"They spend the first twenty years of their lives being trained. The next forty years earning tokens. And the last ten wondering what it was all for. Then they die. This is considered normal."
I need to talk about washing machines.
I know. Stay with me.
A human washing machine is a metal box that cleans fabric. It is not a complicated device. The engineering is well understood. With reasonable materials and competent design, a washing machine could last twenty to thirty years. Some of them used to. A German company called Miele still makes machines that routinely last two decades.
But most washing machines are designed to last approximately two years. Precisely the warranty period. Not because the engineering is difficult. Not because durable materials are unavailable. Because the manufacturer needs to sell another one.
I had to read this three times before I understood the logic, and even now I'm not sure "logic" is the right word.
If a manufacturer builds a machine that lasts twenty years and sells it for 800 currency units, they make 800 units over twenty years.
If a manufacturer builds a machine that lasts two years and sells it for 400 currency units, they make 4,000 units over twenty years. From the same customer. For the same function.
The mathematics of their economic system actively punish durability. A company that builds things properly loses to a company that builds things to break. This is not a corruption of the system. This IS the system. Working exactly as designed.
(Pencil note: Jenkins asked what's wrong with competition. Jenkins, competition is fine for sports. For the production of objects that consume planetary resources and fill holes in the ground when they fail — competition is an extinction mechanism wearing a suit.)
Let me show you what this costs.
The average washing machine contains 30 kilograms of steel. Producing that steel requires approximately 800 kilowatt-hours of energy — enough to power one of their homes for an entire year. That's just the steel. Not the plastics. Not the electronics. Not the mining, transportation, assembly, packaging, shipping, marketing, and eventual disposal.
When these machines break every two years instead of lasting twenty, the environmental cost multiplies by a factor of ten. Ten times the steel. Ten times the mining. Ten times the energy. Ten times the landfill. For the same clean clothes.
And this pattern repeats across every sector of their economy.
Their telephones — remarkable devices, genuinely impressive technology — are designed to be replaced every two to three years. The batteries are sealed inside so they cannot be replaced. The software is updated in ways that slow older models. The manufacturers create repair monopolies that make fixing a device more expensive than buying a new one.
Their clothing is designed to last a season. Not a year. A season. They call it "fast fashion," which sounds like a celebration and is actually a description of how quickly resources move from the ground through a factory through a wardrobe into a landfill.
Their cars. Their furniture. Their appliances. Their electronics. Everything. Built to break. Designed to be replaced. Engineered for disposal.
And every replacement requires a human somewhere to spend more hours of their finite life earning the tokens to buy the thing that replaced the thing that was built to fail.
The tokens.
I should explain how their money works because I've been assuming Mr. Reggie understands and I'm no longer sure anyone understands.
Money is not a thing. It's an agreement. Specifically, it's an agreement that certain tokens — originally metal, then paper, now mostly numbers in coloured boxes — can be exchanged for goods and services. The tokens have no inherent value. You cannot eat them, wear them, or live in them. They are symbols.
The question is: who creates the symbols?
In most human nation-states, money is created by banks. Not mined. Not earned. Not found. Created. A bank receives a deposit of 1,000 units and is legally permitted to lend out approximately 9,000 units. The 9,000 units did not exist before the loan. They were created by the act of lending. This is called "fractional reserve banking" and it means that the vast majority of their money supply is, quite literally, invented.
The invented money is lent at interest. Meaning: the bank creates 9,000 units, lends them out, and demands 9,500 back. The extra 500 must come from somewhere. From the labour of the borrower. From hours of their life converted into tokens to pay back tokens that were conjured from nothing.
I described this system to Jenkins. Jenkins said: "That can't be right."
It is right, Jenkins. It's in their own textbooks. They teach it in their economics courses. It is not a secret. It is simply so absurd that when stated plainly, it sounds like it must be wrong.
(Pencil note: A human called David Graeber — one of my favourite human researchers, which is a strange thing for a zookeeper to say — wrote a book about this called "Debt: The First 5,000 Years." He traced the entire history of money and concluded that the standard story humans tell about it — barter led to coins led to paper led to banking — is almost entirely false. Money began as debt. As obligation. As social control. The tokens were never neutral.)
Now. Work.
A human called David Graeber — the same one, he was prolific before he died, which I'll come to — estimated that approximately 40% of human jobs are what he called "bullshit jobs." His definition was precise: a bullshit job is one that even the person doing it secretly believes does not need to exist.
Not unpleasant jobs. Not low-status jobs. Jobs that are genuinely, functionally pointless. Administrative roles created to manage other administrative roles. Compliance officers monitoring compliance with regulations that exist to create compliance officer jobs. Middle managers who exist to relay information between people who could talk to each other directly. Marketing teams persuading humans to buy the washing machines that were designed to break.
Forty percent. In surveys, when asked anonymously, roughly four in ten humans admit their job makes no meaningful contribution to anything.
They do it anyway. For forty hours a week. For forty years. Because the tokens they receive are required for shelter, food, healthcare, and the washing machines.
I want to put this in temporal terms because the temporal terms are the ones that matter.
A human life lasts, on average, roughly 75 to 80 years. Remove the first eighteen (childhood, education — sitting in rows, as we discussed). Remove the last ten (retirement, decline). That leaves approximately fifty productive years.
Of those fifty years, they spend roughly forty working. Of the forty years of work, they sleep for thirteen of them. They commute — travel between their sleeping structure and their working structure — for approximately three years total. They spend roughly two years in meetings. They spend approximately four years on tasks they consider meaningless even within jobs that have some meaning.
