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There is a strange tension in modern life that almost everyone feels but few can articulate.

We are more technologically capable than at any point in history, yet life feels harder. We are more productive, yet less secure. We are told we live in the most advanced economy ever built, yet the basics — housing, family formation, time — feel increasingly out of reach.

This is not an accident.

And it is not a mystery.

At the centre of it all is inflation — not as a statistic, but as a moral force.

Inflation Is Not Just Rising Prices

Inflation is usually described as a technical necessity, a modest side effect of a complex system. That framing is misleading.

Inflation is the debasement of money over time. It is the erosion of stored effort. It is what happens when money no longer faithfully represents the work that produced it.

When prices rise faster than wages, life becomes more expensive in time. You must work more hours to buy the same future. That is not a neutral outcome. It is a transfer — from savers to debtors, from workers to asset holders, from the future to the present.

Inflation allows governments to run permanent deficits without immediate consequences. It is politically convenient precisely because its damage is delayed, dispersed, and difficult to trace.

That delay is the problem.

Money Is a Proxy for Time

Money is not wealth in itself. It is stored human time.

When you work and save, you are deferring consumption — banking hours of your life for later. When money is debased, that stored time decays. The work still happened. The time was still spent. But its ability to carry forward into the future has been reduced.

This is why inflation is so corrosive. It doesn’t just make things more expensive — it breaks the promise between effort and reward.

And once that promise breaks, trust breaks with it.

The Confusion Around Deflation

At this point, someone usually objects: “But deflation is dangerous.”

This is where language obscures reality.

There are two very different things that get called deflation.

One is demand collapse inside a debt-saturated system, where falling prices make fixed debts harder to service. That is genuinely destructive — but it is a symptom of structural fragility, not a law of nature.

The other is productivity-driven deflation — the cheapening of goods and services through efficiency, technology, and innovation.

This second kind of deflation is not only benign, it is the entire story of human progress.

From tools to agriculture, from industry to software, civilisation advanced by making essentials cheaper in human time. We learned to do more with less. Life became easier because we got better at producing what we needed.

If technology improves and productivity rises, yet prices must still increase for the system to function, then something is wrong. The gains of progress are being intercepted before they reach ordinary people.

That interception is inflation.

Deflation is only considered “dangerous” because our current system cannot tolerate honest prices without collapsing under its own debt.

That is not an argument against deflation.

It is an indictment of the system.

The Shape of the Dystopia

The dystopia people fear is not a dramatic collapse. It is far quieter than that.

It is:

smaller homes longer working hours delayed families permanent insecurity lowered expectations presented as realism

There is no moment where things “break.” There is only gradual acceptance that life should cost more and deliver less.

This is why the damage is so difficult to resist. It arrives disguised as normality.

And it is why inflation is not merely an economic issue. It is an ethical one.

A society that systematically makes the future worse than the past — by design, not by accident — is failing a basic moral test.

What Bitcoin Actually Is (and Isn’t)

Bitcoin is often framed as an investment, a speculative asset, or a political statement. None of those descriptions are precise enough.

Bitcoin is best understood as a monetary refusal.

It refuses:

monetary expansion by decree debasement to cover deficits trust in authority as a prerequisite for saving

Bitcoin does not promise prosperity. It does not guarantee fairness. It does not fix every structural problem.

What it does is simpler — and more radical.

It restores money as stored time.

No committee can dilute it. No emergency can override it. No future promise can quietly borrow against it.

That is not ideology. It is constraint, encoded.

Can Bitcoin Prevent the Dystopia?

No.

A society cannot asset-allocate its way out of moral failure. Bitcoin does not build houses, reform education, or make political systems courageous.

If only a minority adopt it, the broader trajectory can continue unchanged — with inequality simply expressed in a new form.

But Bitcoin can do something important.

It can allow individuals and families to opt out of the mechanism of theft.

