Owned: The Price of a Responsible Life

The Money Lie is an unflinching excavation of the quiet tyranny that money exerts over our modern identities. It begins with a simple premise—that we were told money was just a tool, but it now dictates the tempo, ethics, and architecture of our lives. From our alarm clocks to our most sacred relationships, money isn’t simply part of the story; it is the story’s narrator, editor, and final judge.
The book dismantles the illusion that we're in control of our financial lives. Instead, it shows how deeply embedded systems of scarcity, performance, and debt shape not just what we do, but who we think we are. Productivity masquerades as virtue. Wealth impersonates wisdom. And the absence of money is treated as moral failure.
There is no advice here, no listicles or tidy conclusions. What the book offers is awareness—deliberately uncommercial, structurally jagged, emotionally claustrophobic. You will not emerge soothed or inspired. You will emerge awake, if slightly disoriented. You’ll see how the endless chase for “enough” slowly becomes a life of quiet servitude, how your ambitions were often architected by invisible market logic, and how opting out isn’t escape, but resistance.
This is not about budgeting. It’s about reclamation. Reclaiming time from the spreadsheet of optimization. Reclaiming worth from credit scores and salaries. Reclaiming your soul from the auction of attention.
In a world that sells performance as presence and burnout as success, The Money Lie asks the only question that still matters: What if your life is already too expensive to afford?