The Tangled Net #15: The Financialization of Everything
When all value becomes extractable
By Brian Stefan, LCSW
California Grief Center | The Grief Wave
🌊 TL;DR
We’re building a world where everything—friendships, homes, education, even our mental health—gets converted into financial value. “Social capital.” “Investment properties.” “Human capital development.” “The wellness market.” This isn’t just capitalism doing what capitalism does. It’s a psychological colonization that’s redefining what it means to be valuable as a human being.
We now know:
Financialization creates measurable psychological distress by commodifying human relationships
The same metrics that drive economic efficiency corrode social bonds and personal meaning
Cultural practices that resist monetization get systematically devalued and eliminated
Some communities are developing resistance strategies, but face enormous structural pressure
This is a grief rarely acknowledged because we lack words for what we’ve lost
The question isn’t whether financialization will continue—it already has reshaped human experience globally. The question is whether we can preserve any space where value exists outside extractable profit.
Facing the Extraction Together
Sarah refinanced her San Diego bungalow three times in five years. Not because she needed repairs or faced emergency expenses, but because financial advisors kept explaining how she was “leaving money on the table” by not extracting her home’s equity. The money funded sensible things: her daughter’s college tuition, a more reliable car, paying off credit cards.
The house her grandmother left her—the place where three generations gathered for Sunday dinners, where the kitchen still smelled faintly of cardamom from decades of baking—had become, in the vocabulary of financial planning, an “underperforming asset.”
When her brother suggested she was treating their inheritance like an ATM, Sarah felt genuinely confused. “It’s my equity,” she said. “Why shouldn’t I optimize it?”
The language had changed everything. What was once home had become real estate. What was once inheritance had become equity. What was once family legacy had become opportunity cost.
This linguistic shift—from use value to exchange value—represents one of the most profound psychological transformations of our age. And it’s happening everywhere, simultaneously, in every domain of human experience.
Part I: When Relationships Become Portfolios
The Rise of Social Capital
The term “social capital” entered mainstream discourse in the 1990s through the work of sociologist Robert Putnam. It described the networks, norms, and trust that enable cooperation within communities. The concept was meant to highlight how relationships create collective value beyond economic transactions.
But something changed in translation. What began as an academic framework for understanding community resilience became a personal optimization strategy. By the 2010s, LinkedIn wasn’t a professional directory—it was a platform for “building your network” and “leveraging connections.” Friendships became categorized by their instrumental value: “This person could help me get a job.” “That connection might introduce me to investors.”
Research from the University of Toronto in 2019 found that people who view relationships through a “social capital” frame report lower relationship satisfaction and higher loneliness—even when they have large networks. The instrumentalization of friendship corrodes the very thing that makes friendship valuable: the experience of being valued for yourself rather than what you can provide.
Romantic Relationships as Market Transactions
Dating apps haven’t just changed how people meet—they’ve transformed how people think about relationships. When romantic partners become profiles to be swiped, compared, and optimized, the very psychology of attachment shifts.
The “paradox of choice” research by psychologist Barry Schwartz demonstrated that excessive options lead to decision paralysis and chronic dissatisfaction. But dating apps don’t just offer choices—they train users to think in terms of better deals. There’s always another profile, another option, another possible match who might offer better compatibility, attractiveness, status, or earning potential.
This isn’t about whether apps are useful tools. It’s about how the interface shapes consciousness. When you evaluate humans using the same psychological mechanisms you use for selecting products on Amazon—comparing features, reading reviews, checking ratings—you’re training yourself to approach intimacy as consumption.
Studies from the Netherlands in 2022 found that heavy dating app users showed higher rates of “relational dysphoria”—chronic dissatisfaction with partners combined with difficulty forming lasting attachments. The market logic of optimization had colonized their capacity for commitment.
The Quantified Friendship
Fitness trackers don’t just count steps—they’ve created a framework where all activity becomes measurable, comparable, and optimizable. This logic has spread beyond physical health into social life itself.
Apps now track how often you contact friends, measure “interaction quality,” and provide metrics on relationship maintenance. Some even offer “friendship scores” that quantify how much effort you’re investing in various relationships, with recommendations for “improving underperforming connections.”