How an Individual Uses Bitcoin to Refuse the System

Bitcoin works when it is used boringly.

Not as a trade.

Not as leverage.

Not as a gamble.

But as time preservation.

In practical terms, this means understanding life in layers:

Fiat for survival — bills, food, obligations Bitcoin for savings — long-term, untouched, patient Skills and resilience — because stored time only matters if you can still earn

Debt matters here. Inflation turns debt into servitude. Bitcoin and high leverage do not mix.

Volatility matters too. Bitcoin removes smoothing and manipulation. Price swings are not a flaw — they are the absence of lies. Anyone who cannot tolerate that volatility will sabotage themselves.

Bitcoin does not remove effort. It removes decay.

The Intergenerational Dimension

Bitcoin’s most important feature is not personal gain. It is intergenerational honesty.

It allows people to save without being forced into speculation.

It allows effort to reach the future intact.

It allows children to inherit stored time rather than starting from zero in a system that resets every generation.

That is not utopian. It is modest. And it is profound.

What Bitcoin Will Not Do

Bitcoin will not:

make life easy remove inequality eliminate hardship replace work or meaning

It offers optionality, not comfort.

It amplifies discipline and punishes recklessness. It exposes character rather than compensating for it.

Bitcoin does not save people from themselves.

The Real Question Bitcoin Forces Us to Ask

The most uncomfortable thing about Bitcoin is not its volatility or its politics.

It is the question it makes unavoidable:

Why must money decay for society to function at all?

If we are truly becoming more productive, more capable, more efficient — why must the future always pay more for the same life?

Bitcoin does not answer every question.

But it makes one thing clear:

Inflation is not inevitable.

Debasement is not natural.

And theft does not become moral just because it is slow.

Bitcoin is not a promise of utopia.

It is a refusal to accept quiet decay as the price of modern life.

And sometimes, refusal is where change begins.

The interview was a weird one.

Mark Peters sat off to the side.

His wife sat directly across from me.

At the start of the interview Mark said it might seem a bit strange, but his wife would be asking the questions, and I should answer directly to him — not her.

The interview took place at Mark’s house in Canford Heath, Poole.

The position: trainee bathroom installer.

I remember some banter about the signwriting on the side of his van. It was a blue Volkswagen Transporter with a cartoon woman sitting in a bath. The unusual thing was that supply-and-installation fixed prices were listed on the side. I had never seen that before, and it gave the whole thing a very commercial feel.

Maybe that was the point.

Maybe Mark Peters wanted the company to look bigger than it was.

“How should you leave a customer’s house after you’re finished?” he asked me.

I said you should leave it as you found it.

“Better than you found it,” he replied.

I didn’t get the job.

Maybe that’s why. I’ll never know.

What I do know is that as I walked out, I looked at the vans parked outside his nice house and thought to myself: If you can’t join them, beat them.

That interview stayed with me longer than I realised.

Later that year, on an autumn Saturday morning, Sting and The Police played quietly through the stereo of an RS Turbo. Matt never played music too loud when he drove — and for good reason. We liked to hear the wastegate hiss as he changed gear.

“Don’t stand so, don’t stand so, don’t stand so close to me — fsssshh.”

The RS wasn’t just transport.

Metallic purple. Lowered. Alloy wheels. Body kit. Whale-fin spoiler. Not done on the cheap — thousands had been spent on it. A real show-stopper. Not the kind of car you normally saw twenty-year-olds driving. This was Max Power magazine territory.

The routine was simple.

Cruise around on a Saturday morning. Offer lifts to girls. Invite them out to Poole Quay that night on a pub crawl. Rinse and repeat.

There was no Tinder back then. In some ways things were harder — you had to do everything face to face. But in other ways, things were easier. People couldn’t just look you up online. If they thought you were interesting, numbers were exchanged. If not, you’d never see them again. Curiosity worked in your favour.

The only problem was that it wasn’t Matt’s car.

It was Colin Spencer’s.

