Why Is Everything So Expensive?

Today, I'd like to talk with you about a feeling that seems to follow a lot of people around now from the supermarket to the petrol pump, the moment a rent renewal lands in the inbox. It's the feeling that everything costs more than it should and it keeps costing more than it should. And no matter how the numbers are explained to you, something about it feels less like a financial event and more like being robbed. And I'd like to start with what happens underneath all of that because what happens underneath is where the real injury lives.

And it's almost never the part that gets talked about. None of us are standing in a shop doing a calculation about purchasing power. What we're feeling is something closer to insult because you did the things and you worked the hours and you took the shifts. Maybe you took a promotion that you weren't sure that you wanted and you watched the reward for all of it, get a little bit thinner in your hands, even as the effort got heavier.

And there's a very bitter flavor to that. It's the sense that the deal has been altered without your consent, that you're holding up your end and somebody somewhere has stopped holding up. There is. And that's the feeling that's underneath. Why is everything so expensive now? And it isn't really a question about prices. It's the sensation of covenant being broken in slow motion, eroded gradually and also not being able to find anyone to hold accountable for it.

Now, the conversation you hear about this is almost entirely an economic conversation. And most of it isn't because they talk about inflation and supply chains and interest rates about the cost of this and the policies around that. And then it turns very quickly somehow into advice for you. Budget better. Cut the luxuries. Track the expenses. Cancel some subscriptions. Pick up the side hustle. Optimize your own spending.

And all of that operates on an assumption that I would like to make visible because it's doing a lot of work in the background. The assumption is that what you're experiencing is a maths problem, that the distress is a function of numbers. And if the numbers were managed more cleverly by you naturally, of course, then the distress would resolve, tighten the budget and the wound closes. But I don't think the wound is the budget.

I think the budget conversation, however sensible, walks straight past the door of what's actually hurting. And I want to go to that door now because what a lot of people are grieving when a price hike feels like theft isn't the money. It's the meaning behind your effort because for most of us, effort was never just a transaction. It was also a kind of faith. You put in the work on the unspoken understanding that the work would convert into a little bit more stability, a little bit more room, a little bit more of a sense of freedom of security and a sense that you were building toward something rather than running on the spot to stay in one place.

And the effort meant something appointed somewhere. And what's actually being injured when the reward keeps shrinking no matter how hard you push isn't a bank balance. It's that faith, exactly. It's the belief that effort is a thing that adds up, that sacrifice is a deposit you're making toward a life and not just water poured into sand. And here's the distinction I'd ask you to sit with when the rent goes up again and the groceries cost a third more than they did because I think it's everything.

There's a kind of sacrifice that's devotion. You skip the holiday, you work the extra shift and it's buying something real on the other side. And there's an erosion in that because you give and give and the price keeps climbing and it buys nothing and leads nowhere and never ends. Standing in the checkout line, they feel identical. The only difference is whether there's a destination the cost is paying for and what an economy like this one does quietly, very quietly is take the sacrifice that used to be devotion and turn it into erosion and never once does it tell you that it switched.

That's why working harder than ever and feeling like you're sinking isn't weakness. It's your budding knowing, the giving stopped buying anything. That's why this feels like an injury and not just an inconvenience. A more expensive life you're still building toward is hard but it's bearable because the cost means something. But a more expensive life you're running flat out just to stay level in, that's the one that empties people out because the effort has been severed from its destination.

You're still paying the price of devotion but you've stopped receiving anything that a devotion is supposed to buy and we know the difference on a very deep level even when the mind can't name it. It's that tiredness that a lot of people are carrying that's not laziness and it's not weakness. It's the kind of exhaustion of a sacrifice that's stopped pointing anywhere definite. So here's the first useful move and it's not a budgeting tip.

It's to separate the two things that have been fused together inside you because they're being felt as one wound and they're not. Is the facts, things cost more, your money buys less and that's real and it's not in your head and budgeting carefully is a reasonable thing to do about this. Then there's the spiritual injury sitting on top of the fact, the sense that your effort has been betrayed, that the deal was rigged, that you personally are failing at something everyone else has apparently solved.

And that second thing, the injury won't be touched by any amount of expense tracking because it never lived in the numbers. It lives in what you decided the numbers were supposed to mean. So much of the despair around money right now isn't really about the money. It's that we let the number in the bank account become the scoreboard for whether our effort even mattered and then handed the dial of that scoreboard to interest rates and markets and landlords who don't know we exist and we're never going to keep the deal.

If your sense of whether you're building a worthwhile life rises and falls with a figure that strangers move for reasons that have nothing to do with you, then you've outsourced the meaning of your own effort to the one place guaranteed to betray it. The cruelty of the cost of living crisis isn't only that the rent went up, it's that we were taught to read our whole worth off the price tag. Which brings me to the harder and more freeing part.

The question underneath why is everything so expensive is not only how do I make the maths work, though you should make the math work as best as you can. But the deeper question is what was my effort actually for and did I ever choose that or was it chosen for me? It was a great deal of what we sacrifice for without ever having decided to. We absorb a picture of the life we're supposed to be building, which is the size of it and the cost of it and the things we had to contain to count and we've been pouring our effort into that picture so automatically that if we ever stop to ask whether the picture was ours or whether the number it demands was ever a number we set.

So before you cut one more subscription or pick up one more side hustle to outrun the cost of living I'd ask you a question worth more than any budgeting app. When you picture the life your effort is supposed to be buying, which is the house, the income and the version that would finally feel like enough, whose picture is that? Did you draw it or did you just inherit it from everyone around you? Because if you never actually set the number, no amount of earning will ever reach it and the chase has no finish line built into it and the most radical thing you can ever do in a world engineered to keep you feeling permanently behind is to decide for yourself what your effort was really for and find more often than you'd believe that there's a figure that's closer and smaller than the life you were handed to chase.

And none of this is me telling you it's fine that things are hard because maybe they're hard and that's real and naming the meaning underneath the money doesn't pay the rent but things are changing and they're changing structurally. And in a moment like this one the people who hold steady would be the ones who are optimising every last expense and subscription. They'll be the ones who refused to let a number they didn't set be the measure of whether their life was worth the effort at cost.

Your effort means something. It just never meant the thing on the price tag. If anything in this episode made you want to explore what you just heard I've made it easy for you to do so. In the show notes there's a link to access a book called Before Approach in the Threshold which is the gateway into this work and alongside this you will also receive free 14 day access to the Atlas. The intelligence trained on everything written and recorded in this body of work.

There to think alongside you on whatever you're actually sitting with. Both are free to start and the link to access them is in the show notes. This was Michael Orier and you're listening to the architect speaks.