The Trough & the Jungle

Exploring money, inspiration, and how life happens

We all know the diamond thing, right? How they hoard away most of the diamonds to keep them out of circulation, to keep the value of the other ones high?

Do we all notice that money is the same way? Almost all of the money is kept in silos — government treasuries, wealth management funds, international conglomerates, blah blah blah — and the silos feed out into this thin little trough that snakes through society. That’s where the paychecks come from. Everyone lines up at the trough, because we must, because the trough is the only place to get money, and money is the only way to make A Good Life happen.

That, of course, is Trough propaganda. The whole purpose of the Trough is to make sure we can never stray too far from Trough-world before worrying that we’ll starve under a tarp somewhere.

If you do find a way to wander further afield though, you find something shocking — the world of the Trough is really just one kind of shrubbery in a much larger Jungle.

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Someone might say “I want to make $300k per year.” But they don’t, not really. That’s shorthand that they aren’t owning as shorthand. What they actually want is a lifestyle and sense of safety that feels available somewhere around the $300k mark.

The thing is, there are a lot of ways to Make Things Happen that aren’t strictly money-based. Things do in fact happen and get built away from the Trough.

When you step away from the Trough and into the Jungle, some of what you find out there is “Oh wow! I can make things happen with cooperation and devotion and cleverness and intuition that would have taken a lot of money if I was trying to do them with money!”

And you’ll also find quite a lot of stuff that you simply can’t make happen with money — it’s the wrong medium to drive certain types of occurrences, the gears just don’t mesh.

But not all of this is inspiration and utopian visions, of course: you’ll also notice more unsavory ways that people make things happen without the Trough. “Oh right, people make things happen with violence, lies, manipulation, control, fear. Oof.”

That’s the Jungle.

And to be fair, that’s part of they appeal of the Trough, is that it can replace a lot of those rougher and more horrifying aspects of the Jungle. Which it has done largely at the cost of the more beautiful and nourishing aspects.

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I don’t have a takeaway.

Well, I have some, but they’re pretty soft for now.

One is that the Trough is in fact a part of the Jungle.

I think something has broken down specifically because Trough-world tries to make itself the only world, and deny that the Jungle exists or is connected. This creates and is fed by odd dynamics where money takes on many roles that would usually be distributed in the jungle. Money can stand in for all sorts of emotional dynamics, attachment issues, insecurities, emptinesses, violences, power dynamics, hierarchies, ambitions, manipulations, cooperations, devotions, on and on and on. All of it collapses onto the almighty dollar. Which increases the felt sense that the Trough is all that exists.

When we zoom out and see the Jungle, something relaxes, some cellular exhale takes place. Like yes, right, there’s a lot more at play here. I might not actually need $300k, I just need to find workable paths toward the life and sense of safety that feels good to me, and there are a lot of ways pull that together.

Another takeaway is that even pointing at the Jungle can be a powerful act. For many people, it’s going to sound airy and distant, somewhat unreal and impractical to think about. Others, it will crack open their metaphysics and let them see that what they assumed was the Whole World was actually just a hermetically sealed corner of something larger. That can be a powerful move.

And my final takeaway is this: I’m feeling patient about it, but that I want to play and build in the Jungle, and I want to find others who want to play and build too. I want to figure out what it’s like to hold both integrity and aliveness while navigating the Trough and the Jungle with people I love.

And I think it’s gonna be a delightful little adventure.