To Be You, Man.
A Bird's Eye View of What's Under The Bed.
I. Those who care about humanity won’t be paid enough to live.
Look at the people we universally call brilliant.
Socrates owned nothing by design and was mocked by Athens for wandering the streets asking questions no one wanted to answer. Plato lived in a society that barely valued philosophers unless they flattered power. Tesla died in a hotel room surrounded by unpaid bills, his inventions powering the modern world while capitalists cashed in on his ideas. Einstein spent most of his life broke, writing papers on stolen scraps of time while working at a patent office.
There are countless others, yes, but few with riches to their name. Few were rewarded in their lifetimes for the magnitude of their thought. Their value to humanity came from what they understood, not what they owned. History is clear: intelligence has never depended on wealth, and wealth has never been proof of wisdom.
But society keeps acting like wealth and intelligence are the same thing. The more money someone has, the more we assume they must be smarter, more capable, more deserving. We treat money like a scorecard for human worth. But the ugly truth is that this logic slides straight into ableism.
Merriam-Webster defines ableism as “discrimination or prejudice against individuals with disabilities,” and the way we talk about poverty folds right into that. We attack a person’s character instead of the systems that put them there. We don’t ask what blocked them, what collapsed around them, what was taken. We jump straight to: What’s wrong with them? Why can’t they do better? What’s their flaw?
Wealth becomes proof of ability.
Poverty becomes proof of failure.
And neither one is actually true.
But that’s the story baked into the programming. We’re sold the idea that if we struggle, it must be because of something inside us, not something around us. Being poor means we’re defective. Needing help means we’re “less than.”
Even our childhood stories personified the rags-to-riches dream, teaching us that virtue is rewarded with wealth and struggle is just a temporary test.
We have created a world where those least qualified to care for us—CEOs, politicians, and other decision-makers—decide our worth.
Once Upon a Class
Every culture tells fairy tales. They feel like innocent bedtime stories, tiny moral lessons, or animated films. But sugar always has a purpose: it masks the bitterness underneath.
II. How We Measure “Worth”
I remember hearing something, years back, about Bill Gates: if the money he made in a single second were like walking down a sidewalk, he’d lose money by stopping to pick up a $100 bill. Back then he was the model of the “smart rich man,” the nerd whose intelligence supposedly translated straight into wealth.
These days, Gates isn’t even close to the top. The sidewalk has tilted so sharply upward that the richest men on earth make him look like a mid-manager with a comfortable savings account. Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg—all held up as brilliant savants who didn’t even need college because they were simply that exceptional.
And yet, when you pull back to a bird’s-eye view, the pattern becomes obvious:
the people we hand the keys to aren’t chosen for wisdom, compassion, or any understanding of what it takes to keep a society alive. They’re chosen for their ability to extract.
CEOs, landlords, financiers, politicians, boards, and donors operate on one metric— profit—and every budget they write erases the parts of life that actually keep us standing: care work, disability, grief, burnout, hunger, community stability. In their world, success means cutting costs, raising margins, and squeezing more from people who already give everything.
And when someone can’t survive that grind, the system calls them “unproductive,” “dependent,” or a “drain,” folding disability and poverty into a narrative of personal inadequacy. We mistake wealth for intelligence because the people benefiting from that myth wrote the definition.
Money isn’t just currency.
It’s treated as evidence.
Evidence of competence.
Evidence of discipline.
Evidence of superiority.
And when we accept that myth, we accept its shadow:
If someone isn’t wealthy, they must lack the traits that matter.
If someone struggles, we treat it as a personal defect.
If someone needs help, we assume they didn’t try hard enough.
This is the metric society uses—a yardstick carved by the people holding it.
The higher your income, the more “worthy” you’re considered.
The lower your income, the more suspect your life becomes.
But wealth doesn’t measure compassion.
It doesn’t measure wisdom.
It doesn’t measure how well someone can care for a community, a family, or themselves.
What our culture calls “worth” is just a reflection of who has the most power to extract, hoard, and dominate. It rewards the skills of a taker and ignores the skills of a caretaker. It elevates the people most removed from human suffering and silences the people who know how suffering actually works.
We built an entire system on the assumption that those at the top know the most—when the truth is that the higher you climb, the less you understand about what keeps people alive.
And that’s how the keys ended up in the wrong hands.
III. Who Actually Knows How to Care
When you climb down from the bird’s-eye view and look under the bed—where the dust, the strain, and the real work live—the picture flips. The people who actually keep society from collapsing aren’t the ones sitting on boards or giving keynote speeches. They’re the ones who show up in the dark, in the mess, in the moments when things fall apart.
Nurses, aides, teachers, social workers, disability support staff.
Parents juggling three jobs.
People navigating SNAP, SSI, SSDI, Medicaid, eviction courts, food pantries, school offices, impossible schedules.
The mutual-aid volunteers who fill the gaps our government refuses to even acknowledge.
The janitors who keep hospitals safe.
The bus drivers who get kids where they need to go.
The caseworkers holding broken systems together with tape and patience.
