Money Cages Us

Grace Laopradith
ILLUMINATION
Published in
2 min readApr 24, 2023
Photo by cottonbro studio from Pexels

These bills and receipts on the table, scattered and decrepit.

My wish for them to just fly away, to disappear into the care-frees of the natural world.

Yet they only just enlarge, shadow me, and suffocate my throat in their tight and cutting hold.

How can I be happy when this entity is always looming over me?

A death-like basket holds us all in the trouble we created for ourselves.

The kings and queens of capitalism carelessly manipulate the weaves of this basket; tightening and sharpening it to their advantage.

They make us bleed the money they desire while we bleed the money we lack.

Like the ever-stretching walls of the basket, the process is never-ending. We seek money out, young and old. We dare to see those shiny coins and crisp bills.

That lust for wealth, an evolutionary adaptation, now a life we lead.

Money is a basket, a cage, a prison. A basket in every cage, with many cages in this prison.

You think you can escape the basket but you’re still in a cage. You think you can escape the cage but you’re still in this prison.

Even the emperors and empresses of this system still unknowingly strive to build a wall around themselves. They make the bars out of gold, the ceilings from platinum and silver, and even adorn the walls with diamonds and gems.

They build their cages high and wide, yet even the “masterminds of money” can’t help but forget the key for their locked doors.

They’ll look around and realise that they had trapped themselves and the billions of others in this infinite prison of suffocation.

A beautiful system this is.

I’ll just lie to myself, and call it a path set for you and me.

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Grace Laopradith
ILLUMINATION

A high-school student ready to share her ideas to the world (and hopefully make a pretty penny to supply her weekly bookshop visits)