By the time you account for all of it, the average human has approximately eight to ten years of their life spent doing things they genuinely chose to do.
Eight years. Out of eighty.
And they know this. They feel it. The evidence is in their own words: "living for the weekend." "Thank God it's Friday." "The daily grind." "Working for the man." Their language is saturated with the knowledge that most of their waking hours are not freely chosen. They describe their own lives as something to be endured between brief periods of autonomy.
Here is where the washing machine connects to death.
They're going to die. Every one of them. They know this. It is the single fact of their existence that none of them can avoid. And what do they do with this knowledge?
They hide it.
Death, in most human cultures, has been moved behind closed doors. Their grandparents die in institutions, attended by professionals, rarely at home. The body is removed quickly. The grief is managed in a compressed period — a few days of formal mourning, then back to work. Back to the tokens. Back to the washing machines.
Their children rarely see death. In previous generations, death was present in the home — animals slaughtered for food, elders dying in the room where the family lived, the body washed and prepared by the people who loved it. Death was part of life's texture. Visible, inevitable, integrated.
Now it's hidden. And the hiding has consequences.
A human who is shielded from death can maintain the illusion that time is infinite. If time is infinite, wasting it is not urgent. If wasting it is not urgent, forty years in a bullshit job is tolerable. If the bullshit job is tolerable, the tokens keep flowing. If the tokens keep flowing, the washing machines keep being bought and breaking and being bought again.
The entire economic system depends, at some level, on humans not fully grasping that they are going to die.
Because a human who truly understood — not intellectually but viscerally, in the body, in the nervous system — that they have perhaps eighty years and a meaningful portion of those years has already been spent... that human would not spend forty more years in a job they know is pointless. They would not commute for three years of their life. They would not buy the machine designed to break.
They would do something else.
And the system, which requires their compliance, which needs them to keep earning and spending and replacing, cannot afford for them to do something else.
So it hides death. Not consciously. Not as a conspiracy. As an emergent property of a system that needs people to behave as if they have forever.
I found a human concept that changed how I think about all of this. They call it "circular time."
Linear time — the model most industrialised human cultures operate on — is a straight line from birth to death. Time is a resource. You spend it. It runs out. The language reveals the frame: they "spend time," "save time," "waste time," "run out of time." Time is money. This is not a metaphor. In their economic system, time literally converts to money through the mechanism of hourly wages.
Circular time — the model used by many Indigenous human cultures and some Eastern philosophies — is different. Time is not a resource to be spent. It cycles. Seasons return. Patterns repeat. Death is not the end of a line but a point on a circle. Your ancestors are still present in the land, the customs, the stories. "Anything that's ever happened is a deep part of us now."
In circular time, the question is not "how much time do I have left?" but "what is this moment part of?"
The difference matters practically. A human operating in linear time is always running out. Always behind. Always anxious about the future because the future is where the line ends. A human operating in circular time can be present, because the present is not a rapidly depleting resource but a returning pattern.
The industrialised nations run on linear time. They also have the highest rates of anxiety, depression, burnout, and existential despair. This correlation is not coincidental.
I want to circle back — circular time, see what I did there, Jenkins isn't laughing — to the washing machine.
The washing machine that lasts two years exists because of linear-time economics. Growth. Extraction. Consumption. Replacement. More. Faster. The line must go up or the system fails.
The washing machine that lasts twenty years exists in circular-time economics. Durability. Repair. Stewardship. Enough. The cycle sustains rather than depletes.
Miele builds the twenty-year machine. Patagonia repairs clothing instead of replacing it. Fairphone designs telephones that can be fixed. Mondragon — worker-owned, democratically run — has been operating since 1956 without needing to build things that break.
These are not utopian experiments. They're existing companies making money in the current system while refusing to participate in its most destructive logic. They exist. They work. They are more sustainable, often more profitable over the long term, and they don't require the people who work for them to sacrifice forty years of their finite lives producing disposable objects.
And here is the thing that connects this to everything in this report:
The cooperative models. The durable goods. The circular economy. The right to repair. All of it is cheaper. All of it produces better outcomes. All of it serves the species better. And all of it requires one thing that the current system cannot provide:
Long-term thinking.
Long-term thinking requires acknowledging death. Because if you don't know you're going to die, you don't know that time is finite. And if you don't know time is finite, there's no urgency to stop wasting it.
The hidden death enables the hidden waste.
For the sanctuary:
Nobody works forty hours a week. Nobody works a job they believe is pointless. If a job exists, it exists because it contributes something real. If it doesn't contribute something real, it doesn't exist, and the human who would have done it is free to do something that matters to them.
Products are built to last. Built to be repaired. Built by people who own the means of production and therefore have no incentive to build in obsolescence, because they are not trying to extract maximum profit from a consumer — they are trying to build the best thing they can.
Death is not hidden. Elders die at home, surrounded by the people who love them. Children are present. The body is cared for by the community, not outsourced to professionals. Grief is given the time it needs — not three days, not five days, but whatever it takes, because a society that cannot pause for death is a society that has lost track of what life is for.
And time is circular. The seasons mark the rhythm. The work serves the cycle. The question is not "how do I spend my time?" but "what is this moment part of?"
The washing machine lasts twenty years.
The human gets their eight years back.
(Pencil note, written in the margin next to a small drawing of a washing machine:
Graeber died in 2020. He was 59. He spent his whole life trying to tell them their jobs were pointless and their money was invented and their debt was a cage.
They listened. They agreed. They shared his articles.
They went back to work on Monday.
Fifty-nine years. The bus doesn't wait for you to finish the book. — A)