Dylan Bain: It is time to reject the domestication of a manufacture society and reclaim the human wisdom that lives within our hearts. Welcome to The Human Revolution. I’m your host, Dylan Bain

Dylan Bain: It’s March of 2020, and I’m looking at houses. My wife and I have hit an income level where we can finally afford to buy a house. This is something I promised her when I married her 10 years before, and I’m looking through all the different things. I’m on Zillow, and I’m talking to real estate agents, and I’m trying to determine what the best decision for my family is.

I’m looking at taxes, and I’m looking at school districts, and I’m looking at crime rates, and I’ve got all these spreadsheets. And I walk into this house and I call my wife and I say, honey, it’s perfect. And then she walks into it and she says, honey, it’s perfect. I said, yeah, it’s got, you know, this is going to be great for taxes and this is not becoming neighborhood and everything’s going to be wonderful.

And she says to me, I don’t give a shit, Dylan. And I stop and I’m kind of panicking if I’m going to be entirely honest, because shouldn’t we want the largest financial decision that we’re ever going to make to be the right one. I say to her, I said, you know, I said, honey, why don’t you care about any of this?

And she said, because we’re not buying a house. We’re buying a home. This cuts to so much of the essence of the human revolution. In our modern society, Our anti human society that is designed for extraction on every single level. We are incentivized to be in our heads, always thinking about what the quote unquote right thing to do is.

And of course there’s an entire cadre of people who will line up to give you expert advice on all the best strategies. And when I started working in finance, I signed up to be one of those people. I went and got my CPA. I got my MBA because I wanted to be the guy who was giving you good advice. And what I’ve discovered over time is that that advice is only as good as the emotional impact that it has with you. See, while I was in my head, I wasn’t in my body, and my wife was. While I was thinking house, she was thinking home. When I was thinking family, she was thinking Our family. When I was thinking school districts, she was thinking education. When I was looking at, well, how has things set up?

Is it a good, will be a good resale value? She was putting people in the home at a dinner party. She was looking at it from a human scale. I was looking at it from an industrial scale. I was not thinking about this house as my home. And so much of what we end up in, in particularly in North America, are these traps where we get into trying to make the right decisions.

And so stop and think about in your life where you’ve seen this. You know, the housing example is a good one, but cars are that too. How many people are driving a car where the payment is quite frankly, quite burdensome. And that car, if you stop and think about it, starts depreciating the moment you drive it off the lot and will spend the majority of its life Parked in a location, doing nothing at all.

People don’t look at it and they say, what do I need this car to be? They look at it and say, what does this car say about me? Because that’s the sales pitch. And so they buy more car. Then they actually need. And we live in stretched out communities where we’re going to be commuting forever in a day. And therefore this car, we want to be our everything.

It’s got a TV system. It’s got its own environmental controls. It’s got heated butt warmers it’s got leather steering wheels. It’s got satellite radio. It’s got staying power. If you get in an accident, you’re going to win. Win what? I find myself asking frequently. Win what? What do you need a car for? You need a car to go from point A to point B.

What does the car say about you? Absolutely nothing. That car should fit your lifestyle. And there are so many people and I pick up, I pick on pickup trucks quite frequently because they’re easy to pick on. But I drive to downtown Denver and I passed pickup truck after pickup truck and they are pristine machines.

They’re beautiful. They’ve never seen a challenge in their life. And when you ask somebody when they’re driving their pickup truck and they say, you say, Hey, uh, you know, why, why did the picture, why might I have to haul something, dude, you had this truck for what? Five years? You’ve never hauled a single thing, but your insurance is higher than it needs to be.

Your fuel charges are higher than they need to be all for the privilege of having excess capacity you don’t need. And when people will talk about this and say, well, that’s what the market will bear. For starters, markets are supposed to try to be more efficient, which would mean that having all that excess capacity is not a sound economic decision if you actually believe in the efficiency of markets, but more to the point, you’re ignoring the sheer level of government subsidies and car company propaganda and political lobbying that has gone into making that pickup truck, the actual thing. So much of what we see in our markets are not actually the markets working.

The results of market manipulation. I’ve talked about gas prices before is a great example of this. People are all up in arms if gas prices hit 4 a gallon. But if we removed all the subsidies, actually let price controls work, if we were actually serious about having a free market, well, the gas would be somewhere between seven to 12 a gallon.