What gets lost in this quantification? The unmeasurable qualities that make relationships meaningful: the comfort of silence with an old friend, the knowledge that someone will show up in crisis even after months of not talking, the depth that develops through shared experience rather than consistent contact.
When friendship becomes a metric to optimize, people report feeling exhausted by relationships rather than nourished by them. The Harvard Study of Adult Development—one of the longest-running studies on human happiness—found that relationship quality matters far more than relationship quantity. But financial logic privileges what’s measurable, and depth resists quantification.
Part II: The Colonization of Identity
Education as Human Capital Development
Universities once claimed to educate “the whole person” or develop “citizens capable of critical thinking.” That language has largely disappeared, replaced by frank discussion of education as investment in human capital that should generate measurable returns.
Students now calculate expected lifetime earnings by major, optimize course selection for career outcomes, and view their education primarily through return-on-investment frameworks. A 2024 survey by the Lumina Foundation found that 73% of college students selected their major based primarily on earning potential rather than interest or calling.
This shift has measurable psychological effects. Research from Yale University in 2021 found that students who view education primarily as investment rather than exploration show higher rates of anxiety, lower creative output, and more difficulty finding work meaningful even when it pays well.
The irony: education pursued purely for financial optimization often produces worse financial outcomes. Passion, persistence, and creativity—qualities that drive genuine success—develop through engagement with work that feels meaningful, not from strategic calculation of market demand.
Mental Health as Wellness Market
The global wellness industry reached $1.8 trillion in 2024, according to the Global Wellness Institute. Mental health has become one of its fastest-growing sectors—meditation apps, online therapy platforms, self-optimization courses, productivity systems promising to “hack your psychology.”
This marketization isn’t simply about access to care. It transforms how people understand their own minds. Depression becomes something to be “managed” through purchased interventions. Anxiety becomes a “performance issue” requiring optimization. Suffering becomes a market opportunity.
Dr. Carl Walker’s research at Brighton University documented how wellness culture creates what he terms “responsibilization”—the belief that psychological distress results from individual failure to properly invest in mental health. If you’re depressed, you haven’t meditated enough, optimized your diet, or purchased the right therapeutic services.
This logic systematically erases structural causes of suffering. Poverty, discrimination, exploitation, and powerlessness become reframed as individual optimization problems. The solution to living in an unjust society becomes purchasing better coping mechanisms.
Meanwhile, practices that once supported mental health outside market logic—community support, religious ritual, family care, friendship—get devalued as “unprofessional” or “inefficient.” The professionalization and monetization of care has meant that increasingly, the only legitimate forms of support are those someone can profit from.
Identity as Brand
“Personal branding” has become a required skill for professional success. LinkedIn influencers post daily “authentic” content about their morning routines, career setbacks reframed as “learning opportunities,” and carefully curated vulnerability designed to maximize engagement. Instagram feeds become portfolios demonstrating lifestyle quality. Twitter threads showcase thought leadership. Every platform demands a different performance of the same monetizable self.
But the psychology of treating your identity as a brand—something to be marketed, differentiated, and monetized—creates what sociologist Erving Goffman called “identity strain.”
When you’re always performing your brand, which self is authentic? When you craft your image for market positioning, which thoughts and feelings are truly yours versus strategically performed? Research from the University of Amsterdam in 2020 found that people engaged in intensive personal branding show higher rates of identity confusion and lower integration between public and private selves.
Social media accelerates this process. The “influencer economy” means that ordinary people are now expected to monetize their personalities, relationships, and daily experiences. A vacation isn’t just a vacation—it’s content. A friendship isn’t just a friendship—it’s a collaboration opportunity. Your child’s birthday isn’t just a celebration—it’s brand-building material.
This creates what researchers call “mandatory authenticity.” You must constantly perform genuine emotion as content that generates engagement. The contradiction breaks people. Be authentic, but make it marketable. Be yourself, but optimize it for algorithms. Be real, but make it profitable.
Part III: The Housing Crisis as Psychological Crisis
When Homes Became Assets
The transformation of housing from use value to exchange value represents perhaps the clearest example of how financialization reshapes human life. In the 1970s, most homeowners in developed countries viewed houses primarily as places to live. By the 2020s, real estate had become the primary investment vehicle for middle-class wealth building.