Colin had been working with his dad as an apprentice plumber since the age of sixteen, right at the height of the plumber shortage. As a result, Colin was flush. He lent the car to Matt most weekends because Matt was better looking — and far more successful with the pickup routine.

Matt and I were the front end of the sales funnel.

Colin would appear further down the line on the pub crawl.

On this particular ride, our passenger was Nikki — a twenty-four-year-old police officer I’d met at the Brass House the week before. She was four years our senior. I was counting the seconds until we dropped her off at Fleetsbridge Tesco.

The unspoken truth was that Matt wasn’t insured to drive the RS.

You could have cut the tension with a knife.

We pulled into the Fleetsbridge Tesco car park. I hopped out and swung the front passenger seat forward to let Nikki out. She couldn’t have weighed more than fifty kilos and almost floated up out of the car, weightless.

“Thanks for the lift — text me,” she said, flicking her straight platinum-blonde hair back as she walked off.

I looked at Matt.

“Thank fuck for that,” he said.

We both cracked up laughing.

Nikki turned back to see what was so funny, and Matt and I froze — like a pair of kids just rumbled by a teacher.

Matt’s dad was an electrician who dabbled in kitchen and bathroom refurbishments. Matt worked with him on electrical jobs, but he was keen to carve out his own path as a ceramic wall tiler.

I don’t think there was any sound business reasoning behind it. It felt more like the classic case of a son wanting to do something different from his father — to become independent as quickly as possible.

I was working as a jobbing plumber, but I didn’t have my gas registration.

As I explained my idea of starting a bathroom refurbishment business to Matt, it felt like the obvious route to go down. A bathroom is, after all, mainly a plumbing and tiling job.

Two entrepreneurs were born over a full English breakfast.

Or so we thought.

We weren’t entrepreneurs at all.

We were technicians suffering from an entrepreneurial seizure.

An entrepreneurial seizure is what happens when someone who does technical work — a mechanic, a hairdresser, a tradesman — assumes that because they can do the work, they know how to run a business that does that work.

The hairdresser thinks that because she’s good at cutting hair, she should run a hair salon, without realising that running a business requires an entirely different set of skills.

Most self-employed people will tell you they own a business.

They don’t.

What they own is a job.

A business is a money-making organisation that produces profit whether the owner turns up or not. If it requires the owner to be present and doing the technical work, it isn’t a business — it’s employment with extra risk.

Many of these jobs will never become businesses because they aren’t scalable, and the technician doesn’t understand how to build one. They just keep working harder, doing everything themselves.

What Matt and I didn’t realise was that we were about to start one of the least scalable and least profitable businesses you could imagine.

Looking back now, after more than twenty years in business, I can see that Bathroom Solution couldn’t have been a worse business model even if it had been designed that way.

In practice it meant long hours and hard work for very little profit. Responsibility sat with me at all times — the money, the quality, the mistakes, the stress. I was never able to switch off. Even when I wasn’t working, I was thinking about work. And despite all of it, there was no obvious way to expand. The ceiling was low and visible.

What made it worse was watching other people make money in businesses that didn’t seem to demand the same level of effort or sacrifice. They weren’t working harder than me — they were just positioned better.

I’d often heard people say, “A restaurant will never go out of business — people always need to eat.”

That’s an example of a business with repeat custom.

MOT centres. Hair salons. Plumbers doing annual boiler services.

Revenue compounds in those businesses. Once a customer is acquired and satisfied, they return. New customers stack on top of old ones. The business grows without having to start from zero each time.

Bathroom refurbishments don’t work like that.

They’re projects that happen once every ten or twenty years. By the time a customer is ready for another one, they’ve usually moved away — or lost your number.

For Bathroom Solution, customers didn’t compound. Every job meant starting again from scratch. That meant constant spending just to stand still.

I didn’t understand any of this at the time.

I just believed that if you stuck at something and worked hard enough, it would succeed.