It’s easy to forget that America once ran on company stores and scrip. Coal miners in Appalachia were paid in vouchers redeemable only at their employer’s shop, and the prices were high enough to keep them permanently in debt. It was a tidy arrangement for the owners: keep your workforce tethered to the very institution that exploits them. That system was supposed to have vanished with the 20th century.
It didn’t.
The names have changed—Visa, Mastercard, Amazon Prime—but the principle hasn’t. Our current economic system, so often praised for its dynamism and innovation, operates like an upgraded version of that same model. It gets people hooked on consumption and then chains them to a life of debt. Once you’re in, it’s nearly impossible to get out. Capitalism doesn’t simply feed on our labor—it devours our time, our energy, and our sense of obligation to one another.
I run a time co-op and time banking platform—a kind of modern mutual aid system where people exchange hours of work instead of dollars—and a community resource center. I talk with thousands of people every year about why time co-ops are not just a quaint idea, but a practical and transformative model, especially for those living on the margins. Time banking could help the elderly, the working poor, single parents, the disabled, the undocumented. It could bring back a sense of community that’s been atomized by individualism and economic precarity.
Everyone I speak with agrees it’s a good idea. A beautiful idea, even. And yet, nearly no one actually does it.
Why? The answer is almost always the same: “I’m too busy just trying to survive.”
It’s a heartbreaking truth. The people who would benefit most from an economy based on mutual aid are too overwhelmed by the demands of the current one to participate in anything else.
I saw this paradox firsthand recently, in a moment both mundane and deeply telling. My father had to abandon his car in a parking lot after getting too confused to drive home. I needed someone to help me go retrieve it. But there was no one available. Not one person in my network could spare the time—not because they didn’t care, but because they were drowning in their own schedules. The demands of work, kids, side hustles, caregiving, and relentless to-do lists had left them all tapped out.
We live in a society where mutual aid has become alien. Even if we have a few hours to give, we’re so psychologically overdrawn that the idea of helping others feels like an impossible luxury. People are not just busy—they believe they are busy, and in our world shaped by scarcity and stress, belief is just as paralyzing as reality. If you feel like you have no time, then you don’t.
This is not an accident. This is design.
Modern capitalism has created a cycle of dependency and depletion. It teaches us to measure our worth by our productivity and to meet our emotional needs through consumption. It promises freedom but delivers servitude—masked in the form of credit cards, streaming subscriptions, and gig economy apps. Most Americans are just a few missed paychecks away from financial ruin. The majority couldn’t handle a $500 emergency without borrowing or sacrificing basic needs. And in this state of constant financial edge-dwelling, the idea of volunteering time, even for something that could eventually alleviate these very pressures, seems absurd.
It’s a cruel paradox. Those who are most in need of a more humane, cooperative economy are the least able to afford it.
Time banking—a system where you receive credits for hours worked and then trade them on hours of service from others—has remained a niche project largely confined to the educated, upper-middle-class progressive enclaves. Why? Because those are the people who can afford it. Not in terms of money, but in terms of time and stability. They’re not running from eviction notices or rationing their insulin or working three jobs to afford childcare. They have what capitalism has turned into the ultimate luxury: availability.
And that’s the tragedy. We’ve built an economic system where survival consumes so much of our lives that anything not directly tied to earning money feels indulgent or irresponsible. Helping others, building community, trading hours instead of dollars—all of that is treated as a sweet idea for Sunday morning TED Talks, not something we can actually live by.
So the question becomes: What future is left for ideas like time co-ops and community economies in a world that treats time as a commodity and mutual care as a burden?
I’m not naive. I know that we can’t wish away a global economic system. I’m not calling for a revolution with torches and pitchforks. I’m calling for something quieter but just as radical: a devolution. A return. A stepping down from the tower we’ve built out of debt, stress, and overwork, and back to something older, slower, and more human.
It’s not about rejecting technology or growth or ambition. It’s about recognizing that a society built solely on those values becomes unlivable. We’ve reached the limits of what can be achieved through competition and consumption. The future will not be won with faster shipping and more screen time. It will be won, if it’s to be won at all, by small communities rediscovering the power of trust, generosity, and reciprocity.
There are already glimpses of this. Neighborhood tool libraries. Community fridges. Informal barter networks. Childcare swaps. These are not just acts of kindness—they are acts of resistance. They reclaim agency from a system that has convinced us that we are alone, that we must fend for ourselves, and that success is a solitary pursuit.
But these efforts remain fragile and scattered. Without broader support, without a cultural shift in how we value time, labor, and one another, they may never gain the momentum they need. And so the work, frustrating as it often feels, must continue—person by person, hour by hour.
Maybe someday, enough people will get tired of being tired. Maybe they’ll realize that the promises of capitalism are always just out of reach, like a prize in a rigged carnival game. Maybe they’ll see that the only real wealth is time—and that giving it to each other is not charity, but a way to build an economy worth living in.
Until then, those of us who believe in these alternatives will keep doing the slow work. Planting seeds. Talking to the thousandth person who agrees but can’t participate. Holding space for a different kind of world, even when the current one makes it almost impossible.
There’s an old saying from the days of the company store: “I owe my soul to the company store.”
We don’t have to keep paying.
Join us in making the world a better place – you’ll be glad that you did. Cheers friends.