This shift has been catastrophic for younger generations. Research from the Resolution Foundation in the UK found that millennials spend 30-40% more of their income on housing than their parents’ generation did, while homeownership rates have plummeted. In the US, homeownership among 25-34 year-olds dropped from 46% in 2000 to 37% in 2024.
But the psychological impact extends beyond those priced out of homeownership. When housing becomes primarily an investment, communities fracture. Homeowners oppose new construction that might affect property values. Neighbors become competitors in a zero-sum game where your wealth depends on excluding others. NIMBYism—opposition to nearby development—becomes rational economic behavior rather than selfish provincialism.
The Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute documented in 2023 how investment-focused housing markets create measurable increases in community anxiety and decreases in social cohesion. When your primary asset’s value depends on scarcity, you have financial incentive to oppose the very housing that would let your children, neighbors, and community members afford to live nearby.
The Extraction of Neighborhood
Short-term rental platforms transformed housing further—from investment to active income source. In Barcelona’s Barceloneta neighborhood, Rosa lived for forty years in the same apartment building, knowing every family, watching children grow, participating in the rhythms of community life. By 2019, eight of the twelve units in her building had become Airbnb listings. The family who ran the corner grocery for three decades closed when their rent tripled. The elderly couple next door sold to investors and moved to the suburbs.
Rosa still lives there, but as she told a researcher from McGill University: “I am a ghost in my own neighborhood.” The building’s shared courtyard, once filled with residents’ plants and children’s toys, now features Instagram-optimized decor that changes with each property manager. She no longer knows who’s in the elevator. There’s no one to water her plants when she visits her daughter. The accumulated knowledge of forty years—which shopkeepers give credit, which neighbors check on the elderly, where to find help in emergencies—became worthless when community became inventory.
A 2023 McGill study found that in neighborhoods where 10% or more of housing units become short-term rentals, residents report significant increases in “place detachment”—the feeling that their neighborhood no longer belongs to them.
This isn’t nostalgia or resistance to change. It’s recognition that financialization has consumed the neighborhood itself. Research from multiple Spanish cities that have restricted short-term rentals more aggressively than most found that neighborhoods lose specific psychological benefits when housing shifts from residential to transient use: the comfort of familiar faces, the development of mutual aid networks, the accumulation of shared history, the possibility of long-term neighborhood relationships.
These qualities can’t be monetized, so market logic treats them as valueless. But their absence creates measurable harm: increased loneliness, reduced social support, higher stress, decreased sense of belonging.
Part IV: What Resists Monetization Gets Eliminated
The Devaluation of Care Work
Care work—raising children, supporting aging parents, maintaining friendships, building community—creates enormous value that economic metrics systematically ignore. GDP counts paid childcare but not parental care. It counts nursing home fees but not family caregiving. It counts therapy sessions but not the friendship that prevents crisis.
This creates what economist Nancy Folbre calls “the invisibility of care.” Because care work generates no extractable profit, economic logic treats it as valueless—despite evidence that it’s foundational to human wellbeing.
The OECD estimates that unpaid care work, if valued at market rates, would constitute 35-50% of GDP in developed economies. Yet policy systematically ignores it, social status doesn’t recognize it, and financial logic treats it as economically irrational.
Women perform 75% of unpaid care work globally, according to the International Labour Organization. The devaluation of care thus becomes a gender issue: activities culturally associated with women become systematically erased from what counts as valuable contribution.
Research from the UK’s Women’s Budget Group in 2022 found that cuts to public services don’t just reduce government spending—they transfer costs to unpaid (mostly female) caregivers, whose increased labor remains invisible to economic metrics. Austerity becomes possible only because economics refuses to count care as real work.
The Elimination of Non-Productive Time
Financialization doesn’t just commodify activity—it delegitimizes inactivity. Time that generates no measurable value becomes suspect: rest, play, contemplation, wandering, daydreaming.
