# Inflation Comes From Worthlessness

- Link: https://www.andreidraganescu.info/2025/09/16/inflation-comes-from-worthlessness/
- Published: 2025-09-16T11:36:24+03:00
- Author: Andrei Draganescu

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.