Kampala cityMy Nyamiyaga buddy told me how his Shs 50,000 disappears every day. He cannot trace how it vanishes. I asked him if he is working to live or living to work. This is worrisome because it turns the common life advice upside down and instead, “we live to work not work to live.” This suggests that a person’s main purpose and joy come from their job rather than their personal life. We joked about how our hard-earned money disappears, and we put all the blame on capitalism. Work must dignify man. But we all know it has fuelled innovation, expanded markets, created jobs and lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. The phone in your pocket, the medicine that saves lives, the transport systems that connect cities and awesome technologies. In one way or another, products of market economies driven by competition and enterprise. That is fine, but the more urgent question of our time is not whether capitalism works, but whether it is working for us. Wealth was meant to improve human life. Instead, human life increasingly revolves around the pursuit of wealth. On average, people spend roughly one-third of their lives at work. Every hour is expected to produce value. The concept of we are open 24/7. We rush from one commitment to another, measuring our days by outputs. Even when we are physically away from work, work rarely leaves us. We answer emails late into the night, respond to WhatsApp messages during family dinners, chase clients on weekends and spend holidays cultivating business relationships. The first questions we ask when meeting someone is no longer, “Who are you, how are you?” but, “What do you do, where do you work?” Our occupations have quietly become our identities. An economy is a tool. It is not a civilisation. It should serve society rather than define it. Economic growth is essential, but so are healthy families. Productivity matters, but so do friendships. Investment is necessary, but so is environmental stewardship. Wealth creation deserves celebration, but not at the expense of compassion or human dignity, family, climate, morals, income inequality. Profit is an excellent servant, but it is a dangerous master. The greatest societies are not necessarily those that produce the most goods. They are those that produce good people, citizens who care for one another, families that remain strong, communities that trust each other and institutions that place human person flourishing above relentless accumulation. If an economic system leaves us with fuller bank accounts but emptier homes, homeless people, lost hope in pursuit of labour, unemployment, faster economies but slower relationships, greater consumption but diminished contentment, cleaner balance sheets but dirtier rivers, disappearing swamps and this beautiful nature, then perhaps the issue is no longer economic. It is profoundly human. We discuss climate change, biodiversity loss and environmental degradation as isolated crises, and then have come up with something interesting called climate financing. What are we financing? These things are closely linked to an economic culture that rewards endless production, endless extraction and endless consumption. If you are not wasting away producing, you are being wasted away consuming. The average person is exposed to between 4,000 and 10,000 advertisements every day, many of them carefully designed using behavioural science to shape purchasing decisions. Global consumer spending now exceeds $60 trillion annually, more than four times what it was in the early 1970s. See how much we are spending on our socials, on your smartphones. At the policy level, we need to make capitalism more humane, encouraging businesses to create decent jobs, protecting families and the environment, rewarding innovation, and ensuring that economic growth improves everyday life, not just balance sheets. Wealth should ultimately make life better, not merely busier. Socially responsible capitalism. And perhaps the future will not belong to societies that simply create more wealth, but to those wise enough to remember what wealth was meant to serve in the first place. And my Nyamiyaga friend’s Shs 50,000 won’t keep disappearing. Perhaps we need to stop capitalism so that life can continue. The author is a concerned citizen.The post Have we had enough of capitalism? appeared first on The Observer Media Ltd.