What would that do to the pickup truck market? And from where I’m standing, I, at the end of the day, believe myself to be a capitalist. And one who’s honest about the limitations of that economic philosophy and where the pitfalls of that economic philosophy lie. But it’s also important to understand that we have adopted capitalism almost as an article of faith, rather than understanding it’s just a political organization philosophy, and it’s one that no one actually uses anywhere on the planet. Like communism, capitalism has never been fully tried because it turns out that high minded philosophy doesn’t stand a chance against the emotional reality of humans. My guest last week, Anya Shack, she had this great quote, I put it up on Instagram and she says, quote, it is my personal belief, and this is something that I think I will fight until the day I die, is that sex and relationships and love go into this moral bucket that shouldn’t be touched by capitalism and free markets and money.

Unquote. Holy shit. We live in a world where our food is industrial, our relationships are transactional, our hearts are suppressed, and our lifestyles encourage ill health, and isolation. And all of that is extremely profitable. All of that will meld into an economic philosophy. When you think of a company’s sole obligation is to its shareholders, then selling you food that makes you sick is their moral obligation under that philosophy.

Under that philosophy, we never ask why the humans are sick, we ask what other drugs can we give them? How else can we put a middle man into this? And as much as I think that the internet and the connectivity that exists there could be a force for good when you look at dating apps and how they’ve distorted the dating markets and how they’ve actually negatively impacted society, like, did you know that Gen Z Is drinking less, smoking less, and having less sex than any other generation we’ve ever looked at. People in old folks homes are getting it on more readily than the people in Gen Z. That should give you pause. And for where I look at it, I look at it and say, Okay, I don’t want to solve this problem, I want to understand this problem.

Is it the lack of community? Is it the commodification of relationships through all the different apps that we have on our phones? Is it the fact that we don’t actually think that we’re allowed to do anything unless it’s somehow profitable? I can’t go to the bar and have a drink with a friend unless, you know, it’s a networking event.

I can’t, you know, play a guitar unless I’m going to go to a bunch of open mic nights and try to make some money. I can’t draw unless it’s somehow economically useful. This is a philosophy that we have that’s infused in society, and we’re missing the point. And Anya’s point is that we’ve done that with relationships, sex, and love.

And it turns out that those things are relational, not economic. And yes, people can argue with me that there is some economic value and there’s an economic choice metrics that are going on and an entire cadre of interlocking incentives. And all of that is true, but it’s not something that you can put on a spreadsheet.

It’s something you can qualitatively observe, but you cannot quantitatively analyze it. And this is one of the things that drives me nuts because at the end of the day, I’m a data guy. I love my data. If I could spreadsheet a human, you boy howdy bet that I will. And yet I can’t. So when people present things and be like, this country is doing great.

Look at their GDP. What is the GDP per capita? what is the quality of life? Are these people connected? Are they happy? Do they live into old age free from worry? Do children grow up believing that there’s a bright future for their society? And if not, that GDP number means exactly zero.

Are we measuring the right things? Are we asking the right questions? Yeah, those numbers are really insightful to a point, but if at some point you’re going to have to cross out of the numbers and into the human and start to ask some questions. What’s going on here and why, what’s missing here? And when it comes to things like our personal finance, at the end of the day, That’s what I’m doing in this podcast is I’m talking about personal finance through a very human lens. Why? Because the four pillars of our human existence: food, relationships, heart, and lifestyle, those pillars use the rest on the environment. And they no longer rest on the environment, they now rest on finances. Do I think that that’s a good thing? It’s irrelevant to me. And here’s why it’s irrelevant to me. Because I don’t have the power to change it, but I do have the power to help you be able to navigate it. And part of, you know, humanizing your personal finances, part of humanizing yourself is starting to realize that money is emotional.

Not everything has to be the quote unquote right decision. When you’re buying a house, you buy a home. You buy the house that fits the life you want to live, not the tax code or the zip code or the school district or the siding or the neighborhood or the HOA. We tie ourselves up in knots trying to make the good decisions when in fact we’re making terrible decisions because it turns out we made that decision from the neck up but life is experienced from the neck down.

And it’s there from the neck down that you must make the decisions. You’re making a decision for your life. And yes, money is a big part of it. It’s foundational. Money will dictate a lot of how you can exist in this world. And at the same time, it says nothing about you as a person, and it shouldn’t be driving solely your decision making.

Again, with cars, same type of deal. Don’t buy the car for the life you think you want to live. Go make that life and then buy the car to supports the life you’re living. Don’t buy a car to impress your friends. Do you want your friends really to be impressed by the, price tag on your automobile rather than the way that you express your heart?

Do you want your relationships to be dictated based upon your cashflow versus how present you can be? And we try to actually establish our relationships based upon these quantitative metrics, and it doesn’t work. It works for a while, then we slip up. We wake up one morning, and it’s empty, it’s hollow, we don’t, we don’t care.

