Excerpt

The Search for Substance

The gold standard age represented faith in the physical, the fiat age represents faith in faith. But faith, when detached from substance, must continually be reinvigorated by spectacle. The spectacle is our new bullion. It provides temporary proof of value in a world where value has no fundamental basis. The more spectacular the performance, the greater the illusion of backing. But spectacle, by definition, must escalate to sustain attention. What began as communication becomes inflationary noise.

The crisis of meaning that follows may be misinterpreted as nihilistic (A wildly misinterpreted philosophy by all perhaps save Walter Sobchak). It is the over production of belief. We believe too much, too often, in too many things. The problem is surplus. When everything can be believed, belief ceases to discriminate. The marketplace of meaning floods, and the signal is lost in the noise.

In such a world, cynicism becomes a coping mechanism. To doubt everything is easier than to sort through the endless claims on one’s belief. But cynicism, too, is a form of faith, faith in the futility of faith. It preserves the structure of belief even as it denies its content. The cynic and the believer are twins, both orbiting the same empty center.

Some thinkers have called for a return to grounding, to a rediscovery of limits, of finitude. But limits cannot simply be decreed back into existence. Once the gold window of the heart’s depths has been closed, there is no easy reopening. The very idea of an external standard now feels alien. We have internalized fiat metaphysics too deeply. To believe again in a backing would feel like surrendering autonomy. We would rather drift in uncertainty than tie ourselves to something we did not choose.

The longing for substance persists. It surfaces in strange places like in the cult of mindfulness, in the fetish for craft and the handmade or in the hunger for “real” experiences. These are attempts, however fleeting, to touch something that resists abstraction, to feel weight again. They are secular pilgrimages to the lost temple of reality. Each time we touch wood, knead dough, or look away from the screen, we are trying to remember what the gold world felt like.

Nostalgia is not enough. The term has the etymology of ‘sickness for the past’. The challenge of the fiat age is to invent a new form of solidity that can survive within fluidity. Perhaps we could find a way to ground meaning without resorting to metaphysical metal. The unfinished task of our time is to build a self that can float without drifting, to believe without delusion, to mint value without inflation.

Until then, we remain like traders on a volatile exchange, watching the screens of our identities flicker with each tick of attention, praying the market does not lose faith before we do.

To Conclude

The psychological equivalent of this monetary revolution was not long in coming. If the dollar could be unmoored from gold, then the self could be unmoored from God, from tradition, from the fixed coordinates of a pre-ordained destiny. The cultural forces that would enable this had been building for decades, a slow-moving tide of individualism that found its perfect economic metaphor in 1971. The same logic that governed the new currency; value as declaration, backed by consensus began to govern the soul.

The transition was not announced on television, but it was no less profound. The old, backed self was characterized by its weight and its limits. Its value was derived from a finite reserve of external validations. You were your father’s son, your God’s servant, your community’s member. These were truths you inhabited. They were heavy, often restrictive, but they provided a stable map of the world and your place within it. The collapse of this system was, at first, experienced as pure liberation. The chains of tradition fell away. The individual was now free to author their own meaning, to mint their own value through an act of will.

This new, fiat self was light, unburdened by the heavy metal of the past. It was a currency set afloat on the open market of social life. Its value was determined by the perceived worth granted to it by others. The question shifted from "Who am I?" to "Who do people believe I am?" We opened ourselves to the panopticon.

The tools for this new project of self-creation emerged in lockstep with the financial instruments of the fiat economy. Analogous to the financial world invented derivatives, which were bets on the future value of assets, the psyche invented the personal derivative. The resume became a speculative prospectus, a bet on one's future potential. The personal diary gave way to the public blog, the family photo album to the Instagram feed. These are financial instruments traded on the attention economy. They are claims on future social capital, derivatives of the unseen self whose value fluctuate with the volatile metrics of likes, shares, and follower counts.

This new system has its own priesthood and its own rituals of faith. Where the gold standard had vaults and assays, the fiat self has therapists, life coaches and even friends that are figures tasked with helping the individual strengthen their narrative, manage their personal brand, and maintain confidence in their self-declared value. The confession, once a sacrament aimed at absolution from a divine authority, became a therapeutic tool for refining one's story, a public performance of authenticity designed to bolster credibility.

