Author’s Note
Every tool we have examined so far could be held in the hand or at least drawn on a blueprint: a hammer, a wall, a ruler. Today’s instrument is invisible. It is a cavity—an engineered absence that tugs at everything around it like a black hole. We have been trained to praise its drag. We call it ambition when it yanks us out of bed at six, discipline when it keeps us in fluorescent cubicles, innovation when it extracts a new commodity from an old comfort.
But if you stand close enough, you can feel the suction behind the slogans. Hunger has been weaponized, mass‑produced, gift‑wrapped, and financed on installment plans. This essay names the vacuum, follows the pipelines that feed it, and asks whether we have the nerve to cut the line before we are all pulled inside.
Proceed only if you are willing to feel the air thin.
~Dom
The Man Who Couldn’t Stop Eating
The myth of Erysichthon opens not with hunger but with impatience. He paces his megaron, dreaming of a banquet hall so immense that foreign kings will feel small inside it. Ordinary lumber is too common; he craves divinity in the grain. So he marches into Demeter’s sacred grove, where every tree has swallowed decades of prayers, and orders the axes raised. His own men tremble—cutting a holy oak is a form of treason against the soil—but their lord brandishes the first blow himself, embedding iron deep enough that sap and garland petals drip together.
A nymph bound to the oak screams as her lifeline splinters. The sound warps birdsong; even the breeze retreats. Demeter arrives disguised as a pauper, warning that no feast can fill the stomach of a man who empties the world to set the table. Erysichthon replies with laughter and another swing. The goddess straightens, drops her disguise, and whispers a single word:κέκλυθι—feed.
His punishment is subtle at first. Without hunger a man does not notice normal appetite. But at dawn he eats a loaf, then another, then the day’s stores, and still his hands shake for more. Servants sell cattle. Jewelers melt heirlooms. Currency becomes bread becomes nothing. Erysichthon pawns his mother’s crown, his father’s swords, his daughter Mestra—who shapeshifts to escape each buyer, only to be resold by the father who measures love in calories. At last he sets his teeth in his own shoulder. The legend says he consumed himself headfirst, so the last thing he tasted was his heart.
Myths exaggerate to illuminate. The Greeks knew land theft, class addiction, and the physics of desire expanding to fill whatever container morality once imposed. They wrote one cautionary monster; we cloned him on an industrial scale.
Recommended Listening:
A Society of Erysichthons
Drive any interstate in the United States and drift down the next off‑ramp. Within half a mile you will usually pass five billboards. Four advertise food whose photographs glisten like wet plastic. The fifth warns that obesity kills—funded, more often than not, by the same hospital chain whose bariatric‑surgery wing has already eclipsed pediatrics. Step through the double glass doors of a quick‑service restaurant and a dopamine algorithm engages: sodium‑optimized smell vents, LED menus that highlight limited‑time items in the same cortisol‑spiking red used on slot‑machine lights. The fryer oil is filtered twice per shift, not for health but for color—darker browns photograph poorly on Instagram.
A 2023 umbrella review in The BMJ found that diets dominated by ultra‑processed foods raise the risk of early death by up to 51 percent, yet nearly 60 percent of U.S. caloric intake now arrives in crinkly film. Food scientists openly describe a bliss‑point—the ratio of fat to sugar that bypasses satiety hormones. Hunger, once a signal, has become an interface for data extraction. Your cravings are the focus group; your bloodstream is the usability lab.
When arteries clog, the system offers a second course: statins, GLP‑1 injectables, bed‑ridden CPAP rentals. It is a perfect closed loop—first create the wound, then lease the bandage at interest.
The sacred grove of our era is soil biology and gut microbiota, clear‑cut by marketing departments that will later sell us probiotics like indulgences in a medieval church.
The Lottery and the Lie of Escape
You probably know someone who plays: the warehouse shift‑lead who never takes vacation because the overtime keeps the heat on; the retiree running a grocery register for insurance; the cousin who jokes that a scratch‑off is her “401‑k with better odds.” On the predawn coffee run they slide a crumpled bill across the counter for two tickets—not because they expect to win but because, for the five‑minute gap between purchase and reveal, the future tastes like helium.
State lotteries bottle that fleeting altitude and sell it by the billion. Adults in the poorest ZIP codes spend roughly four times more of their income on tickets than those in the wealthiest. The result is an $88‑billion siphon that markets itself as self‑improvement while behaving like a tax on despair.
Communities lose twice. Money that might have circulated through local diners and hardware stores is routed to distant ad firms and bondholders; the chronic gut‑punch of near‑miss failure erodes civic trust and breeds the physics of quick fixes—payday loans, rent‑to‑own furniture, “Buy Now Pay Later” apps. Hope, like hunger, is infinitely renewable provided the last dose never satisfies.
