Inflation is more than numbers on a graph. It’s the signal that money itself is rotting. The bills in your pocket shrink in power not only because of “policy” or “markets,” but because what they buy has already been emptied of worth.

Look around: so much of what we purchase bears no resemblance to what it’s advertised as. The light‑filled rooms of Airbnb listings collapse into dim bedrooms with cheap linens. Coca‑Cola has been reformulated so many times it’s not even close to the drink people once craved. Meat is tasteless unless it’s drowned in seasoning, and the seasoning itself is hollow, rescued only by salt and MSG hiding in the ingredients.

A rebel smoking a cigarette has never touched real tobacco. The legalized weed that puts people to sleep isn’t the plant once whispered about in alleyways. Flying is no longer wonder or awe but an ordeal of queues, checks, and cramped hours. Trains are not romantic anymore, but instead they’re cost‑cut husks rattling along neglected routes. Vegetables are harvested unripe to survive thousand‑mile shipments, watery and bland by the time they hit the shelf. Cars drive themselves on the road and drive the driver into numbness, turning what was once freedom into a self‑regulated countdown to destination.

This is what inflation exposes: money is worthless because what it buys is worthless.The price rises toward infinity, but the taste, the thrill, the meaning all collapse to zero.

The descent to zero value is driven by greed, always demanding more; an insatiable hunger that never rests, always shifting the horizon of “enough.” The ascent of prices toward infinity for nothing is fueled by pettiness, endless little optimizations that squeeze out cost while draining away substance. This combination lifted billions out of poverty—and delivered them straight into pointlessness.

You see the pointlessness in the migrant who crosses the planet to live in a metal barrack and deliver foam containers of food. The wages are higher than anything their remote village could offer, but what do they buy? Watery vegetables, tasteless meat, machines of distraction. Was the cost of the lost life, the family left behind, the belonging forfeited, ever factored in? The trade is counted in currency, never in meaning.

Every generation feels the loss, tries to warn the next, and is met with disbelief; a ritual as old as modernity itself. They point to vanished qualities, like the solid fit and finish of appliances in the 1970s or the rich character of booze in the 1920s, only to be dismissed as nostalgic cranks until the newcomers see their own world hollowing out in turn – like a forty‑year‑old of 2025 trying to explain the early internet to a teenager only familiar with today’s dead internet. What was once lived becomes a memory, then a myth, and finally a marketable style. Nostalgia, stripped of its depth, is packaged as vintage filters, curated playlists, or ironic fashions, a consumable dream that bears little resemblance to the past it claims to evoke. 

Life thins with each turn. What remains is a frantic search for stimulation: random experiences consumed with the speed and short‑lived gratification of a fidget spinner. Fidgeting friendships. Fidgeting family. Fidgeting hobbies. Fidgeting work. All restless, distracted, turning in place, like a spinner locked between the fingers, never going anywhere despite all the exhausting motion.

Inflation is not just about money. It is the mark of a civilization fidgeting itself to exhaustion.