The architecture of this new identity economy was built on a foundation of credit, in both the financial and psychological sense. Parallel to the way fiat money requires the constant creation of debt to fuel economic growth, the fiat self runs on an engine of desire, which functions as a form of existential debt. The individual must continually borrow significance from an imagined future. "I am not who I am now, but who I will become." This promise of future transformation is a loan taken out against the emptiness of the present. We spend tomorrow's meaning to survive today's attention cycle. Hope becomes the collateral for this loan, and the constant pressure to "become" is the interest that must be paid.

This creates a state of increasing leverage. The self is always in deficit, always needing to issue new promises, new versions, new content to service the debt of its own existence. The old virtues of contentment and satisfaction became economic liabilities. In an economy driven by attention, closure is a kind of bankruptcy. To be satisfied is to cease producing new narrative value, to stop the circulation of the self. Thus, we are condemned to a state of endless becoming, a relentless pursuit of reinvention that is celebrated as growth but often feels like flight. Should one imagine Sisyphus happy? There’s a sense in the modern age that Sisyphus is watching himself push the boulder from the bottom of the mountain.

The psychological toll of maintaining this leveraged existence is immense. Beneath the glossy surface of self-expression lies a deep and quiet exhaustion. The modern individual carries an invisible burden, the pressure to remain visible, relevant, and evolving. Every notification, every like, is a microloan of belief, and each one must be repaid with new content, new proof of one's continuing value. This relentless self-commodification creates a subtle form of servitude disguised as autonomy. We are free to declare anything, but still, we are bound to the endless labor of maintaining belief in our declarations. There is no sabbath in this economy, no rest for the soul that must constantly perform its own worth.

The most pervasive symptom of this new condition is a peculiar form of anxiety, the terror of meaning-inflation. In the monetary realm, when a central bank prints too much currency, the value of each unit declines. In the realm of identity, when everyone is minting their own meaning, declaring their own unique truth, and performing their own special authenticity, the value of each individual declaration is necessarily diluted. The proliferation of personal brands paradoxically makes each brand less distinctive. We are all shouting our unique value propositions into a cacophonous crowd, and the result is a deafening noise in which no single voice can hold its value for long.

This inflation generates a desperate need to signal one's value more loudly, more cleverly, more frequently. Silence becomes dangerous. Stillness is interpreted as a lack of value, a failure to circulate. The self must constantly produce new declarations, new performances, new content to simply maintain its current valuation. The ancient pursuit was to "be good." The modern imperative is to "be seen." Being seen requires a constant, exhausting output. We have replaced the vault of Aristotle’s psuche with the social feed, and the ledger is now kept by algorithms that record and rank every expression. The soul is audited by analytics.

The irony is that this system, born of liberation, produces a new kind of guilt. The fiat self, though freed from external authority, remains haunted by the memory of substance. We feel the weight of meaning's disappearance as a personal failing. We sense that we ought to be more solid, more real, than our projections allow, yet we have no vocabulary for that solidity anymore. The old virtues sound like relics, but their absence leaves an ache we cannot name. We try to fill this void with the performance of authenticity, pursuing it with the desperation of a nation hoarding bullion. To be called "authentic" is the highest compliment in the fiat age, for it suggests that one's self-declaration still carries some residual weight, that it has not yet been entirely eroded by the inflationary pressures of the market. Authenticity has become a speculative asset, traded and performed until it too, loses its value.

What we often call expression in this economy is, in truth, a form of extraction. Every post, every image, every curated revelation mines a little more of the self's finite emotional ore and converts it into circulating attention. The self is being liquidated, its inner reserves depleted to fuel its public circulation. The currency of meaning expands while the substance of the inner life diminishes. What’s left is a haunting sensation of emptiness, a feeling that behind the vibrant screen of our projected identity, there is less and less there to back it up. Finally, I declare central paradox of the fiat self. In its quest for infinite possibility, it has discovered the infinite void.

To discover where your own Fiat Identity is valued in the attention economy, take the Identity Matrix Quiz now.

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