Today, I think there is no retirement. For many people working, there will be no pension and no multimillion-dollar 401k and likely no Social Security. There is no follow the right path by working at any cost and be rewarded in 50 years for being docile through the process.

We are told to diligently save into 401ks and IRAs that represent $44 trillion in our economy. But much of that capital is invested into prescribed portfolios that undermine a livable future: war, surveillance, extractive industries that break the systems we will need as we age such as healthcare, food, and transit.

The LIFT Economy MBA’s sixth course talks about Personal Life Design. Where we put our money can reflect our values, but only if we understand the choices we can make.

The money we invest into retirement is not out of our control. The choices we make as consumers are not out of our control. And the ways we find security are not out of our control.

Start Here

The course introduced a couple frameworks: the life wheel, Ikigai’s overlapping circles of meaning and skill and need and vocation. These are useful starting structures. But the point that the facilitators keep returning to is that only you can be who you are. There may be no set of shapes for that.

The journal prompt for this session is another potent jumping off point: What is different in the world because I have lived my purpose?

I thought that was a great framing. What is life design but the fulfillment of purpose, of mattering, of self-love?

The Hierarchy of Consumption

In the course, we explored a “Hierarchy of Consumption,” not a strict set of rules but a set of questions to ask before purchasing something new.

The hierarchy is useful. It makes you challenge manufactured demand and support regenerative practices. But the hierarchy assumes you have the luxury of preferences to begin with.

The Hierarchy of Agency

There’s a tension inherent to the Hierarchy of Consumption’s principle of trying to go without.

For much of my life, simplicity was not a choice. If you don’t have a lot of power to make your own decisions, whether due to low income, household norms, abuse or other circumstances, it is rational to not develop preferences. If you can’t have something anyway, wanting it only creates pain.

You don’t eat what you like but what you can get. You ride the bus and transfer a few times and get to work late. You stretch and forego hygiene products past the point of hygiene. Your wants are extravagances.

This is a form of self-erasure. When we eliminate our preferences to save money, we are slowly eroding our ability to know who we are.

Life design, I am learning, requires the opposite.

Every person deserves to have preferences and to be able to express them. Not because preferences are always satisfiable, but because they’re how you know who you are. And knowing who you are is what makes life design something other than filling out a worksheet. It’s what makes your 401k investment choices, or your cooperative membership, or your decision about where to put your time and energy, an expression of your values.

Your Mask First

One of the most grounding moments in this session came from a breakout session share by a student named Vanessa, who works primarily with Black women in her community. She said:

To live a life helping others requires an abundant mindset, being able to say, “I have enough to contribute, I have enough to rest, and I am capable of self-regeneration.” Giving comes from a sense of wholeness, and you must do what you can to get to that personal wholeness.

Agricultural Time

The session included several case stories that share a quality of patience that doesn’t fit into quarterly returns or five-year plans:

They operate on something like agricultural time: the pace of something planted, tended, and harvested across seasons you can’t always predict.

This is different from geological time, which is transformation so slow it exceeds a human life. Agricultural time is human. It requires that you show up regularly, that you adjust to conditions, that you wait without certainty but you know you will see if something will grow.

Stay Here

Sharing is the most potent investment in community that this course points toward. A lending library. An open-source curriculum. A physical space where people can feel like they are home. Teaching as a form of giving. Making things easier for more people to enter and care about a practice.

The Next Economy being built here with cooperatives, lending libraries, time banks, community-owned solar, bioregional food systems, community spaces like Taabir, runs on agricultural time. It does not happen immediately. It requires us to wait, and to stay.

And none of it works if we don’t first know why we’re here, what we actually want, and what it would mean for the world to be different because we lived into that. Be willing to be yourself, and be willing to matter.

The Next 5 Principles:

In Part 1, we examined the initial shift toward a needs-based economy as guided to us by the LIFT Economy MBA. To complete this transition, we must move beyond the age of resource conflict by adopting five additional principles that transform our physical production, our movements, and our internal consciousness.

