Cogs or Connectors

This morning, I saw a post from an old friend. He’s selling his million-dollar home and upgrading to another million-dollar home twenty minutes away. Casual, right? Just another post in the middle of an economy where most of us are cobbling together rent—or figuring out where to park our van for the night.

It got me thinking—not just about him, but about all of us. About how easy it is to climb a ladder and forget who held it steady for you. About how we’ve normalized this strange, tone-deaf dance where we share vacation photos while skipping past the GoFundMes in our feeds. We say things like, “I’m so busy,” when what we mean is, “I don’t have time for you.” And all of this happens while the world keeps moving the goalposts for everyone except the people who already won the game.

The truth is, I don’t want a million-dollar home. Sure, no one wants to be homeless—believe me, I appreciate every roof I get to have over my head. But the kind of home my friend has? That’s not peace; that’s a commitment in the dark. It’s a gamble with factors none of us can fully control—illness, gas prices, recessions, wars. It’s chasing a fragile dream that demands endless work, constant stress, and mild enjoyment of the people you actually care about, if you’re lucky.

There’s something really nice about not doing what you don’t have to do. I’ve learned that. When the world stops convincing you to sacrifice everything for the next thing, you can just exist. You can breathe. You can connect. You can see people not as tools or stepping stones but as human beings who matter simply because they are.

But society doesn’t want that for us. The systems we live in were built to keep us working, consuming, and producing—not living. Billionaires and governments have figured out how to move the goalposts faster than we can run. And most of us are running on fumes, anyway.

I’ve been homeless for a year now, and nothing makes these systems more obvious than losing everything. When you’re homeless, you stop being a person in the eyes of the world. You become a statistic, a resource, something to exploit. Homelessness isn’t a crisis to be solved; it’s a pipeline to the prison system, to fines and fees that fill someone else’s pockets.

But even those of us who aren’t homeless are trapped. The friend upgrading his million-dollar home? He’s not free, either. His ladder might be taller, his rungs might be shinier, but he’s still climbing toward a goal he didn’t set, dictated by systems that don’t care about him. And the cost of all this climbing? It’s us. It’s our relationships, our health, our humanity.

I’ve been on both sides of this. I’ve been the person who sacrificed connection to get ahead. I’ve been the person too busy to care, too focused on the next thing to stop and see who was holding me up. And I’ve been the person who had nothing to give, watching as people quietly disappeared because I was no longer useful to them.

But I don’t live like that anymore. Stripped of everything, I’ve found something better: clarity. The people in my life now? They’re here for me, not for what I can do for them. And that’s worth more than any house, any job, any ladder.

So now I’m asking: How do we make it fair? How do we stop treating people as tools, as cogs in systems built by people who don’t care about us? How do we stop letting the world use us?

And maybe even harder: Who in your life do you treat as a person, and who do you treat as a tool? And when was the last time you treated yourself as more than just a cog in the machine?

We deserve better. Not because billionaires say so, but because we exist. We are miraculous, complicated, brilliant beings, and we are worth everything. It’s time to stop climbing, stop hoarding, stop moving the goalposts. It’s time to make it fair. Because a life where we can breathe, connect, and just be? That’s worth more than any mansion ever will be.