Making value exchange into a sacred act of creation
From extraction economy to attraction economy
Every moment of every day, we are constantly trading our energy for something. And for the most part, that exchange is happening unconsciously — and it’s taking place in a default reality where the atmosphere is thick with consumption, scarcity, extraction and withholding.
Our environment is so polluted with these energies. Most of us no longer know what it’s like to breathe air free and clear of them. We just know that we’re suffocating.
Do you remember when social media used to be social? I would post status updates with random thoughts and current mood reports. I would ask my network of friends for suggestions of where to go on holiday. I would get connected with people around the world offering me a place to sleep. In those days, social media was fun; it was connecting; and it felt magical.
These days I feel like I’m largely engaging with brands on social media, not friends. It’s rare now to see a post without a call-to-action at the end. I often question what I am doing there. It feels like a waste of energy to be hanging out there, because I have nothing to sell. There’s a heaviness, fatigue, and a sense of “why bother?” Social media is work; it is competitive; and it feels draining.
What used to be a newsfeed on our friend’s lives has become an ad feed over time — mostly without us noticing. “If you’re not paying then you are the product,” as some wise person once said. How much time are we using every day, reading the ad posts that others are paying for us to see?
We are the frogs that got boiled, with the temperature increasing one degree at a time. Day after day, year over year. We have become the product of what we mindlessly consume instead of choosing what we want to receive.
It’s impossibly addictive, this elegantly designed dopamine machine. And the more we engage with it, the faster it learns how to keep us in attention slavery. To quote James McCrae (@wordsarevibrations), “paying attention is buying reality.”
In this moment we have the opportunity to shift: to move away from the old economy of extraction, and into the new economy of attraction. But before we can buy into a new reality, we need to see what we have been blindly buying.
The foundational assumption of the old paradigm economic model is scarcity. Scarcity is taught in every business school in the world, including the one that I graduated from. Only they don’t call it scarcity in business school, they call it supply and demand economics. With supply and demand, prices are determined by the market conditions. If you want to jack up the price of something, you can do that one of two ways: by increasing demand or by restricting supply.
As individual actors in this system, we look to see what we can get (maximum inflow), and how we can spend less (minimum outflow). There’s a basic belief that we’ve collectively agreed to. That belief is there’s not enough to go around, so we need to use what we have carefully and make sure we get the most benefit. Or else, we might run out of resources. There’s extraction and withholding.
We talk about buyers’ markets and sellers’ markets. This language suggests that no matter what the economic weather is, someone is winning and someone is losing. Parties are pitted against each other. High price, the seller wins. Low price, the buyer wins. Exchange is an adversarial process where one person's bargain is gained at the other's expense.
Ugh. Who wants that? This is the mousetrap we’re in. How do we get out of this maze? We are called upon to imagine possibilities beyond a simple transaction, trading this for that.
One experiment to try, is to see what happens when we put community first and commerce second. What if we can elevate exchange to become a magical, multi-dimensional act of creation, instead of a zero sum money game?
In a world of enoughness, I imagine us being free to invest energy into the kind of world we want to see. We consciously choose what we buy, what we own, and how we invest — and by doing so, own creatorship of shared reality. We move towards the world we want, fueled by soul desire, doing from love. We drop the ego’s survival impulse to defend and protect ourselves, trying to avoid what we fear.
Money, time, and truly all forms of resource, are our creative currency. These storehouses of value are the raw materials we use to build reality. We already do this every day, whether we realize it or not. The opportunity we have is to own more of our world-building power. To do this we have to bring attention to the ways it moves through us unconsciously.
Untapped potential for creation is latent in energy spent unconsciously. By bringing unconscious spending to the level of conscious awareness, we plug into the power to change reality.
The ones who benefit in the old-paradigm transactional reality are those extracting energy from the activity of trading. Most of us are simply passing our unfulfilled desires and lack beliefs, round and round. Every purchase is like a sneeze, transmitting the virus of not-enoughness.
Making exchanges can move beyond trading this-for-that. The act of making an exchange can be returned to the realm of the sacred and creative — more like the act of making love. It goes beyond buying and selling experiences and things.
Instead we can have delightful and pleasurable energy sex, generate more energy and open up new possibilities. We can design exchanges with partners who inspire and uplift us in their unique offerings, and who also genuinely want to see us flourish and expand in expressing our energy.
Making exchange into a creative act requires us to see beyond just money. Money is only one form of exchange, and our single focus on it is limiting.
If we think about value instead of money, value is effectively infinite, since it is a mind-created thing. As creator beings, we can generate value in the process of making exchange. With value, our imagination is the only limitation. Value can be generated in an endless variety of forms: love, support, appreciation, learning, esteem, referrals, testimonials, access to networks, and lots of other dimensions.
In multi-dimensional, creative exchanges, the value of the exchange is more than the sum of its separate parts. In the movement of energy exchange, creation is happening. Everyone participating feels like they are getting the best deal. There are no winners, no losers. One person’s abundance does not diminish another’s. We are all creating reality, together, and everyone is uplifted in that.
When we recognize we’re on the same team, serving higher purpose, abundance flows to each and every one, as part of the whole. We can give generously what feels easy and effortless to give, without calculating or withholding. We can gracefully and gratefully receive everything we need and more.
Maybe we can exchange for the sake of enlivening and creating, instead of extracting and consuming. Maybe?