6. Open Source and Regionally Replicate

7. Transparent

8. Regenerative Operations

9. Supports Movement Building for Systems Change

10. Supports Personal Growth and Development

The Next 5 Principles: Part 2

6. Open Source and Regionally Replicate

The Context: Property and ownership typically emerge out of a paradigm of scarcity. In the “Business as Usual” model, intellectual property (IP) is used to gatekeep solutions. We must understand why IP can be toxic to beneficial impact outcomes; it creates a tension where ideas are either locked away or hijacked by the exploitation economy.

The Vision: Open Source Economics extends the software model to all goods and services. By opening access to technology, we enable a system based on the integration of natural, social, and industrial ecologies.

• The Scaling Question: When progress feels too slow, how do we scale? The Next Economy chooses a federated model—think of one Walmart vs. a federated set of thousands of small-scale general store mercantiles.

• Case Studies: Open Source Ecology (OSE) creates the Global Village Construction Set to distribute raw productive power. We see this “scaling via federation” in groups like Transition Towns and Agrarian Trust.

7. Transparent

The Context: Transparency is the foundation of trust. It moves us away from isolated silos toward interdisciplinary, synergistic systems thinking. It is the bridge between the enterprise, its staff, and its customers.

The Vision: This involves Open Book Management and Co-budgeting. When financials are a “commons,” you build a brand community rooted in radical honesty.

• Trust as Infrastructure: Transparency leads to engagement. Enterprises like Zingerman’s and Enspiral use openness to prove they are creating collective wealth instead of private extraction.

8. Regenerative Operations

The Context: Our paradigms inform where we sit on the spectrum of “degenerative” to “regenerative.” We must move from “less bad” (sustainability) to “actively beneficial” (regeneration).

The Vision: This means looking at the entire supply chain to see how material goods can actually restore land and people. It is a “Soil to Soil” approach.

• Climate Beneficial Models: Fibershed creates “climate beneficial” garments, while firms like New Frameworks design buildings that sequester carbon in their walls.

• Closing the Loop: From forest management to SOIL Haiti, these models prove that human needs can be met through methods that replace harmful systems with life-giving ones.

9. Supports Movement Building for Systems Change

The Context: In the current economy, businesses often lobby against regulation. In the Next Economy, enterprises federate to support transformational movements.

The Vision: Organizations must see themselves as part of a larger social movement seeking to remove the structural and political constraints that limit collective liberation.

Cap-Haitien’s historic Cathedral in the city center, photo taken in September 2025. credit SOIL HAITI

10. Supports Personal Growth and Development

The Context: A workplace can be a “Deliberately Developmental Organization” (DDO)—a place to produce goods and a place for personal transformation.

The Vision: We are human beings, and must be honored as so as we become change agents in their families and communities. The workplace becomes a vessel for healing and evolution.

• Case Studies: Organizations like Soul Fire Farm demonstrate how to support people in actualizing roles core to their identity.

Key References & Resources

• Open Source: Linux Foundation | Global Village Construction Set

• Federated Models: Three Stone Hearth | Evergreen Cooperatives | Agrarian Trust

• Transparency & Trust: Zingerman’s Community | Patagonia Transparency | Fairphone

• Regenerative Design: New Frameworks | Massey Burke | Ecotrust Forest Management

• Systems Change: Savanna Institute

• Personal Development: The SOZE Agency

Toward inclusive, democratic, and local ecosystems

This article continues our exploration of economic concepts and strategies for transition, drawing from the insights of the LIFT Economy course.

Modern commerce is dominated by monopolies and extractive giants like Nestlé, where 90% of transactions serve exploitative industries rather than basic needs. By applying the 5 Major Principles of the Next Economy, we can distinguish true solidarity from corporate greenwashing. While brands like Dropps or Mrs. Meyer’s focus on eco-marketing, they lack the Inclusive Ownership and Democratic Culture found in models like Equal Exchange, Boston Ujima, and CERO.

This overview will discuss the following:

• The Problem of “Need”: Moving away from a 90% exploitative economy.

• The 5 Major Principles: Defining the shift toward inclusive, democratic, and local ecosystems.

• Case Studies in Solidarity:

  • Cleaning: The limits of mission-driven startups.

  • Coffee: Global multinationals vs. worker-owned co-ops.