The “optimization culture” documented by sociologist Judy Wajcman means that even leisure must be productive: exercise tracked, meditation quantified, hobbies monetized, relaxation optimized for recovery. The concept of time genuinely free from productivity metrics has become nearly unintelligible.
Research on rest and creativity consistently shows that breakthrough insights emerge during unstructured time—walks without destination, conversations without agenda, periods of apparent idleness. But these practices can’t be monetized, so optimization logic eliminates them.
Studies from Stanford’s Stress and Health Center in 2023 found that constant productivity orientation correlates with higher burnout, reduced creativity, and paradoxically, lower actual productivity. The refusal to allow non-productive time undermines the very productivity it claims to maximize.
Traditional Practices Under Pressure
Cultural practices that resist commodification face systematic pressure to adapt or disappear. Religious rituals get shortened to fit busy schedules. Extended family gatherings become difficult to maintain when economic necessity scatters families geographically. Community festivals lose attendance because people work multiple jobs to afford financialized housing.
Anthropologist James Ferguson’s work in Zambia documented how economic pressure transforms social relationships. Practices of reciprocity and mutual aid—which function outside market logic—become untenable when everyone faces precarity. People want to help neighbors but can’t afford to. They value community but must prioritize paid work. Traditional obligations become burdens rather than sources of meaning.
This isn’t simply modernization. It’s the systematic elimination of alternatives to market relationships. When all security comes through paid work, when housing requires maximum income, when healthcare depends on employment, people lose the option of organizing life around anything other than monetizable activity.
Part V: The Psychological Costs
The Tyranny of Perpetual Comparison
Financialization turns everything into a commodity—which means everything becomes comparable. Your home’s value versus your neighbor’s. Your salary versus your college roommate’s. Your child’s achievements versus the metrics shared in parenting groups.
Research from the University of Warwick in 2018 found that relative income predicts life satisfaction more strongly than absolute income. But financialization exponentially increases comparison opportunities. Social media ensures you know about every vacation, purchase, and success in your extended network. Real estate websites let you see exactly what everyone paid for their homes. Salary transparency websites quantify your relative professional value.
Perpetual comparison creates what psychologists call “hedonic treadmill acceleration”—the endless chase for more because you’re always aware of who has more than you. Studies show this correlates with higher anxiety, lower life satisfaction, and chronic feelings of inadequacy.
The Erosion of Intrinsic Motivation
When activities get monetized, research consistently shows that intrinsic motivation declines. This is the “overjustification effect”: providing external rewards for previously unrewarded activity reduces the behavior’s internal appeal.
Studies by psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan found that paying children for reading reduces their interest in reading. Compensating artists for creative work that was previously done for love changes how they approach creativity. Monetizing hobbies often transforms them from sources of joy to sources of stress.
Financialization multiplies this effect across all domains. The side hustle economy means hobbies become business opportunities. The influencer economy means social life becomes content creation. The optimization mindset means even rest must generate measurable recovery benefits.
The result: people report increasing difficulty identifying what they actually enjoy when stripped of instrumental purpose. The question “what would you do if money were no object” becomes unanswerable because financial logic has colonized imagination itself.
Precarity as Control
Perhaps financialization’s deepest psychological impact is the perpetual insecurity it creates. When housing is investment, prices must always rise—meaning affordability requires ever-increasing debt. When education is human capital investment, you must constantly upskill to maintain value. When employment is contingent, you can never fully relax into security.
This produces what sociologist Guy Standing calls “the precariat”—people whose lives are defined by economic insecurity despite often having formal employment and education. Research from the London School of Economics in 2021 found that precarity creates specific psychological profiles: hypervigilance about economic threats, difficulty planning long-term, reduced willingness to take risks, and chronic low-grade anxiety.
Critically, precarity functions as social control. People afraid of losing housing, healthcare, or employment are less likely to protest working conditions, demand systemic change, or organize collectively. Financial vulnerability becomes a mechanism for political pacification.
Part VI: Resistance and Alternatives
Despite enormous structural pressure, and perhaps because the psychological costs have become unbearable for so many, people are building alternatives. Not utopian fantasies, but functioning experiments in organizing value differently. These efforts face real obstacles and remain fragile, but they demonstrate that other ways of living are possible—not easy, not scalable, but possible.
