Money Alienation

The estrangement from money itself: not just from lack of it, but from the entire logic of exchange, value, and debt. Money alienation is the sense that money no longer represents anything real—it’s numbers on a screen, created by banks, manipulated by algorithms, and yet it determines whether you eat or starve. You work for it, you need it, but you cannot understand its flow, its inflation, its creation. Money alienates you from the value of your labor, from the goods you buy, from the society that runs on this abstract fiction. It’s the vertigo of living under a system no one controls but everyone obeys.

Example: “His paycheck arrived via direct deposit, and he spent it on groceries via card—money alienation, never seeing or touching the abstract numbers that owned his life.”

Money Alienation by Abzugal Nammugal Enkigal April 15, 2026