A Bucket with a Hole and a Record of People Who Continue to Run - 1/19/2026

Summary

We think we are cherishing what we have earned through our hard work. We polish old coins, gaze at bankbooks lined with numbers, and reach for the ingot of gold that will never lose its value. However, few realize that the very ground on which we stand is being silently chipped away, little by little. This article unravels the silent reality that our efforts to preserve what we have acquired are actually fueling a gigantic, invisible machine.

Keywords

Savings, Gold, Inflation, Labor, Machine

The More You Polish The More Your Coins Lose

In a certain village, there was a man who was extremely diligent about polishing his coins. Every day, he carefully wiped the coins he earned with a cloth and arranged them in a box. His neighbors also cherished theirs. The villagers believed that these coins would guarantee their future security.

But then, something strange happened. Years passed, and while the number of coins in the box remained the same, the bread that once cost one coin now required two. The man was shocked. "Maybe my coins had become thinner without me realizing it?" he wondered.

In reality, the man's coins hadn't actually become thinner. The village headman was constantly minting new coins in the back of the village and scattering them around. The more coins there were, the less valuable each one became. No matter how carefully the man polished his coins, as long as the headman kept turning the handle in the back, the value of the man's possessions would fade like a heat haze.

Value of what he owned = Effort to polish - Amount increased in the back

The golden room prepared as a refuge

The man thought. "That's it. I'll just exchange them for gold, which doesn't change shape. That way, it won't matter how many new coins the headman mints."

He exchanged all of his thinner coins for gold. Gold was heavy, radiant with a dull luster, and seemed very reliable. But even here, there was a strange twist. To obtain it, one had to go through an "exchange" run by the rich man, where a portion of the man's savings was quietly deducted as a fee.

Furthermore, to safely store the gold, the man needed to rent a specially locked warehouse. To maintain it, the man had to work again to earn new coins. Ironically, the man, who had supposedly found a "refuge" in gold, ended up working even busier than before to maintain it.

The rich man had known all along that people would flee to gold. In fact, he had prepared an escape route for them. From his high window, the rich man watched as people diligently offered new labor, satisfied that they had made a wise choice.

On a hamster wheel that would never stop

In the end, whether the man kept his coins, exchanged them for gold, or entrusted his rights to someone else's business, the outcome was the same.

With the goal of "protecting what's mine," the man racks his brain, gathering information and constantly moving things from one place to the other. However, these very movements are the driving force behind the enormous device the rich man has created. The more anxious the man becomes, and the more "smart" he tries to act, the more powerfully the device rotates, and the rich man's storehouse becomes filled with water.

We believe that the reason the bucket doesn't hold water is because we're not pouring enough. So we learn how to carry water more efficiently and buy bigger buckets. But the fundamental problem lies in the structure itself: tiny holes are drilled into the bottom of the bucket from the beginning, and the water that leaks out is turning someone's waterwheel.

As long as we live in this village, we are not allowed to stop moving. We must keep running faster than the rate at which value disappears. This is the true nature of the endless daily routine that we are led to believe we "chosen of our own free will."

The cost of maintaining security = endless work + submission to the system