Is Right Livelihood Possible in 2025?

In 2023, when I was interviewing for my first “corporate” job as a middle aged adult, I spoke of “right livelihood” and a mission driven approach to my work. Interviews with global directors and even the CMO contained that language and they all nodded along. I’d read the company’s “Career” page where someone had appropriated all the feel good language for a healthy workplace. I thought we were in alignment.

Spoiler alert— we were not. The job was the opposite of right livelihood. It was a fast track to an early grave for someone like me. A woman who lived her entire adult life outside the box and begrudgingly participating in capitalism when bills needed to be paid or passion projects needed funding.

To say I have a tumultuous relationship with modern approaches to money, value exchange and capitalistic economic systems reinforced by patriarchs keeping the colonization approach to labor alive is a gross understatement. 

But here’s the catch, in 2025, there’s simply no way around the mechanisms of the oligarch’s system. Extraction is embedded in almost everything. Every potential job or paying project requires me to choose which aspects of right livelihood must be placed in a lock box for a hot minute while I generate labor to produce funds to stay alive. And even the ones that I believe are in alignment can easily be derailed when the Spector of the patriarch arrives out of left field. 

The decentralized industry I’ve devoted the last decade of my life to is a prime example. When I first found blockchains and Bitcoin, it was in the aftermath of the housing collapse of 2008 and Occupy Wall Street. A movement of hackers and anarchists created an alternative economic system. I was intrigued. The technology also enabled peer to peer messaging that was encrypted, which was my first hand on experience with the tech in 2012. Blockchains can also power governance and require those who work within the ecosystem to take action from a place of complete transparency. But, the same tech that many adhered to for a transparent and autonomous existence also allows for money launderers and criminals to flourish in the shadows of a complex technology driven by cryptography. 

While that corporation at the beginning of this essay did hire me and they were one of the biggest organizations in crypto with trusted products I’d used since my entry into the industry in 2017, I also found quite a few nefarious actors hiding in those shadows of a massive centralized corporation cosplaying autonomy and decentralization. I was raised to speak up and when I was hired, I was completing a Bachelors degree in Yoga, focusing on conscious leadership. I followed the proper “protocol” for whistleblowing against criminal actors in my workplace. And I was removed swiftly with my entire division’s leadership, while the criminal was promoted. 

And that is just one tiny little instance of an integrity vacuum from my personal experience in Corporate America for all of 2 years. Now imagine the sheer scale of corruption across the entire systems of labor we are forced to work within to play this real life version of the Hunger Games  in 2025. 

After floating through one more wildly toxic Lord of the Flies crypto startup, I spun out 11 months ago and was unsure which way was up or down. My country is collapsing rapidly and the “cost of living” is not sustainable for anyone. It requires that sacrifice of our best selves in order to participate in the Empire’s game to keep the lights on and food in the fridge.

Unsure of where to look next for a job or to return to client work from my pre-crypto days, I decided to volunteer in the impact side of the Ethereum ecosystem. I floated in and out of many orgs and many communities and each time I found myself in a similar situation of sacrifice. I see extraction everywhere, we just call it different things in the impact space. For the most part, that extraction comes in the form of free labor. The leveraging of volunteers who hope, one day, to find a way to make some of that income necessary to pay those bills again. We call the extraction fancy names and wrap it in complex financial infrastructure. 

But it’s extraction all the same. 

So, where does someone like me turn? How does someone like me, an artist and yogi forced to play the game of the empirical extractor for survival, turn to exchange her labor for money that will allow her to keep producing art, building community and live in a way that reflects her values? I have vague ideas, but no concrete vision. The system is too broken to plan accordingly.

And I know I’m not alone. I see the voices and the questions being asked of people across the various social algorithms I can still stomach and I know these questions need answers that are almost impossible to find right now. Those types of answers thrown people down a canyon of inquiry and self-assessment that leads to exiting the corrupt systems the oligarchs need us all trapped within to remain in power. 

Those answers are considered heretic in late stage capitalism. Those answers have no space in systems that refuse to decolonize themselves for humanity to survive accelerated collapse.

I’ve been exploring this line of thought for almost 2 decades in my writing online. I truly don’t expect to find the answers I seek anytime soon in our current system. I do expect that as we begin to wake up to the real answers of right livelihood, more people will choose to exit this system and build their own answers to a healthier way of creating sustenance. A circular and regenerative system of self-creation that serves their communities, brings them joy and allows us NOT to succumb to the powers of the oligarch and serving their heartless and soulless agenda.