We go into work on a Friday, find ourselves laid off, and then we start looking at that car payment. How much we’ve tied up into it. The debt we took on.

What would have happened if we bought the car that we needed? Not the car that everyone told us we wanted.

We wake up in ill health because we made a bunch of convenient choices rather than taking the time to say, I don’t need the convenience, but I do need healthy food.

How many of us get to a certain age where we look around and go, I don’t actually have friends. I don’t know who I’d call in an emergency. When was the last time you laughed until your belly hurt? These are the things that make a human life. And we want so much in society to remove the humans so we can focus on the economics.

We can focus on the commerce. We can focus on how are we going to make more money out of the situation? An infinite growth model. Humans are not designed for an infinite growth model. We are not built for it. We can barely wrap it or wrap our heads around it, let alone organize our societies around it.

And yet we try. I, I saw a quote from Connor Beaton today that said essentially the human body was not designed to take in the sheer level of inputs that we get now. Think about how much input you get from your phone in 15 minutes of doom scrolling on Instagram. Like that, that’s incredible. You’re going to get like 20 different political opinions.

You’re going to get a bunch of sensational reels. You’re going to get a couple of cat videos for sure. And at the end, you’re just, your whole body’s just going to be a Twitter with anxiety and nervousness because it can’t process it. we were designed to experience in a natural setting, to take in the inputs of the soft breezes rustling of leaves, you know, to feel the temperature change in the air.

That’s what we were designed to take in. And yet we’re taking in more and more and more, not through our bodies, but through our eyes and into our heads and we’re losing the human. And any solution you come up to this, Oh, I want to get off social media. Okay. Hey, I can get behind that. Also, social media is a big part of where life takes place now, can you afford to do that? Well, I want to, I want to ditch processed food. My brother is somebody who has ditch processed food. I can tell you that there’s like three things you need to know. Number one, your body is not going to feel good for a while because you got a detox from the processed food.

Number two, it’s going to take a heck of a lot more time, particularly in the beginning because you have to learn how to cook a bunch of stuff. And you’re going to make mistakes. And number three, and this is where I come in, your grocery bill is going to double. And there’s not a lot you can do about that because the base ingredients as presented in the grocery store are not nearly as subsidized as that bag of corn chips.

We organized society around that because it was good for someone’s bottom line, because we wanted to sell you convenience. And so here again, your personal finances are the core of you being able to eat in a more human way. Relationships are no different. When you’re having to hustle and grind to afford a lot, you know, the lifestyle you thought you wanted to live, you can’t be nearly as present when you’re with family, friends, and loved ones, you know, I’m fond of, I told one of my clients and went in a session, man.

It’s real hard to truly fuck your wife when you’re getting fucked by the bank on interest rates. Kind of gives you pause. It’s hard to express your heart when you feel maxed out on anxiety because you don’t know if you could take a financial hit. And it’s very hard to create a lifestyle that you truly wish for without money.

And I’m, I’m a millennial. What’s the millennial midlife crisis? It’s not, you know, blondes and Corvettes like it was for my dad’s generation. No, it’s homesteading. So many of us in the millennial generation, and I believe this will be true for Gen Z as well, are longing for the authentic. We want to get our hands dirty.

We want to feel something real. And so in our midlife crisis, when we throw our hands up and go, fuck it, so many of us are starting gardens in our backyards and raising chickens and all sorts of other stuff. And then somebody who has a garden, I will be the first one to tell you it’s expensive. Grow lights for the seedlings and, you know, organic fertilizers and your worm compost and all the bins and everything else like that costs money.

Raising chickens is a process and it’s going to cost money to get the mealworm so they can have the protein to produce the eggs. It’s involved. And so yet here again, in order to live that life, in order to be able to inhabit the space that you wish to inhabit, your first step is getting your financial house in order.

And ladies and gentlemen, I’m here for this. It’s time for us to start having the human centered conversation around our finances and our lifestyles. It’s time that we start asking questions How did our food system become industrial? Why is it that everyone needs a credit card? Why is it that I never consented to being a credit score?

These are all good questions, and we need to be asking more of them. And just like my wife stepping into our home for the very first time and telling me she didn’t care about the tax strategies, I hope that this is a wake up call to refocus us on the things that are truly important to us, the humans.

Dylan Bain: Thanks for listening. The conversation doesn’t stop here. You can find me on all the social media platforms at TheDylanBain and you can sign up to get updates on workshops, events, and more at dylanbane. com.