We for too long have created the drama and then classed the drama to have started when we got held accountable to our own cause.

Everything that has demand will keep happening. Markets, whether financial or spiritual, obey this principle. You keep buying strawberries, farmers keep growing strawberries. You keep glorifying violence, culture keeps making violent films. You keep fetishising your body, industries keep selling you mirrors. If there is a need, it finds supply. The law is consistent across economics, psychology, and metaphysics. And it is one of the reasons humanity struggles to evolve: we heal symptoms, but rarely the roots.

We crave so intensely — adrenaline, validation, novelty — because we have not learned to meet our deeper needs. We have not healed the roots of emptiness, trauma, boredom. So we push ourselves to extremes just to feel something. That extremism is the shadow of demand. Until we address the hunger itself, we will see the same dynamics appear in different outfits: one day it’s drugs, the next it’s likes, the next it’s AI‑generated lovers. We cannot legislate, ban, or tax our way into healing if the demand remains. The field merely takes shape according to what we feed.

In that light, we must examine our cultural altars. Everything we glorify should have its counterpart glorified too. If we love victory, let’s love process and losses. If we adore youth, let’s revere elderhood. If we celebrate hustle, let’s honour rest. Balance is the nature of the field. When we elevate one polarity and ignore its twin, imbalance blooms. We glorify romantic love yet belittle friendship. We glorify intellect yet dismiss the body’s wisdom. We glorify wealth yet mock the poor. This is why any lasting system must be holographic: masculine and feminine, stillness and motion, contraction and expansion, free and paid.

Value itself has been distorted by this imbalance. We have been conditioned to associate cost with worth. “If it’s expensive, it must be valuable. If it’s free, it must be worthless.” We’ve been marinated in marketing, taught that paying for labels confers status. Meanwhile, we overlook the priceless treasures that cost nothing: clean air, safe water, unconditional love, a song hummed to a child. We are suspicious of gifts because our programming equates “Free” with scam or gifting for celebrations. We throw away knowledge shared freely but line up to purchase the same wisdom packaged in shiny boxes. We assume popular things are better because they are ubiquitous; we dismiss common things as unimportant because they are everywhere. We have forgotten that common things exist because they are foundational. Air is common, but try living without it.

The “Jones effect” — the impulse to value what others value — fuels this distortion. We compare ourselves to others, fearing irrelevance, and so we buy what they buy, watch what they watch, love what they love. Popularity becomes a proxy for value. But if we strip away the herd, if we compare two offerings without external hype, we might be shocked. The product with a million followers might be hollow, while the one hidden in the corner might be a masterpiece. Value by nature doesn’t always shout; sometimes it whispers. The test is time, not trend. True value withstands the clock, the market’s fickleness, and the onslaught of programming. It endures because it aligns with the deeper laws of this reality.

This conditioning that “common means worthless” is the residue of generations trained to consume. For centuries we have been told that scarcity equals value. The rarer an object, the more we pay. The rarer a skill, the more we respect. This conditioning has infected our perception of ourselves: the more unique we are, the more we believe we matter; the more ordinary, the less. We forget that most miracles are common: seeds sprouting, lungs breathing, hearts beating. In a unified system, the measure of worth isn’t rarity or price but resonance and endurance. What nourishes the collective? What still stands when marketing budgets are gone? What echoes through time as truth?

So what do we do? First, we heal the roots. We ask why we crave what we crave. We face the emptiness that makes us binge. We hold space for the loneliness that leads to addiction. We stop glorifying extremes without acknowledging the cost. We create systems that meet needs rather than exploit them. Our educational model — where tuition returns to students upon graduation — is an example: we remove the need to commodify knowledge, decouple learning from debt, and show that value can be reciprocal rather than extractive. We honour both giver and receiver, recognising that what is shared freely is often more potent than what is sold.

Second, we restore balance in our glorification. We teach children to love both winning and losing, to find meaning in both solitude and connection, to honour both ambition and contentment. We tell stories where kindness is as heroic as conquest. We reward collaboration as much as competition.

Third, we recalibrate value. We learn to trust our own discernment rather than the Jones effect. We choose quality over branding, substance over spectacle. We invest in what nourishes our whole being. We recognise that value isn’t just monetary; it is energetic. Does it uplift? Does it expand? Does it endure?

Finally, we remember that common isn’t dirty. It is holy. We remember that the measure of worth is not the price tag but the alignment with truth, nature, and longevity. We measure value by the generosity of its influence, by whether it stands the test of time and the barrage of programming.

If everything that has a demand will keep happening, then let us demand what heals. Let us demand balance, authenticity, reciprocity. Let us demand systems that honour our wholeness. And let us stop feeding the roots of our dysfunction by paying for things that poison us and ignoring the gifts that were always free.

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