  • Waste: Reclaiming city needs from “Big Waste” monopolies.

• Closing: Reclaiming our cash and our power.

What is a need?

In the last month, after my rent went up, I realized that if I didn’t cut my spending, I’d be packing my books into a box.

I stopped eating out. I cut out my coffee shop visits. I stopped visiting the neighborhood Marshall’s and instead talked to those same old ladies on my block instead of the demonic checkout line.

This came around the same time that we were studying needs-based economies in the MBA I’m taking. Here’s a recap of that lesson.

We need to be discerning about what is actually a need. Right now, most transactions aren’t revolving around basic needs; they are simply feeding exploitative industries who don’t give two shits about us.

The 5 Major Principles

Let’s look at the five major principles that can help guide us in understanding the companies that are full of it, and the ones that are actually trying to imagine a post-capitalistic society.

A core pillar of the Next Economy involves shifting toward need-oriented, basic goods and services, which moves the focus away from exploitation and toward what people actually require to live.

This transition requires a commitment to inclusive ownership, breaking the traditional link where economic rights automatically dictate power and governance. While exclusive models allow a few to have more, inclusive ownership encourages broader participation so that everyone is okay; however, employers face the challenge of convincing investors of its value. Despite these hurdles, a for-profit lens reveals that inclusive ownership is a powerful tool for retaining talent and avoiding the expensive headache of losing staff.

Establishing an equitable and democratic culture is essential, as seen in the case of Boston Ujima, which raised a 5 million dollar investment fund through a democratic process. Their “flipped model” utilizes a 50 dollar minimum investment to ensure that those at the entry level receive the highest democratic return.

These enterprises support local economy ecosystems by building non-extractive supply chains that stabilize producer economies globally.

Finally, education is embedded into the good or service, ensuring that the business does not just sell a product, but actively educates consumers on economic justice and alternative trade systems.

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Company Case Studies

Part of our assignment for the class was identifying a few businesses we rely on and measuring how they stack up according to these principles. I focussed on three major needs:

1. Cleaning products (personal need)

2. Coffee (spiritual need)

3. Composting/garbage collection (city need)

Cleaning products: Mrs. Meyers vs. Dropps

Although they sell different products and serve different needs, I found it interesting that I have an assumption about Dropps’ commitment to the solidarity economy. But their ownership by VC and hierarchical structure, as well as their reliance on global supply chains, illuminates the ongoing “greenwashing” epidemic in the current late-stage capitalistic system.

Instant Coffee: Equal Exchange vs Nescafé

Nescafé

Yes, Nescafé maintains its accent mark. One could argue its commitment to the Spanish language. Brand ambassadors, these guys.

But Nescafé’s NOs across the board appear as no surprise. They’re a hot mess. Their parent company, Nestlé, was featured in a golden article about the 56 companies responsible for half of the world’s pollution. On top of that, they are constantly being hit with lawsuits about their usage of child labor. Ouch.

Equal Exchange

On the other hand, check out Equal Exchange’s vibe.

Plus, their coffee tastes like heaven’s brew.

Composting/garbage collection (city need): Waste Management vs CERO

Waste Management, Inc.

Now let’s look at a larger scale societal need. Garbage collection, sanitation, and composting.

I recently learned about the insane garbage collection monopoly via Texas-based Waste Management (WM). Its profit maximization is so reliable that homeboy Gates invested in WM recently.

Check out this report: “How Waste Monopolies are Choking Environmental Solutions, and What We Can Do About It” by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance:

In the mid-20th century, the waste industry was at its most decentralized. Tens of thousands of firms serviced many areas of the country. Yet by the late 1990s, Waste Management Inc. (WMI) had acquired 3,000 small family owned haulers.2 Today, WMI has 437 subsidiaries and controls 38 percent of the waste industry.3 The company will soon acquire the fourth largest solid waste company, Advanced Disposal, leaving only four very large publicly traded companies to dominate the waste sector…

Big Waste dominates every aspect of solid waste and recycling practice and policy. The top four consolidated companies earn $30 billion of the $70 billion economic sector.

