Lance,

You have a very good anecdotal and observational appreciation for the situation, so the next step is exploring the mechanisms and feeback processes at work.

Here are a couple of essays, where I examine my own insights. This is about the economics;

https://medium.com/dialogue-and-discourse/the-worm-in-the-apple-of-modern-capitalism-a46081000d5a

This goes into the deeper metaphysical and physiological foundations;

https://medium.com/predict/peeling-the-paradigm-1ceab7e774b0

In a nutshell,;

People are linear and goal oriented, while nature and markets are cyclical and circular, so while markets need money to circulate, people see it as the signal to extract and store. Requiring ever more to be added and ever more corrosive ways to store what has been extracted.

While we assume money is a commodity that can be mined or manufactured, like gold, or bitcoin, it is a contract in which the asset is backed by a debt. So to store the asset, similar amounts of debt have to be generated. Which means this religion of wealth accumulation requires an economy of debt.

Econ 101 says money is both medium of exchange and store of value, but a medium is dynamic, while a store is static. Blood is a medium, fat is a store. Roads are a medium, parking lots are a store. They are not actually synonymous.

The functionality of money is its fungibility. We own it like we own the section of road we are using, or the fluids passing through our bodies. It is a public utility and has to be recognized as such. Then people would respect it more and desire it less. Like we respect and need water, but we don't want to drown in it.

Logistically the government could tax out what it currently borrows, then people would have to find other ways to store value.

The fact is that there isn't the investment potential to save what we feel we need, but we do save for many of the same reasons, so the concept of the commons will eventually have to be resurrected. Which isn't socialism, as society needs both public and private assets. The question is figuring out which is which.

People who love money and hate government interference have as much sense as the fish that loves the worm, but hates the hook. They are two side of the same creature. Develop your own social, communal, cultural mediums, if you don't respect the source of the national one.

The irony of our individualistic ethos is the resulting atomized culture is more easily controlled by institutional authority and mediated by a parasitic financial system. Networks, organic, social, economic, matter as much as the nodes inhabiting them.

I could go on, but this is the short version. Personally I'm old enough and set in my ways enough, that this is just ideas I'm handing out to whomever might find them useful and wish to incorporate and build on them.