The Solidarity Economy in Practice
In Jackson, Mississippi, Cooperation Jackson operates a network of worker-owned cooperatives, community land trusts, and mutual aid programs. Member-owners make collective decisions about their workplaces, share profits equitably, and reinvest surplus into community development rather than extracting it for distant shareholders.
The cooperative members report something unexpected: not just better pay or working conditions, but a fundamental shift in how work feels. Decision-making meetings can be frustrating and slow, but workers describe feeling genuinely invested in outcomes rather than simply complying with directives. Profits shared collectively create different incentives than individual bonuses—people help struggling colleagues rather than competing with them.
Research from the Solidarity Economy Association documents thousands of such projects globally. Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) programs create relationships between farmers and eaters that transcend pure market exchange—members share both abundance and scarcity, supporting farmers through difficult seasons. Time banks allow people to exchange skills without money, valuing all labor equally regardless of market rates. Tool libraries and maker spaces enable shared access to resources, building community through cooperation rather than individual ownership.
Studies from the University of Wisconsin in 2023 found that participants in solidarity economy projects report higher life satisfaction, stronger social connections, and greater sense of agency than demographically similar people engaged purely in market relationships.
But the limits are real. Cooperation Jackson serves thousands of members—not millions. It operates in one of America’s poorest cities, where low real estate costs make community land trusts feasible. When wealthier developers target the same neighborhoods, the cooperative lacks capital to compete. Its success depends on continued community solidarity in the face of enormous pressure to sell out, cash in, optimize.
The challenge: these alternatives remain marginal, vulnerable to economic pressure, and difficult to scale without losing the qualities that make them valuable.
Reconceiving Growth Itself
An international movement advocates for “degrowth”—deliberately reducing economic activity in wealthy nations to enable ecological sustainability and human flourishing. This isn’t anti-growth sentiment. It’s recognition that beyond roughly $30,000 GDP per capita, additional economic growth doesn’t increase wellbeing and often actively harms it through environmental destruction, time poverty, and commodification of relationships.
Degrowth means: reducing working hours while maintaining living standards through redistribution. Limiting advertising and planned obsolescence. Building public services that provide security outside market relationships. Valuing activities by their contribution to flourishing rather than their generation of profit.
Research from multiple European regions implementing reduced work weeks in 2024 found that areas with strong public services and limits on commercial advertising show higher wellbeing scores despite lower GDP per capita than comparable regions pursuing growth.
The psychological appeal: degrowth offers permission to stop optimizing, to value activities by their intrinsic qualities rather than monetizable outcomes, to organize life around what actually makes people happy rather than what generates extractable profit.
The obstacle: degrowth requires coordinated political action against powerful interests, and challenges assumptions so fundamental that alternatives seem impossible to imagine. It’s easier to envision the end of the world than the end of quarterly growth targets.
Personal Strategies, Structural Limits
Some people attempt individual resistance: refusing to view homes as investments, maintaining friendships without instrumental purpose, pursuing work for meaning rather than optimization.
These strategies offer psychological protection but face severe limits. You can refuse to treat your home as an asset, but you still need housing in a market where prices reflect investment logic. You can prioritize meaningful work over salary, but you still need income sufficient for financialized necessities. You can resist personal branding, but you face professional disadvantages in doing so.
Research from the University of California in 2022 found that people attempting to “opt out” of financialization while remaining within capitalist economies report high stress from constant negotiation between personal values and economic necessity. The psychological burden of resistance often falls on individuals lacking power to change structures.
Sustainable alternatives require collective action, but precarity and time scarcity make organizing difficult. This is by design: financialization isolates people, creating conditions where collective resistance becomes nearly impossible while individual resistance remains inadequate.
The truth is harder than either pure optimism or pure despair: change is possible but not inevitable, alternatives exist but remain fragile, and the outcome depends on choices not yet made by millions of people navigating impossible circumstances.
Closing: What Cannot Be Priced
Years after the last refinancing, Sarah stood in her grandmother’s kitchen trying to remember what the room had been. Not the physical space—that remained mostly unchanged. But the feeling of it.