They go further to describe the landfill monopoly (riveting, I know):

Big Waste companies own or control 75% of the permitted landfill capacity in major metropolitan areas and control an estimated 50% of the national hauling market, with even higher levels of domination in certain regional markets.4 One of the key ways vertically integrated waste firms have solidified control is through landfill ownership. It gives them a competitive edge in bidding for collection and hauling contracts against companies that have to pay disposal fees to landfills. To secure that advantage, companies have strived to maximize the percentage of the waste they collect to deposit in their own landfills.

This economy invests in trash! Talk about an economy of needs.

Ok, enough bad news.

CERO

Here’s an example of a coop that brings joy to the world.

CERO is a commercial composting company based out of Dorchester, MA. Providing compost pickup and diversion services for a wide range of commercial clients in the metro Boston area, we transport compost to local farms where it is returned to the soil and then used to support the local agricultural economy. Our mission is simple: do the right thing for the environment while empowering everyone in our diverse community to engage in healing our broken food loop.

Closing Thoughts

Mission-driven branding does not guarantee structural solidarit— which can be assessed through these five principles as a start. This was quite a depressing deep-dive. It’s important to know where your hard earned cash is going. Plus, it’s always fun to trash mega-corporations (puns intended) and reflect on what I actually need and other ways to find those goods and services without worshipping companies that get to receive treatment as human beings. [See: Citizens United and recent attempts to overturn it].

From staying home, focusing on what I have, and hearing this tik-tok baddie on repeat, I have saved hundreds of dollars and many minutes of small-talk with baristas who hate me.

I also feel better not buying so much shit I don’t need.

happy new year, y’all.

OM

thank you gamma for the slides, thank you me for the homemade pancakes, thank you compost garden downstairs whose volunteers never miss a saturday.

We are excited to finally launch The Crossing, a place where we will be sharing our learnings from the LIFT Economy MBA, as well as our experiences in crafting a self-directed nonprofit organization: TAABIR, a post-capitalistic vision for Dallas, Texas, Wichita Land, Old Mexico, built by Black and Brown people, by poor white folks, by migrants and by one-too-many corporate sponsors.

TAABIR is building an ecosystem for the people of Dallas. It acts as 1) a resource center for vocational training, cooperative business, and the solidarity economy, 2) a co-working space for member organizations and businesses, and 3) a community space for those in need.

Interested in learning more? Email us at taabirusa@gmail.com or DM us here on substack.

Yeah, it’s not easy.

But with the right team (and budget), anything is possible— even bringing the solidarity economy to the suburban chokehold of Dallas, Texas! More than that, we hope to re-invigorate the community-based economy that raised us here in Dallas.

We envision more for Dallas. Here is our effort in creating the world we wish to see.

NOTE: the first three articles in our blog were written by a guest writer from the Origin of Matter, the original home. We moved!

Digging deep

Today, we begin a new journey into the grounding into the post-capitalistic economy.

Today, all members of our collective begin the LIFT Economy MBA program:

The Next Economy MBA is a nine month learning experience for entrepreneurs and aspiring entrepreneurs who want to learn key business fundamentals (e.g., vision, culture, strategy, and operations) from an equitable, inclusive, and regenerative perspective.

We won’t get MBA certification, because duh, the current MBA curriculum depends on an extractive economic model, which we are committed to destroying.

So, the purpose goes beyond professional development, as it should. We are dedicated to eradicating this disease of capitalism and developing medicines that target the root of the problems.

Does “nature” include humans?

One of the fundamental tenants of the post-capitalistic movement is our connection to the natural world. We know that humans are happier, and overall outcomes for quality of life are improved when we maintain this bond. This bond requires some reflection:

We must hold accountability for our actions and those of our ancestors and societies, and work every day through personal daily action and collective advocacy against companies benefiting off of the murder and destruction of our home.

At the same time, in this post-capitalistic fight for humanity to “do better,” I wonder if we have a tendency to separate ourselves from our connection to nature; that we must conserve, fix, resolve each problem we face as Nature.

However, we cannot assume a position of superiority over the non-human world, that we know what is best for it. Because as a friend recently reminded me: we are nature. And we must constantly be seeking inward and attempting to listen to and learn from non-human experiences.

With that being said, let us now turn into some animals.

