The Ego Economy: Why the Freedom Economy Is Passing You By

 
photo by new wave rh
[Note: The Growing Life will become Finance Your Freedom.  Please go there for the full version of the article, or to leave a comment (I'd love to hear your thoughts on this piece)].

I should start out by telling you that . . .

I’m Trying to Practice My Ranting Skillz

I suck at ranting. I enjoy reading rants, but I’ve never been very good at writing them. But apparently the rant genre is a sub-genre of the blog genre, and I need to master this shit if I ever want to displace Dooce on technorati.

Cool… I’ll Start With My Rant Right Now

Almost any resource can be a currency governed my economic forces—and the laws of supply and demand. (I probably read that in a fancy book somewhere. Please punch me in the face if I ever write another high falutin’ sentence like that again).

Anyway, money is a currency or whatever. Yeah, we know that.

But so is ego: it is traded, bartered for, bought, sold, etc. I see people participating in the ego economy all the time: new business owners waste thousands of dollars on putting big pictures of themselves on billboards. Social media people and others in the web 2.0 space sacrifice entire days of vacation and family time so they can be mini-internet famous for 1,000 people and make an extra $100/month. And people get into debt buying shit they don’t need trying to impress others or get laid.

So before the internet, money was (often) the primary means by which people participated in the ego economy; the money economy fed into the ego economy. Maybe it’s still this way.

But social media, the internet, and web 2.0 have given people a whole new venue for being vein and wasting their resources in exchange for ego gratification. Now you can broadcast a vlog to 500 people, become a power user on StumbleUpon, or Reddit, or Digg, and start a blog and try to get 1000s of subscribers. You can start and lead your own forum or newsgroup. You can be the leader of your own fiefdom of 400.

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