Money Money Money Problem!!

When Every Conversation Becomes About Money...

Living in a city like Seoul — the glittering epicenter of late capitalism — it’s impossible to escape money talk.
At first, it feels normal. But then one day, the illusion cracks, and you suddenly realize: everything around you is about money.
Yesterday was that kind of day.
Every conversation — from work to dinner tables — sounded like numbers, investments, valuations, profits.
It felt nauseous.

Working in the crypto industry only amplifies that.
Here, a company’s worth isn’t described in ideas or impact — it’s defined by numbers: “how much we raised,” “what the FDV is,” “who made billions from the latest token.”
Outside of work, conversations turn to credit card bills, car upgrades, international school tuition, someone’s lucky 10K USD profit gain from shorting Bitcoin.
Open Instagram, and it’s just ads, brand deals, and influencers creating thousands of postings to sell you something you never know you wanted.
It’s like the whole world is screaming: MONEY! MONEY! MONEY!!!!!
And honestly, it’s fucking exhausting.

When Passion Meets Private Equity

Recently, I met an old boss who now works at a private equity firm.
One of his portfolios happens to be a small subculture-based fashion brand I used to know back in my early twenties — a brand that started as a genuine community.
Now, it’s become an “asset” to scale, optimize, and sell for 3x its current valuation.
He didn’t know the culture. Didn’t need to care, either.
To him, it was just a line item — a number to manage and multiply, a margin to increase. That conversation stuck with me.

Can people who don’t understand a brand’s soul ever grow it without destroying it?

Does “authentic value” even exist in today’s market — or has every good thing been turned into a monetizable opportunity?

Community-based brands always begin the same way: someone loves something deeply and wants to share that love.
Authenticity builds connection.
Then, one day, private equity or venture capital shows up —

“We’ll help you scale. We’ll give you capital, structure, expertise.”

And inevitably, it all changes.
People who built the brand get laid off.
Culture becomes a KPI.
Someone says, “Pop-ups are trending, you should do one,” and another layer of sincerity gets shaved away.

I know I’m generalizing.
VCs aren’t villains. Founders aren’t saints.
But there’s always tension when genuine passion meets capital.
Like when NTS Radio took investment from Universal Music Group.
They promised “not taking any creative and operational control” but really — can any corporation invest just to support art?

Capital eventually demands monetization.
The texture of the platform will probably eventually change.
And yet, I can’t even blame the founders — without sustainable structure, sincerity alone can’t pay the bills.

The Two Species of Capitalism

Sometimes I feel like “people who make things” and “people who manage money” are two different species. ("Makers" and "Money people" are how I like to call them)
Founders fight in the wild — building from zero to one, improvising, learning by doing.
Investors operate in systems, managing risk, optimizing returns, speaking fluent spreadsheet.
Yet somehow, the latter often look down on the former — calling the founders/builders naïve for not knowing corporate jargon and practises.

But the irony is, the money people are just components in someone else’s system — not creators of worlds, but guardians of frameworks.
I’ve seen big-company people fall into that illusion.
When you handle “trillions in operations” every day, you start thinking that’s your money — as if proximity equals ownership.
That illusion makes them forget what small money feels like.
How much sincerity and sweat live inside so-called "small-scale work".

And it reminds me that the scale of money is always relative.
To the people building indie fashion brands from scratch, a $5~10mil investment feels like a miracle.
To private equity, it’s just another “small-cap portfolio.”
In one world, you’re a success story.
In another, you barely register.

In the End

Maybe someday I’ll cringe rereading this rant.
But today, I’m just tired — tired of the noise, tired of the constant translation of meaning into money and repackaged as profit.

Still, I want to believe that not everything collapses under capitalism. That somewhere, sincerity still counts for something.

I want to believe that I can grow into a dignified version of myself who chooses meaning over money — and gives a full, capital-letter MIDDLE FINGER to it when it tries to own me.