Bees

I imagine us as bees pollinating the flowers that produce the honey that will feed all people and allow all to experience spiritual and emotional alignment with ourselves and each other.

Spiders

Or, you can imagine us as spiders. Some build webs, some build sacs. The web ones are the goodie kids who know about metrics and alternatives to the GDP. The sac ones are on the prowl, not really interested in building webs but instead move as predators and prey, fighters and workers, anarchists who scheme through the night to prepare to rest and enjoy life during the day.

On another note, spiders are often considered bioindicators because their presence and diversity reflect the health of an ecosystem. A healthy population of yellow sac spiders can indicate a balanced environment free from excessive pollution and pesticides. Yay.

We are nature, and now we evolve.

I’m sure there are more. I’m sure there are more animals and fungi and rocks I could compare myself to. Don’t get me started on the dynamism in the living bodies that modern science identifies as “dead”).

As long as we are nature, we must be willing and able to evolve. We will later do a deep-dive on Darwinism (stay tuned), but for now, I think both post-modern and traditional scientists can agree that species change over time, either in lines, cycles, curves, or spirals.

We must evolve from the globalization and spread of this capitalistic, mass-producing, and rapidly consuming system that has maintained the following conditions specifically affecting our conditions as human beings (these do not include impacts on non-human natural world):

• Despite gains since 2015, 1 in 4 – or 2.1 billion people globally – still lack access to safely managed drinking water*, including 106 million who drink directly from untreated surface sources.

• 3.4 billion people still lack safely managed sanitation, including 354 million who practice open defecation.

• 1.7 billion people still lack basic hygiene services at home, including 611 million without access to any facilities.

• People in least developed countries are more than twice as likely as people in other countries to lack basic drinking water and sanitation services, and more than three times as likely to lack basic hygiene.

• In fragile contexts**, safely managed drinking water coverage is 38 percentage points lower than in other countries, highlighting stark inequalities.

• While there have been improvements for people living in rural areas, they still lag behind. Safely managed drinking water coverage rose from 50 per cent to 60 per cent between 2015 and 2024, and basic hygiene coverage from 52 per cent to 71 per cent. In contrast, drinking water and hygiene coverage in urban areas has stagnated.

• Data from 70 countries show that while most women and adolescent girls have menstrual materials and a private place to change, many lack sufficient materials to change as often as needed.

• Adolescent girls aged 15–19 are less likely than adult women to participate in activities during menstruation, such as school, work and social pastimes.

• In most countries with available data, women and girls are primarily responsible for water collection, with many in sub-Saharan Africa and Central and Southern Asia spending more than 30 minutes per day collecting water.

As someone who has witnessed this reality through stories about my own parents, as well as living in these types of communities, I am very much ready to become a worker-bee or yellow-sac spider in my desire for something better. Let’s just hope it doesn’t recreate capitalism or make it worse.

Game over (begins)

In the program I mentioned above, we will be diving deep into core principles of the current economy, and alternatives to them that can help people exchange goods and services without making the world a worse place. Including:

1. Need-oriented, basic goods and services

2. Diverse, equitable, and inclusive ownership

3. Equitable and democratic culture

4. Support of local economy ecosystem

5. Education embedded into the good or service

6. Open source and regionally replicable

7. Transparent

8. Regenerative operations

9. Supports movement building for broader systems change

10. Supports personal growth and development

signed,

OM; Taabir USA

Endnotes

References

https://www.lenalingua.com/post/the-lenape-s-sustainable-practices-and-their-relevance-today

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10902-019-00118-6

https://wearenature.org/

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adi9606

https://www.who.int/news/item/26-08-2025-1-in-4-people-globally-still-lack-access-to-safe-drinking-water---who--unicef

https://www.sciencealert.com/does-nature-include-humans-the-answer-may-surprise-you

https://www.planetnatural.com/sac-spider/

TAABIR is building an ecosystem for the people of Dallas. It acts as 1) a resource center for vocational training, cooperative business, and the solidarity economy, 2) a co-working space for member organizations and businesses, and 3) a community space for those in need.

Interested in learning more? Email us at taabirusa@gmail.com or DM us here on substack.