What is Not Your Fiat Life?

This blog is a space for appreciating real value by celebrating what makes life worth living.

It is meant to create conversation. Please consider commenting or sharing some of your own “appreciations” on our Community Appreciations page.

How can Not Your Fiat Life help?

Long ago, Rainer Maria Rilke gave this advice to a young man who wanted to be a poet but had to make his living as a clerk:

“If your everyday life seems poor, don’t blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches…”

This blog attempts to help us become poet enough by practicing noticing, and naming, the small and great riches of our daily lives.

What does it mean to reject the “fiat life?”

“Fiat” money is currency that holds value by government decree, and is printed in endless supply so its worth is constantly eroded. A fiat life demands harder work for money that buys less, leaving us with ever cheaper substitutes for real value.

Not Your Fiat Life refuses those decrees. It rejects the idea that governments can define what is valuable. Instead, it insists that value is discovered in lived experience, human connection, craft, and beauty.

What is this blog not?

This blog is not an economic treatise.
 It questions the fiat life but leaves it to others to explain the economic forces that led to it, and to suggest alternative systems. If you’re curious about that, you might start here, here, or here.

This is blog is not a guide to budget living.
 It rejects both false luxury and misplaced cheapness. Here: What’s worthy of appreciation is not judged by monetary cost. Each post includes the “fiat cost” only so we can marvel at how often monetary cost fails as a proxy for value.

This blog is not an influencer’s unboxing. 
In rare cases, I’ll appreciate something mass-produced. But the focus here is on experiences that aren’t for sale and creations by artists and makers—who are not paying me.

This blog is not a personal memoir. 
If you’re looking for my story, you’ll find it at my companion blog, Fully Invested Lawyer.

This blog is not cynical. It rejects hard-heartedness, complaining culture, and cancel culture. In their place, it adopts a new culture of appreciation.

This blog accepts Alice Walker’s challenge

Long before decentralized finance and bitcoin bros, poet Alice Walker understood that we decide what we value:

“We alone can devalue gold, by not caring if it rises or falls in the marketplace.”

She understood the danger of confusing the medium by which we exchange and store value with what we value. She challenged us:

“This could be our revolution, to love what is plentiful as much as what is scarce.”

This blog aims to accept that challenge; to connect those who are capable of appreciating with that which is worthy of appreciation.