Meaning-Making as Economic Activity
Creative surplus isn’t something you build toward or earn through years of grinding in a job you dislike. It’s the baseline condition of being a thinking, feeling, sense-making creature. The only question is whether you’re curious enough about yourself to recognize it and articulate it into the world.
Most economic thinking about creative work starts from the wrong place. It assumes you have to accumulate something first — time, resources, credentials, permission — before you have anything to offer. You wait until you’re ready. You save up. You eventually have something to give. This framework is broken, and it’s why so many people end up hating their jobs. They’re operating from a permanent condition of not-enough, waiting for a future state that never arrives.
The surplus exists now; it is your voice. It’s in how you see the world, the patterns you notice that other people miss, the way you naturally make sense of complexity. It’s in your curiosity, your intuition, your capacity to hold contradiction. These aren’t luxuries you earn after paying your dues. They’re the material you’re made of.
The work isn’t to create surplus. The work is to get curious about what you already produce, what you already see, and what you already understand that could matter to someone else.
Self-knowledge isn’t a wellness exercise. It’s an economic act.
Self-authorship starts with curiosity; sustained attention to how you actually think, what you care about, and what you gravitate toward when nobody’s watching. Most people never do this work. They’re too busy performing versions of themselves that they think are marketable. They optimize for what they imagine the world wants. They suppress the specific way they see things in favor of something more palatable, more professional, more sellable. And in doing that, they lose access to the one thing they have that’s actually scarce: their particular perspective.
Curiosity about yourself asks: what do I naturally notice? What frames do I use to make sense of the world? What do I understand about complexity, or systems, or human behavior, that I take for granted but other people might need to hear?
It isn’t navel-gazing, but the prerequisite for economic articulation. You can’t describe a frame you haven’t made explicit to yourself. You can’t invite others into a way of seeing that you’re not actively conscious of.
Once you’re curious about yourself, articulation comes naturally and generously. Not the kind most people think about, not into a product, or an artifact. Articulation here means learning to describe the frames you see without needing to make them visible first.
Utility is cheap now. AI can do almost anything utilitarian — write your emails, design your graphics, code your software, optimize your processes. The scarcity isn’t in solutions anymore. It’s in meaning. In coherence. In sense-making. In someone showing you a way to see the world you hadn’t considered before.
Which means the old economy — the one built on selling fixed products, services, and solutions — is already obsolete. It’s just taking time to die.
The new economy is built on something different: the capacity to describe how you make sense of things, and invite people into that sense-making while it’s still forming. Not after you’ve figured it out. While you’re figuring it out. The meaning emerges in the describing, in the conversation, in the shared act of articulation.
This requires a different kind of language. Not the language of clarity and certainty. The language of formation — tentative, alive, specific. You’re not drawing pictures or building frameworks that look like architecture. You’re describing patterns, asking questions, noticing edges, and inviting others to notice what you notice.
When you can articulate a frame in a way that shows someone how to see something they couldn’t see before — that’s where value concentrates. Not in the product. In the coherence of the seeing itself.
Meaning and value are the same thing.
In the old economy, value was what you could sell. Meaning was the purpose, your why. You chased value and hoped meaning would follow. Or you chased meaning and hoped it would translate into money. The split created a permanent low-grade exhaustion — the sense that you were either feeding yourself or feeding your soul, but never quite both at the same time.
When utility is cheap, the split doesn’t hold. Meaning is the value. The frame that helps someone make sense of their world in a way they couldn’t before — that’s the economic unit. That’s what’s scarce. That’s what people pay for.
This breaks zero-sum thinking. Meaning isn’t scarce that way. Your frame doesn’t get smaller when I understand it. It gets sharper. Richer. More real in the world. The more you articulate it, the more coherent it becomes. The more people receive it, the more it develops. Value flows in multiple directions because meaning is generative.
That’s not transactional, but mutual. Both people are changed by the exchange. Neither extracts from the other. The economy that emerges runs on relationships rather than transactions, on proximity rather than scale, on the ongoing practice of seeing together rather than the one-time delivery of a product.
Local economies are the container for this because they’re small enough to see the whole loop. What you give. What returns. How it compounds over time. At scale, all of that becomes invisible, and the transaction reasserts itself. But in a room, in a cohort, in a coaching relationship — you can actually watch meaning move between people. You can see it being built.
Three containers where this work is operating now.
One-on-one coaching through In Process. The most specific and individual, where a single person’s frame is disambiguated and integrated as a form of self/leadership. https://in-process.net/coaching
Critical Business School. A cohort container. People come together around a shared commitment to development — to thinking differently about their work, their role, their capacity to generate. The curriculum isn’t a set of answers. It’s a series of frames practitioners bring from their own seeing. The school works because the learning isn’t delivered. It’s uncovered, individually, while with others. https://criticalbusinessschool.com/
AI Literacy. We’re in the middle of a massive shift in what’s possible, what intelligence means, what human capacity looks like in a world saturated with artificial intelligence. The work isn’t to explain the technology. It’s to make sense of what it means — to articulate frames that help people navigate the shift without losing themselves in it. Meaning-making in real time, at a moment when the stakes are high, and the frames are still forming.
https://criticalbusinessschool.com/ai-literacy
Each operates differently. One-on-one is intimate and developmental. The school builds mutual learning and shared language. AI Literacy is public sense-making at the edge of what we understand.
But all three run on the same principle: meaning as the economic unit. The ongoing practice of seeing clearly, describing that seeing without needing pictures first, and inviting others into the formation of meaning.