GDP: The Broken Compass of Progress

Last week at breakfast, I sat with a table full of brilliant people, but one guy stole the room. Charismatic, passionate, fire in his eyes, preaching financial freedom like it was gospel. He wasn’t just talking about money — he was teaching, breaking down the game, showing people how to escape the cycle of struggle. And judging by his massive YouTube following, people listened.

Everything he said made sense. Every word was well-intentioned. And yet, the more he spoke, the more my stomach twisted into knots.

Because beneath all that passion, beneath the goodness of what he was teaching, was something deeper. A problem we never talk about.

He was living in the Dominican Republic. But his wealth? It came from real estate in the U.S.

Somewhere right now, a family in the U.S. is working their butts off, likely living paycheck to paycheck, bleeding a massive chunk of their income just to keep a roof over their heads. And I’m not talking about a little pinch — we’re talking about a gaping wound. In many cities, it’s not uncommon to see families shelling out over half their hard-earned cash on rent. Think about that. Half. Gone. Not to build equity, not to invest in their future, but just to have a place to exist. And that money? It doesn’t stay. It doesn’t cycle back into their community… It flows outward, funding someone else’s dream while they stay trapped.

We are told this is normal. And many renters are truly trapped. Did you know that, according to Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, over 22 million renter households in the US are considered “cost-burdened,” meaning they’re forced to spend more than 30% of their income on housing? And for millions of those, it’s even worse — they’re paying over 50%! That’s not just unsustainable; it’s a recipe for financial ruin. It’s a system that actively prevents people from getting ahead, from building any kind of security. And the landlord, maybe living large in the Dominican Republic, is the winner. GDP says, “Excellent! The economy is growing!”

But is it?

Is this really sustainable?

We’re taught that this is success. That making money — even at the expense of others — is not just smart, but admirable. Because we measure everything in dollars.

A Dollar Bill — The Tool That Became the Master

Now, don’t get me wrong — I love money. It’s a tool, a powerful one, a necessary one. But that’s all it is. A tool. Just like a hammer or a shovel. The difference? No one worships a hammer. No one shapes entire societies around the accumulation of shovels. But money? We’ve built an entire belief system around it, turned it into the ultimate marker of success, power, and security.

Look at land. We’re told that owning land is the key to stability, to wealth, to a future. That’s what drives people to spend their whole lives chasing property, not because they want to care for it, but because they’ve been told it’s their only way out of the rat race.

But what happens when land stops being a place to live and becomes just another speculative asset? You get a tiny fraction of the population hoarding more and more of it, while most people can barely afford a home.

And GDP? GDP says this is success.

GDP looks at a family struggling to pay rent, at neighborhoods drained of wealth, at land turned into a financial chess piece and says, Yes. The economy is thriving.

Still think this is progress?

GDP: The Path to Destruction

Imagine a world where every time you poisoned a river, clear-cut a forest, or turned a thriving ecosystem into a dust bowl, you got richer. Sounds like some dystopian nightmare, right? But that’s exactly how the global economy works.

GDP doesn’t care how money moves — just that it does. Look at the Amazon rainforest, the lungs of our planet. It’s being slashed and burned at a terrifying rate, not for some noble cause, but for cattle ranching and soy farming. Why? Because there’s money in it. There’s a global demand for cheap beef and soy, and GDP loves that demand.

GDP sees the bulldozers ripping through ancient trees, it sees the fires consuming biodiversity, it sees the land being converted into vast monoculture plantations, and it registers it all as positive economic activity. The sale of the timber, the export of the beef and soy, the profits made by multinational corporations — all of it gets added to the plus column. But the cost? The irreplaceable loss of biodiversity, the disruption of the water cycle, the displacement of indigenous communities, the release of massive amounts of carbon dioxide contributing to climate change? GDP doesn’t see any of that. It’s blind to the devastation. It’s like celebrating the sale of a priceless antique while ignoring the fact that the house it came from burned to the ground. And they call that sucess?

The same logic applies everywhere. A population plagued by illness? That’s a financial win. More medical bills, more pharmaceuticals, more insurance claims — all signs of “economic growth.” But a thriving, healthy society, one that doesn’t rely on endless treatment? That barely registers.

And what about the environment? A clean river holds no measurable value, but pollute it with chemicals and suddenly there’s economic activity — lawsuits, clean-up crews, government contracts. The economy surges while the planet suffocates.

Inequality follows the same pattern. GDP doesn’t differentiate between a billionaire buying a fourth vacation home and a family working three jobs just to keep the lights on. It only sees the dollar signs moving, never questioning who benefits or what kind of society those numbers actually represent.

GDP isn’t a measure of prosperity — it’s a rigged scoreboard, designed to keep us running in circles, thinking we’re winning while the ground beneath us erodes. Literally erodes.

And if we don’t change the way we measure success, it’s going to drive us straight off a cliff. We’re chasing the wrong numbers, worshipping a false idol. So, what’s the real measure of a thriving society? What’s the foundation upon which everything else is built?

It’s not hidden in some complex algorithm or financial instrument. It’s right beneath our feet. It’s the soil.

What If There Is Another Way?

