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@ What Cant Be Printed
2025-05-25 22:12:26
Scene 9: The Breaking Point
Lucas had texted Thomas that morning.
Can we walk today? I’ve got something to tell you.
Thomas replied with a time and a meeting spot at the park.
Lucas moved quietly through the city—collar up, hands deep in his coat pockets, wind cutting between buildings.
Daniel’s words from the day before still hung in his head—they were hard to shake. Daniel wasn’t blind to the cracks in the system. He’d seen volatility, downturns, panics—and kept going. Built a life, bought a duplex, rode the market.
He called it adaptation.
Said inflation could be outrun. That if you owned assets, stayed invested, trusted the arc—you’d be fine.
And maybe he was right.
If you owned enough.
If you were already in.
Lucas passed a man curled under a thin blanket outside a shuttered corner shop. A sign rested beside him: "Still Looking for Work. Still Hoping."
Farther down, a young woman argued quietly on a cracked phone, a toddler on her hip and a grocery bag at her feet. Her voice was stretched, not angry—just worn.
How were they adapting?
They weren’t rebalancing portfolios.
They were just trying to hold on.
The billboard above the park entrance flashed bright and confident: “Experience More. Pay Later.”
Lucas didn’t even look up.
Thomas was waiting, hands clasped behind his back. They started walking without a word.
After a few minutes, Lucas said, “I got laid off.”
Thomas slowed. “I’m sorry.”
“They said it wasn’t performance. Just headcount. Realignment.” He gave a bitter half-smile. “You know the language.”
“I do,” Thomas said.
“I always figured if I worked hard, kept my head down, I’d be fine. But suddenly... I’m not essential anymore.”
Thomas didn’t respond. He let the quiet fill in the rest.
“I’m not panicked,” Lucas added. “Not yet. I’ve got some savings. I’ll figure it out. But still—yesterday I’m debating Daniel about the structure of the system. Today I’m outside of it.”
Thomas raised an eyebrow. “What did Daniel say?”
Lucas shrugged. “That the system works—flawed but functional. That we’ve been through worse. That inflation’s bad, but manageable if you own assets. The usual stuff. That sound money sounds good until you hit a crisis and need the Fed to step in.”
They reached a bench and sat.
“Sounds like a man who’s never missed a paycheck,” Thomas said.
Lucas didn’t reply.
Thomas leaned forward. “I’ve heard it all. I believed it for years. But that ‘flexibility’ they praise—it’s not flexibility. It’s moral hazard dressed up as pragmatism. Every downturn becomes a license to print more money, push more debt. The system doesn’t save people. It saves asset prices. And people who don’t own those assets get left behind—quietly, but predictably.”
Lucas said nothing.
“You didn’t lose your job because of performance,” Thomas continued. “You lost it because risk and consequence no longer live in the same place. The system’s built to offload cost and concentrate reward. That’s what fiat enables. Not resilience. Transfer.”
A breeze passed through the bare trees.
“Daniel’s not wrong to want stability,” Thomas said. “But what he calls evolution—I call erosion. Since 2020, real wages are down. Stocks are up. Housing’s up. Groceries are up. But the people doing the work are standing still—or slipping.”
He paused.
“When the Fed prints, it enters at the top—through credit, through banks, through capital markets. The bottom gets inflation. The middle gets squeezed. That’s why the 401(k)s look okay and groceries look like theft.”
He let that sit.
“Fiat doesn’t just warp the economy—it warps trust. It rewards proximity to capital and punishes patience. It breaks the link between effort and reward. Quietly. Systematically.”
Lucas stared at the ground. He felt the truth of it, not as a theory—but as a pressure behind the eyes.
Thomas leaned back. “And deflation? That’s just prices falling because productivity improved. It rewards savers. It makes things cheaper. That’s not chaos—it’s sanity. But they fight it because the system runs on debt, and debt can’t survive falling prices. So they inflate. Always.”
Lucas looked down at the path. “So what do I do?”
Thomas’s voice softened. “First, stop waiting for the system to recognize your value. It won’t. It can’t. Learn how the rules work. Then step outside them—bit by bit.”
Lucas didn’t nod. But he didn’t argue either.
Thomas looked at him more gently now. “Look. I’ve spent most of my life as a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest. Made every mistake twice. But the market—it’s a truth machine. Eventually, it teaches you. If you’re willing to listen.”
They sat in silence.
Lucas wasn’t sure what he believed anymore.
But the cracks in his old framework were no longer theoretical.
They had found him.