The Gift

By Roshan Ghadamian

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Chapter 1 — The Extraction Era

What the World Forgot How to Give

The first time I saw what taking looked like, I was still in school.

We were driven out past the edges of town to a place where the road ended in dust. The bus door opened and the smell of diesel and scorched metal hit us first, then the sound—an endless mechanical roar that seemed to come from the earth's own throat. The teacher called it an open-cut mine. I remember standing at the fence, the wind pushing grit against my skin, looking down into a hole so vast it distorted scale. Trucks the size of houses crawled along switchback roads that glimmered like scars.

I didn't have the language then for extraction, only the sense that something irreversible was happening. The earth had been peeled back like a bandage and there was no skin left to heal.

Years later I would think of that pit whenever I opened my phone.

The landscape had changed; the principle had not. The scars were no longer visible—they hummed quietly inside the circuits we carried in our pockets. The same appetite that had once torn mountains apart now mined our attention. The feed, the scroll, the endless invitation to compare and consume: these were just new shafts bored into the psyche.

I've watched people I love disappear into that hum. I've seen young women measure their worth in likes until the comparison eats through them. Entire industries built on insecurity, on the steady erosion of self-esteem. The addiction economics are the same as gambling: a loop of anticipation, reward, withdrawal, and return. The resource this time is not ore or oil; it's human attention. The mine never closes, and the company town lives inside your head.

The Financial Extraction

The first great extraction I saw up close was financial.

I was working in finance when the global markets cracked. In the corridors of APEC meetings and the chaos of news cycles, people ran like headless chooks, convinced the end had come. Phones rang without answers. Funds froze. Pensioners lost decades of careful work. And yet, when the smoke cleared, the same men who had leveraged the world to the brink were the ones invited to rebuild it. Too big to fail became too entitled to learn. The system did what all self-preserving organisms do—it sealed the wound and rewarded the infection.

The taxpayers, the savers, the ordinary families paid the bill. The lesson was precise: the rules bend toward power, not virtue. That realization was the beginning of my fascination with blockchain and code—technologies that could, at least in theory, make the rules visible and harder to corrupt. If human enforcement collapses under stress, maybe machine enforcement could hold its line. At the time that idea felt radical; now it feels like common sense.

Before I could articulate any of that, I was still inside the old machine.

My early jobs were a string of narrow lanes disguised as careers: property finance, an assistant's desk in a snake-pit company, the kind of workplaces where loyalty is a currency and betrayal a sport. The day I lost one of those jobs—probation not even complete—was a small humiliation that turned into a large education. It showed me who I was becoming: someone willing to trade empathy for advancement. If I'd stayed, I would have grown into the worst version of myself—sharp, cynical, comfortably numb.

Then the crash came, and with it a strange mercy. Our entire division was wiped out. The same system that rewarded obedience also deleted it without ceremony. I remember the silence after the layoffs: a corridor of empty cubicles, the hum of an air-conditioning unit still doing its job after the people were gone. Extraction is efficient like that—it takes what it needs and leaves the lights on.

The Pattern Everywhere

The pattern was everywhere once I learned to recognize it.

Grocery chains squeezing producers to improve quarterly returns. Governments rotating unqualified managers through departments like furniture, each one leaving policies half-built before moving on. Whole sectors designed to harvest short-term gain while exporting long-term cost. We borrow from the future with the same confidence miners borrow from the earth—without permission and without a plan to restore.

One day I realized that this logic lived closer than I wanted to admit. It wasn't only corporations that mortgaged tomorrow. It was families too—mine included. My parents once borrowed money they could never repay, pulling it from what was meant to be their grandchildren's inheritance. They did it without shame, convinced it was for something noble: to keep a business alive, to prove that hard work could still turn loss into redemption. It didn't. The debt remains, measured not only in numbers but in trust.

It was the same equation the global markets had run, scaled down to the size of a family: take first, justify later, and pass the bill downstream. What startled me wasn't their decision; it was how familiar it felt. The culture had trained us all to believe that extraction was survival. The moral language of borrowing from the future had become household logic.

When I think about that now, as a father, it hits differently. We tell ourselves we'd do anything for our kids, yet the systems we uphold keep stealing from them—the air they'll breathe, the water they'll drink, the digital world they'll inherit. My parents' loan and the mine I saw as a boy are part of the same pattern: comfort purchased at the expense of descendants. Civilization running a tab with its own children.

Rat Park and Loneliness

I once read about an experiment with rats and addiction. In the first version, the animal was alone in a cage with two bottles—one of pure water, the other laced with drugs. Predictably, the rat chose the drugged water until it died. Scientists used that to prove the inevitability of addiction. But another researcher built Rat Park—a rich environment with companions, tunnels, food, toys, places to hide. In that setting, the rats ignored the drugged water. Connection changed the outcome.

We are not so different.

Our loneliness is engineered. The attention economy isolates us in cages of comparison, then sells us the illusion of connection to keep the cycle running. The result isn't community; it's dependency. We scroll, we envy, we purchase, we repeat. The cost is measured in anxiety, in the quiet dulling of empathy, in the sense that we are competing even when no prize has been announced.

Extraction used to be physical. Now it's emotional, cognitive, spiritual.

Every click is a shovel, every post a small dig into the collective psyche. We are mining ourselves—our memories, our preferences, our fears. And like all mines, the yield declines over time. The algorithms demand more intimacy, more outrage, more exposure to keep producing the same return.

Meanwhile the planet mirrors the behavior.

Japanese eels vanish under rising demand. Coral bleaches, forests thin, groundwater drops. The numbers scroll past on screens, abstract and tidy, while the real cost accumulates offstage. We create carbon markets, then water them down; we invent new terms for old sins—offsets, credits, green growth—until language itself becomes an accomplice.

The same dance continues in politics. Bureaucracies staffed by short-term appointees rewrite the rules every eighteen months, each new executive sweeping the room for optics before moving on. Longevity without accountability; innovation without consequence. The pattern repeats because the incentives repeat: take now, explain later.

When I watch the news today, it's quieter than the panic of the GFC but more pervasive. The noise has moved inside us. The temperature rises by fractions, and we acclimate. Like the fable of the frog in warming water, we notice discomfort but not danger until the boil begins.

Sometimes my wife and I talk about what kind of world our daughters will grow

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