Greetings Reader,

Here it comes: the biggest shopping day of the year! The day after American Thanksgiving, otherwise known as “Black Friday.”

I prefer to call Black Friday by its other name: Buy Nothing Day.

Which means that, for me, it’s also Sell Nothing Day.

So don’t buy anything I’m selling this Friday. Every other day, every other day, every other day of the week is fine, yeah.

And if you were thinking about getting on the boycott train, Buy Nothing Day is a great day to cancel your Spotify subscription (they’re running ICE recruitment ads) or choose a minority-owned local business as an alternative for something you might otherwise get at Target.

With the partial exception of Amazon, which I can minimize my reliance on but not entirely renounce, I’m pretty much a full-time boycotter.

I’m convinced that money speaks louder than words. As Disney’s Jimmy Kimmell debacle proved, cancelling corporations works. So like, if you give ‘em a quick, short, sharp shock, they don’t do it again. Dig it?

As for how we earn a living ourselves, it may seem like we have to choose between acquiescing to corporate wage-slavery—get a good job with more pay and you’re okay?—or joining the ranks of online hustlers with personal brands (God only knows it’s not what we would choose to do).

Yoga wisdom offers us a better alternative: spiritual economics.

A core principle of spiritual economics is that decisions should be made based on sustainable well-being rather than solely for the pursuit of profit.

Modern economics measures success in abstract terms of economic growth. Traditional spiritual economics measures success in tangible terms of economic prosperity.

This verse from the Srimad Bhagavatam provides a great illustration of yoga wisdom’s standard of economic prosperity:

So how has humanity fallen under the spell of artificial scarcity, technological idolatry, and the delusion that happiness can be engineered through consumption? One answer is that modern economics relies on the objectification of nature.

And we are part of nature, which means that modern economics objectifies us, too. The commodification of worker-consumers, along with the objectification of Mother Nature, is a product of modern economic impersonalism.

The opposite of economic impersonalism is dharmic personalism.

Dharmic personalism points to spiritual personhood as the central feature of reality and aligns personal, social, and ecological relationships with universal organizing principles of cosmic order.

Dharmic Personalism prioritizes harmony over acquisition, community interdependence over corporate dependence, and purpose-driven roles aligned with an individual’s qualities over obligatory debt-slavery as a dehumanized cog in a corporate machine.

The spiritual economics of Dharmic Personalism circulates wealth as a sacred trust, supports alignment of work with a person’s natural aptitudes and inclinations, and ensures that our consumption honors the sanctity of life.

This may all sound like pie in the sky, but it’s safe to say that the current system is unsustainable, the old system wasn’t working, and it’s time for us to create something new.

Perhaps we should look to something old—in fact, ancient—for a new way of thinking about economics that prioritizes personhood, aligns with nature, and measures success in tangible terms of economic prosperity.

Wishing you all good fortune,

- Hari-k

P.S.: I pulled many of the ideas I’ve shared in this email from my upcoming class, “Enchanted Economics,” part of my Dharma Rebellion series. If you want to explore these ideas further, you’re welcome to drop in on this class, live on Zoom this Wednesday at 7:00 pm EST. The suggested donation is $15. CLICK HERE to register.