Retirement, Eroded
A generation ago the pay stub itself whispered security: pension deductions, employer‑paid health care, a promise that loyalty would be repaid with dignity. Today ask a barista, coder, or ICU nurse what their sunset years look like and watch the pupils dilate.
Vanguard’s 2024 How America Saves report puts the median 401(k) at just under $36,000—barely a year of assisted‑living rent. One algorithmic sell‑off can vaporize a decade of compound interest; cable pundits suggest skipping lattes and driving ride‑share after hours to “close the gap.” Risk once pooled across companies and generations now rests on the spine of each individual earner.
The collateral damage is communal. Seniors cling to frontline positions for health insurance, sealing bottlenecks below them. Counties hemorrhage property‑tax revenue as fixed‑income elders downsize from owner to renter to unhoused. Younger workers, witnessing the breach of promise, treat institutions like temp agencies and spend trust accordingly.
Erysichthon mortgaged his future by eating it; we mortgage ours by wagering that roulette will spin our way before the bread runs out.
Prices That Never Fall
When the first container ships idled outside Long Beach in 2020, executives stepped to the microphone like weather forecasters describing a storm beyond mortal control. Supply‑chain disruption, they intoned, as if the phrase were a hurricane name. Bread, cars, couch cushions—everything would cost more, perhaps for years. Yet quarterly reports soon revealed a different barometer: operating costs rose, but mark‑ups rose faster. A study by the Groundwork Collaborative found that 53 percent of post‑pandemic inflation could be traced to fatter profit margins rather than higher wages or raw‑material shortages.
Price hikes became a moral relay race. Once one brand blamed container shortages to justify a ten‑percent bump, competitors grabbed the baton and sprinted past fifteen. Shareholders applauded, C‑suite bonuses indexed to earnings per share ballooned, and consumers—told that everyone was suffering—shouldered the difference.
Now, with inflation trending downward, media pundits cheer the slowing ascent as if it were descent. The statistical slope flattens; the summit remains. Asking whether sticker prices might fall is treated like heresy—an offense against the invisible hand. No board of directors wants to report a revenue retreat, no matter how temporary, when executive compensation milestones hang on topline growth.
The playbook repeats whenever disaster provides camouflage. Hurricanes justify lumber surcharges long after sawmills reopen. A drought in the Midwest becomes grounds for global grain premiums even once silos refill. And the 2025 tariff tantrum—politicians slapping double‑digit duties on imported goods to prove ideological muscle—arrives as a gift‑wrapped pretext. Before the levies even take effect, retailers quietly print new tags, arguing that anticipated costsmust be baked in early. When the tariffs lift, the new baseline lingers like a scar.
This is scarcity repackaged as opportunity: squeeze wallets during crisis, cement the gains during recovery, cite investor expectations as the iron law preventing reversal. In boardrooms the tactic is called pricing power. On street corners it looks like families choosing between rent and prescription refills.
The Homes We Cannot Have
In the 1990s every sitcom seemed to feature a single‑income household with a driveway and a shaggy dog. That cultural backdrop—reinforced by mortgage‑lender jingles and high‑school economics classes—taught two generations to view a detached home not as a luxury but as the first rung of responsible adulthood. Then came the 2008 housing crash. The bubble popped, foreclosures spiked, bankers testified, and politicians promised reform. But a decade and a half later the wound has not closed; it has been monetized.
Average wages since 2008 have grown roughly 15 percent after inflation. Median home prices have more than doubled in the same window, pushing the price‑to‑income ratio past 7.8—territory unseen since the robber‑baron era. Low interest rates briefly camouflaged the gap, but when those rates climbed, monthly payments rocketed into the stratosphere. The house did not merely drift out of reach; it shot past orbit.
Into that vacuum marched institutional investors armed with balance‑sheet artillery. Private‑equity funds deploy algorithms that scour MLS listings, triggering instant all‑cash bids far above asking price, sight unseen. In 2024 these entities purchased one in every five single‑family homes sold nationwide—and rented them back at increases triple the pace of local wage growth. The American myth once pictured a young couple touring an affordable starter home; the modern reality is a hedge fund’s LLC outbidding them by $40,000 before they can schedule a viewing.
The fallout ripples outward. Millennials delay marriage because a two‑bedroom apartment already gulps half their combined take‑home pay; Gen‑Zers joke that pets are the only dependents they can afford. Birth rates fall, school‑district budgets shrink, local diners shutter for lack of weekday lunch traffic. Homeownership—long the mechanism for intergenerational wealth—is replaced by a subscription model in which equity accrues upward to remote shareholders.