THESE are the people who understand how fragile everything is—because they’re the ones holding the weight. They’ve seen what happens when the safety net frays. They’ve carried the consequences of political decisions they never got to vote on. They know exactly how quickly a household, a life, a body can tilt toward crisis.
Their intelligence is survival intelligence.
Their expertise is lived expertise.
Their value is irreplaceable — and treated as disposable.
They are paid the least, respected the least, and consulted last. Their work is labeled “unskilled,” even though nothing else functions without it. And because the system refuses to count care as “real” labor, it refuses to count the people who do it as “real” experts.
Under the bed is where the truth hides:
The people who actually know how to keep us alive are never the ones holding the keys.
They’re the ones sweeping up after the people who do.
And somehow, the system still casts them as the monster under the bed—the drain, the burden, the threat to the budget. The very people holding the world together are framed as the ones pulling it down.
IV. The Keys in the Wrong Hands
When you follow the trail of power upward, you see how absurd the arrangement really is. The people making the decisions—the ones writing budgets, shaping policy, setting wages, drawing the lines that determine who eats and who doesn’t—are almost entirely insulated from the consequences of their own choices.
They live in a different ecosystem.
No missed shifts.
No skipped prescriptions.
No hours spent fighting with an automated phone system to fix an error someone else made.
To them, “hardship” is a talking point, not a lived condition.
Yet these are the people we’ve allowed to define what counts as effort, ability, responsibility, or “good choices.” These are the people designing the hoops the rest of us must jump through. They sit in polished boardrooms and declare that the safety net is too generous, that workers need more discipline, that families can survive on less. They call it stewardship. They call it leadership. Really, it’s distance.
Because the further someone is from real harm, the easier it is for them to treat harm as hypothetical.
The further someone is from care work, the easier it is to dismiss care as a cost center.
The further someone is from disability, illness, poverty, or crisis, the easier it is to imagine those struggles as personal failures instead of predictable outcomes of the system they maintain.
And so we end up with a country where the least informed about suffering get to decide how suffering is managed. Where the least experienced with scarcity get to dictate the terms of survival. Where the most insulated voices carry the most authority.
This is how the keys end up in the wrong hands—not through genius, not through merit, but through a structure designed to reward extraction and punish empathy.
Wealth selects for distance.
Distance selects for ignorance.
And ignorance shapes policy.
V. Debugging the Program: Redefining Ability
If the system is broken at its root—if the keys sit with the wrong people and the metrics reward the wrong things—then the fix isn’t charity or “better intentions.” The fix is rewriting the code that decides what we value.
Right now, “ability” is defined by the people most insulated from reality. They equate strength with output, discipline with overwork, and worth with how much profit can be extracted from a person before they collapse. It’s a definition that works beautifully for shareholders and disastrously for everyone else.
So we debug.
We redefine.
Ability isn’t how much you can endure before breaking.
Ability isn’t how fast you can produce under pressure.
Ability isn’t how little you cost to keep alive.
Ability is care.
Ability is stability.
Ability is the skill of reducing harm—in a household, in a workplace, in a community.
Ability is understanding what it takes to keep people alive, healthy, safe, and dignified.
If those were the metrics, the entire hierarchy would invert.
The single parent juggling three schedules would be seen as a logistics expert.
The nurse holding a hallway of patients together would be a master of crisis management.
The disability advocate navigating impossible systems would be a policy authority.
The teacher calming a room of 30 children would be recognized as a specialist in human behavior.
The mutual-aid organizer feeding entire neighborhoods would be a civic strategist.
These are not soft skills.
They are survival skills.
They are the backbone of any functioning society—and they belong in the blueprint, not the margins.
Redefining ability means shifting the center of gravity away from the people who extract and toward the people who sustain. It means letting lived expertise shape the rules instead of treating it as anecdotal noise. It means pulling care out from under the bed and putting it on the table where decisions are made.
This is debugging: swapping the old measure of worth for one that actually reflects what keeps a society standing.
VI. Taking the Keys Back
If the wrong people are holding the keys, then the only path forward is to take them back—not with force, not with fantasy, but with clarity. The myth that wealth equals wisdom falls apart the second we stop repeating it. The moment we stop treating the richest voices as default authority, the hierarchy cracks.
Taking the keys back starts with refusing their definitions.
Refusing the idea that care is weakness.
Refusing the idea that poverty is failure.
Refusing the lie that human worth can be graphed on a balance sheet.
It means lifting the knowledge we’ve been trained to overlook—the survival intelligence, the community intelligence, the care intelligence. The kind that doesn’t get awards or headlines but holds entire families, entire neighborhoods, entire systems together in the dark.
It means naming who actually understands what keeps people alive and refusing to let their insight be framed as a burden.
It means shifting expertise downward, where the consequences live.
It means treating lived experience not as anecdote, but as data.
We don’t need the approval of the people who built this version of the world.
We only need to see the world as it is:
upside down, and held together by the very people it dismisses.
Taking the keys back isn’t an act of rebellion.
It’s an act of restoration.
And the truth underneath it all—the truth the system never wants spoken out loud—is simple:
The people who understand care should be the ones steering the future.
The people who understand harm should be the ones defining safety.
The people who live the consequences should be the ones writing the code.
Everything else is noise.