At some point, the household budget climbed out of the drawer and began telling the household what it was for.
That is more or less where we are.
The economy was meant to help us tend life. Somewhere along the way, life was told to reorganize itself around the economy instead.
Care had to become more efficient. Work had to take up more space. The land had to keep producing, even when its ability to recover was thinning beneath our feet.
Then, once the damage became too visible to ignore, someone suggested a charitable initiative.
A very tasteful one, naturally.
This is the part we rarely say aloud: giving something back after taking too much is not the same as good design.
A business can fund a community garden and still leave the neighborhood less livable. An organization can publish a beautiful statement about well-being while structuring work around permanent depletion.
The gesture may be sincere.
The arrangement may still be wrong.
An economy that serves life would begin earlier. It would ask whether the work strengthens the people doing it and whether prosperity can be created without quietly moving the cost elsewhere.
That “elsewhere” is often a caregiver’s body, a family’s evening, or a piece of land expected to keep giving long after we have stopped listening.
The economy always keeps accounts.
It simply has a habit of sending the bill to people who were not invited into the original decision.
This is not an argument against profit. Profit is useful.
It simply makes a poor household deity.
The economy belongs inside life.
Life does not belong inside the economy.
That order matters because a tool that forgets its purpose eventually begins damaging the very thing it was created to support.
Perhaps it is time to put the budget back in the drawer.
It can come out when we need it.