Why are the poor always the ones being harvested?

While sitting on the toilet, I suddenly realized: the true wealth of the rich has never been cash—everyone in Zimbabwe is a "billionaire," yet they still remain trapped in poverty. What they truly rely on is the labor value built up by the poor over time.

In a human lifespan of 70 years, about 40 years can be converted into labor output. This output is the "primitive capital" of the upper class. In the era of slavery, slave owners drove labor with whips; today, it has transformed into a more covert game of money: you trade time for a salary, thinking it’s a fair transaction, but unknowingly fall into a double trap.

The first trap: monetary hegemony. Some can print money at will, exchanging a piece of paper for the food produced by your sweat, the phone assembled through sleepless nights, and the takeout delivered in the rain. The tragedy of Zimbabwe is not an isolated case; all hands that can manipulate currency are silently harvesting your labor results.

The second trap: the debt noose. First, they weave a fantasy of "life essentials" for you—housing in good school districts, luxury cars, limited editions—then they use consumerism to induce anxiety. When you carry a 30-year mortgage and a 200,000 car loan, and your salary is deducted for repayment as soon as it arrives, it means you have mortgaged your mornings, late nights, and weekends for the next 30 years to the debt machine. At this moment, how are you different from a slave chained up? The alarm clock at five in the morning is an electronic whip, KPI assessments are digital shackles, and even quitting a job requires calculating whether the compensation for breaking the contract is enough.

The way to break through lies in two common understandings:

First, hold on to the bottom line of "no debt, light on my feet." When you are calculating a 5 yuan delivery fee, you might be carrying a 300,000 loan for a car that can’t be driven more than ten times a year, essentially trading 1,000 hours of labor for "face" in the eyes of others. Saving the first 100,000 can buy back the courage to refuse early morning overtime.

Second, rebuild the time coordinate system. The true wealth of life is: being able to walk with your parents at sunset, spending weekends building sandcastles with your children, and being able to sleep for eight hours at night with peace of mind. These free moments are the essence of life that cannot be harvested.

Next time you feel anxious about wanting what others have, try calculating: how many hours of freedom would this require to exchange? After all, the rich have never harvested your savings, but rather the life you could have lived more freely.