, 24(2), 429–449.
Schwartz, A. (2016, February 26). The affluenza defense. Psychology Today.
Models and Alternatives
MIT Management (2015). We Are Market Basket.
Mondragon Corporation. (2025). Corporate Fact Sheet.
Evergreen Cooperatives. (2025).
Yang, A. (2018). The War on Normal People: The Truth About America’s Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future. Hachette Books.
Mollison, B. (1990). Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual. Tagari Publications.
Fuller, R. B. (1975). Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking. Macmillan.
Drucker, P. F. (1993). Post-Capitalist Society. HarperBusiness.
Notes:
All economic, wage, and inflation statistics reference primary U.S. government data, leading think tanks, and industry sources from 2024–2025.
Some narrative/social commentary is supported by peer-reviewed psychological research, case studies, and expert essays/books as cited above.
Mondragon, Evergreen, and Market Basket details are sourced from company factsheets and business case studies published within the last ten years.