Everything feels like a scam now, and that feeling is worth trusting.
It’s not paranoia or nostalgia. Something real is happening, and most people are pointed at the wrong culprit.
One distortion, a thousand points of contact
Everything feels like a scam because the unit everything is priced in loses value on purpose, year after year. When the money itself leaks, anyone holding it has reason to pass the loss on to someone else. You meet that scramble at a thousand points of contact, the chocolate bar that shrank, the £6 coffee, the subscription that creeps up while the service gets worse, the pay rise that somehow left you poorer, the fees charged for what used to be included, the sense that saving is for suckers and everyone you know is flipping something. Each contact reads as a separate little con. It’s actually one distortion at the money layer, spreading through everything built on top of it.
What should be happening
Technology makes things cheaper to produce. Your phone swallowed the camera, the film, the postage, the map, the CD collection, the torch. In a free market, those gains show up as falling prices, because when one producer gets more efficient, a competitor copies the method and undercuts them until the saving reaches you. The natural state of a market full of improving technology is that your money slowly buys more. You work the same hours. Life should be getting cheaper.
So everyone asks “why is everything so expensive?” The better question is “where did the saving go?”
Why the system can’t allow it
Nearly all our money is created through lending, so nearly every pound in existence is also someone’s debt. Those debts are fixed in pounds. If prices broadly fall, wages eventually follow, but the mortgage payment doesn’t shrink. The debt takes a bigger bite of every income, people and companies start defaulting, and the banks that hold those loans fail in a chain. A system built on this much debt can’t survive falling prices.
So it doesn’t allow them. Governments and central banks create more money and credit to keep prices rising by about 2% a year, deliberately, as policy. Technology should be making your cost of living fall by a few percent a year. Instead policy pushes prices up by about 2%. The real gap between what you should pay and what you do pay is bigger than any headline inflation number. That gap is the saving you never received, year after year, compounding for decades.
It didn’t vanish. New money enters the system through financial markets and cheap loans, so the people closest to it catch the gains first. Banks, governments, people who already own assets. House and share prices rise while your wages lag behind. Money is a claim on your time. When more claims are created, your stored hours buy less. So there is a scam, in the strict sense of value taken without consent, by a method almost nobody is shown. But it’s one scam, at the base of the system, not a million little ones.
Why it feels like a million little ones
Because the businesses you deal with are being squeezed much the way you are. The café’s rent, ingredients, wages, and card fees all rise, but customers revolt at a £7 flat white, so the cup shrinks, the beans get cheaper, the staff get cut. Shrinkflation [cutting the size or quality of a product instead of raising its sticker price] is a price rise wearing a disguise, and that’s what makes it feel dishonest. Stretched staff read as a company that stopped caring. Auto-renewing subscriptions and drip-priced airline seats [a low headline price with fees added at every step] read as traps. Most of them are the same squeeze being passed down the line to the last person who can’t pass it further, which is you.
Then there’s the behavioural turn, and I think this is the part you’re really smelling. When money loses value by design, sitting still means falling behind. Cash in the bank is a guaranteed loss in real terms, so ordinary people are forced to become speculators just to stand still. When everyone must speculate, culture follows. Side hustles, day trading, meme coins, courses about selling courses. The payoff for patient, honest work falls and the payoff for grabbing something now rises. People can feel that shift in the people around them even when they can’t name the cause. A society’s honesty isn’t only its morals. It’s also its incentives. When the measuring stick itself can be quietly bent, bending things pays better than building things.
And at the top, the pattern is explicit. A bank that gambles and wins keeps the bonuses. A bank that gambles and loses gets rescued with newly created money, while the small firm down the road goes under. Big companies borrow at rates you aren’t offered and buy up their competitors. Losses get socialised, gains stay private. Lobbying for the policies that keep asset prices rising beats building, so that’s what gets funded. People watch that and conclude the game is rigged. They’re right. They just usually aim the anger at the wrong level, the landlord, the manager, the other political tribe, rather than the design that rewards all of them for behaving this way.
Why now, specifically
Because the gap is widening. Technology’s downward pull on costs compounds, software first and now AI, so the offsetting money creation has to grow to match it. That’s why each rescue is bigger than the last, from hundreds of billions in 2008 to trillions in 2020. In the two decades to 2020 the world added roughly 185 trillion dollars of debt to buy about 46 trillion dollars of growth. The bigger the dose, the bigger the transfer, the more distortion leaks into daily life, and the worse everything feels. Your instinct that “it wasn’t like this” isn’t memory playing tricks. The mechanism is accelerating. And there’s a modern amplifier. When an app is free, you’re the product, so even your idle attention is being farmed and sold, and that is downstream of the same money, because cheap credit and ad models built the giant platforms in the first place. That completes the feeling that every single interaction now has an angle.
Greed, wars, and supply shocks can’t explain it
Corporate greed is the popular answer, and it fails a simple test. Greed is constant across history, so it can’t explain a change. What changed is the restraint. In an honest system, a greedy firm that overcharges gets undercut by a hungrier rival. Cheap credit and inflated asset values protect incumbents from that discipline, so the greedy get shielded instead of competed away. That’s the rescued bank. That’s the competitor bought with cheap credit. Wars and supply shocks are real too, but a shock moves prices for a year or two. It can’t explain a fifty-year slide in what a pound buys while production got radically more efficient. What runs underneath all of it is the expanding money. It has been there the whole time, and it grows with each decade.
And the clearest sign that the pound price is telling you about the pound, not about the house, is what happens when you measure in a money nobody can create more of. The prices didn’t rise. A house that cost around 300 bitcoin fell to a small fraction of that within a few years, even as its pound price climbed. Same house, different ruler. The whole of that fall is bitcoin buying more as adoption grew, not the house getting cheaper to make. In pounds the house was moving the other way, working against the fall rather than causing it, so read the direction, not the size. The gains are real, they’re just being absorbed before they reach you.
Inside the scramble
The scam feeling is accurate perception. It’s what a slowly debasing unit feels like from the inside. Everyone scrambling, and the scramble indistinguishable from universal dishonesty. The reason I ended up at bitcoin is that it’s the first money with a fixed number of units and rules anyone can verify, so it’s the first ruler that can’t be stretched, and in that unit the whole picture inverts. Prices fall, saving works, patience pays.
But the core answer stands on its own. It’s not that everyone became a crook. The money everyone is forced to use rewards crook-like behaviour, and people respond to rewards. One scam, not a million. Fix the money layer at its base, and most of the little ones lose their reason to exist.