What if we measured the success of a state or community not by their GDP, but by the health and vitality of the ecosystem they lived in? And what’s the ultimate indicator of a thriving ecosystem, one that benefits us humans, not in a human-centric way, but as a natural byproduct?

I would argue it’s the soil beneath our feet — the very ground we stand on. Your soles are your direct connection to the energetic flow of the planet, where your body communicates and connects with the great mother, our Earth. (I could go down a rabbit hole about how the invention of the synthetic sole has contributed to our disconnection, but let’s stay focused on the soil itself).

Did you know that the word “human” comes from the word “soil”? At the heart of life on Earth lies soil, and at the heart of soil lies humus — the dark, fertile substance that holds the key to ecosystem health, agriculture, and even human survival. Humus is the gold standard of fertility — the stuff that makes soil capable of sustaining vibrant life. It’s what distinguishes soil from mere dirt, clay, or sand.

And what does humus do? It’s a nutrient-rich powerhouse, acting as a slow-release reservoir for plants. This isn’t just a nice-to-have; studies have shown a direct link between declining soil health and lower levels of essential nutrients in our food. It provides incredible water retention, absorbing and holding moisture like a sponge, preventing drought. Healthy soil is crucial for managing our increasingly scarce water resources, acting as a natural filter and reservoir. It creates the structure for soil, that loose, aerated texture that plants love. And, our favorite word: carbon! Humus is nature’s most effective and efficient tool for sequestering carbon, stabilizing the climate. In fact, soil holds more carbon than the atmosphere and all plant life combined — a critical factor in mitigating climate change. A healthy ecosystem thrives on biodiversity, and humus is a microbial haven — an underground web of life, supporting fungi, bacteria, and earthworms that keep soil alive. A single handful of thriving soil, rich in humus, contains more living organisms than there are humans on the planet!

Now that you’re sold on the wonders of humus, let’s circle back to humans. You’re probably catching my drift. The word “human” derives from the word “humus.” The Latin homo is believed to stem from the Proto-Indo-European, meaning “earthly being” or “one of the earth.” The Latin humus (earth, ground) is directly related to homo/humanus. This is also where we get “humility” — to be humble (from humilis) means to be close to the ground, to recognize one’s smallness in the grand scheme of things.

My favorite definition of the word “human” is Animated soil.

We come from soil, and we go back to the soil — at least, our human form does.

Don’t you think there’s a direct correlation between the health of the soil and the health of the human? Don’t you think that if the soil is thriving, we will be thriving?

What a world it would be if we measured our success by the success of our soil! But did you know that our soil is depleting so fast that some are referring to it as “Soil Extinction”? Do you think there’s a planet where humans exist, but humus doesn’t?

We talk about water, but we have the same amount of water on this planet that we had a million years ago. The planet is, in fact, 2/3 water and 1/3 land. Do you know what manages our water, what cleanses it, filters it, stores it, replenishes aquifers, and rivers? The soil.

We talk about carbon. You know what releases more carbon into the air than anything else? The erosion and complete destruction of soil. Do you know what captures and sequesters carbon more than anything else? Yes, you guessed it: soil!

So why don’t we do something about it? Why don’t we change our economic system from GDP to Proof of Soil? Why don’t we secure our money — our favorite green dollar bill, the world’s reserve currency, — to something real? What if we tied our economic well-being not to a system fueled by war and extraction, but to something directly tied to our planetary well-being? Our soil. The humus. The human. How about we humble ourselves and honor that which gives us life?

The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) rewards extraction and ignores the long-term consequences. SoilDAO proposes a fundamentally different approach: Proof of Soil. This isn’t just a new metric; it’s a new economic engine, powered by regeneration, decentralized stewardship, and the inherent value of thriving ecosystems.

Imagine land where value isn’t just about location and buildings, but about the living humus it contains. Imagine a system where every improvement in soil health — more carbon captured, more water retained, more life supported — translates into tangible economic value, creating a powerful, self-reinforcing cycle of regeneration. This isn’t a utopian dream; it’s the logical, inevitable future, built on the transparency and security of Web3. A future where human well-being and humus are inextricably linked.

What if land was not owned but stewarded in a decentralized way, and the highest privilege was to be entrusted with the stewardship of land for the benefit of the soil? Because as the soil thrives, we all thrive, including our economic engine.

You might think this sounds a bit ambitious, or even utopian. And yet, here we are, building it. The next economic system, the one that makes sense, the only way forward. Join us. We need you. For the first time in human history, we have the tools to make this happen, and we are making it happen. It is happening!

The human creature is the only creature on this planet that can rebuild our humus at the speed that is needed to turn this ship around. And if we tie our economic well-being to the well-being of our planet, we can build a future we will be glad to leave to the generations to come.

I challenge you to show me a more pressing problem that we are facing as humanity, and I challenge you to show me a more resilient solution than this.

We might have artificial superintelligence and flying autonomous vehicles and humanoid robots that do everything for us, but if we run out of humus, we run out of humans. It’s a simple formula.

Come help us build the inevitable future. Find out how.

Want to dive deeper into the science and solutions? Reach out — let’s connect.