She remembered her grandmother standing at the stove every Sunday morning, making the cardamom bread whose scent once filled the house. She remembered her grandfather at the table reading the paper, occasionally reading passages aloud for commentary. She remembered cousins doing homework while adults talked in the next room, the comfortable overlap of generations sharing space without schedule or agenda.
But she couldn’t access what that had felt like. The experience of being in a place that was simply home, not an asset with appreciated value. The experience of time together that generated no measurable output, required no productivity, existed purely because people wanted to be together.
The kitchen looked the same. But financialization had colonized even her memory, making it impossible to recall an experience of value that existed outside extraction.
She cried, and when her daughter asked why, Sarah couldn’t explain. How could she describe mourning something her daughter had never known existed?
Late at night, I sometimes wonder what my grandmother would make of the world we’re building. She understood value in ways that resist translation into market logic. A garden wasn’t an “investment in property value”—it was beauty, sustenance, connection to earth. Time with family wasn’t “building social capital”—it was love. Her work as a seamstress wasn’t “human capital”—it was craft, skill, service.
I can’t romanticize her world. She faced hardships I’ve been spared, limitations I’ve never known, and injustices that demanded change. But she also possessed something we’ve lost: the ability to recognize value that exists outside financial extraction.
The financialization of everything isn’t just an economic transformation. It’s an epistemological one—a change in how we know what matters, how we recognize worth, how we understand human purpose.
We’re told this is efficiency, optimization, rational use of resources. But the evidence suggests otherwise. By every measure that matters—happiness, health, connection, creativity, community—financialization creates worse outcomes for most people while concentrating wealth and power among fewer.
The net we’re pulling from the deep reads like a balance sheet. Every knot now asks: “What’s the return on investment?” Every strand demands: “How can this be monetized?” Every empty space becomes: “Untapped market opportunity.”
But some things still resist this logic. The comfort of silence with an old friend. The satisfaction of work done well regardless of compensation. The peace of time genuinely your own. The joy of giving without calculating return. The experience of being valued for yourself rather than your extractable worth.
These experiences remain, but they’re increasingly difficult to access, defend, or even articulate. We lack language for value that exists outside profit. We struggle to justify time that generates no measurable return. We feel almost guilty for choosing meaning over optimization.
This is a grief rarely acknowledged because we lack words for what we’ve lost. How do you mourn the transformation of relationships into transactions, of time into resource, of selves into brands? How do you grieve for something you can barely remember experiencing?
Perhaps the task before us is simpler than we imagine: remember that we are not assets. Our homes are not investment vehicles. Our relationships are not portfolios. Our children are not human capital. Our time is not simply resource to be maximized.
We are human beings with intrinsic worth that exists prior to and independent of our capacity to generate profit for someone else’s balance sheet.
The question isn’t whether we can fully escape financialization—its structural power is too great. The question is whether we can preserve spaces, practices, and ways of thinking where value exists for reasons other than extraction.
Can we be together without calculating social capital? Can we create without monetizing creativity? Can we rest without optimizing recovery? Can we love without measuring return on emotional investment?
Can we remember, even briefly, even partially, what it means to be valuable simply because we exist?
The net is tangled with price tags and invoices. But we wove it ourselves, knot by knot, transaction by transaction, optimization by optimization. And what we’ve woven, perhaps we can learn to weave differently.
Not perfectly. Not completely. Not without loss or compromise or entanglement in systems we’d rather escape.
But maybe we can preserve small spaces where value exists for its own sake. Where a kitchen is just a kitchen, warm with cardamom and conversation. Where time together generates nothing but the experience of being together. Where worth doesn’t require justification through profit.
Maybe we start here: by noticing what gets lost when everything becomes extractable. By feeling, even if we can’t yet change, the weight of living in a world where all value must justify itself in financial terms.
By remembering that some things—the most important things—cannot and should not be priced.
✨ The next edition of The Tangled Net arrives next week.
May you move through this week remembering that your value exists independent of your productivity, your relationships transcend their instrumental uses, and some of the most important things in life resist quantification entirely.
💛 If your own net feels too heavy to hold alone, we’re here.
The California Grief Center offers support for individuals, couples, families, and organizations across California and virtually nationwide.
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