A single‑earner household is now an antique concept, displayed alongside rotary phones in nostalgia ads. Yet the cultural script still whispers that failing to buy a house signals personal deficiency, not structural sabotage. Couples find themselves staring at Zillow listings like shop windows on a closed mall, running the numbers until they realize the math is a practical joke. If they cannot plant roots, they ask, how do they grow anything else? Family planning becomes risk assessment; romance becomes an actuarial table.
Demeter’s sacred timber, once felled for a banquet hall, is now milled into equity tranches. The feast consumes the guests before they cross the threshold.
The Final Addiction: Pain as Product
Pain should have been a signal—stop, heal, rest. Instead it became a revenue stream. Beginning in the late‑1990s, pharmaceutical companies deployed the most aggressive sales campaign in medical history. Purdue Pharma alone hosted more than 40,000 “educational” lunches for prescribers, rewarding high‑volume clinics with Caribbean conferences politely labeled as continuing‑education credits. Internal memos celebrated “$40 millions from the Boston region—keep identifying ‘supercore’ docs.” Sales reps ranked physicians by dispense rate; bonuses scaled with milligrams.
The model spread. By 2012 the average American prescription equaled 82 opioid pills per resident, enough to medicate every adult nonstop for three weeks. Pill‑mill hubs—densely clustered storefront clinics—popped up along highways, doling out scripts for cash. Regulators, short‑staffed and politically pressured, moved slower than FedEx trucks carrying boxes of 80‑milligram OxyContin straight from distributers to counties with more tablets than people.
Insurance architecture locked the loop. A month of physical therapy cost plans three times more than thirty days of generic hydrocodone, so prior‑authorization algorithms steered patients toward pills over rehab. When dosage tolerance climbed, insurers demanded documented treatment failure before approving safer—but costlier—alternatives. Subscription pain became the actuarial best‑practice.
Then the crackdown came: pharmacies capped dispenses, databases flagged shoppers, brands reformulated pills to deter crushing. Supply shrank; need did not. Street heroin stepped in, soon displaced by fentanyl twenty‑times stronger and cheap enough to mail. Overdose rates vaulted; cartels needed fewer poppy fields—just a suitcase lab and an e‑commerce front.
Public discourse pivoted to blame the user. Addicts were caricatured as weak or criminal, an easier story than confronting the pyramid of incentives that sharpened their craving. Prosecutors targeted dealers at the bottom rung; CEOs negotiated nine‑digit fines payable in future profits. Doctors caught in the quota system lost licenses, while the marketing executives who set those quotas retired with stock options.
Communities paid in funerals and foster‑care surges. County budgets buckled under naloxone purchases and neonatal‑abstinence wards. Yet Wall Street analysts called addiction‑treatment centers a “growth vertical.”Private‑equity firms bought rehab chains, charging $60,000 per 28‑day stay and relying on relapse for repeat business. Pain and its cure—both billable, both privatized.
Meanwhile the root injuries—unpaid leave, workplace strain, lack of preventive care—remain. Treating them would require systemic investment that no quarterly spreadsheet can amortize. Pills, even lethal ones, stay cheaper than justice.
Full Circle: The Void Was No Accident
Fast food hollows the body, lotteries hollow the wallet, greed‑flation hollows the paycheck, speculative housing hollows the neighborhood, and opioids hollow the soul. Each sector claims to heal the wound it slices open; together they operate like a single organism ingesting its own organs one at a time, reporting record gains as vital signs flicker.
Critics call this spiral late‑stage capitalism—decay framed as destiny. The ledgers argue intent. Scarcity is not merely discovered; it is drafted, budgeted, and invoiced.
- Insulin. Three manufacturers control ninety percent of the U.S. market. Internal e‑mails uncovered in congressional hearings reveal shadow pricing—coordinated hikes within weeks of each other. Executives joked, “Test the ceiling, then raise the floor.” Fourteen percent of diabetics now ration doses, courting preventable death.
- Water. Bottling giants pay minor permit fees to siphon millions of gallons from public aquifers—then sell it back at three‑thousand‑fold markup. Lobbyists praise “consumer choice” while sinkholes bloom across farm counties.
- War. A RAND brief calculates that every $1 billion in U.S. arms exports sustains 5,800 jobs at home. Peace is thus reframed as a layoff event; artillery becomes workforce development.
- Environment. Carbon offsets let polluters buy indulgences while razing forests set aside for Indigenous subsistence. The atmosphere tallies the joke; glaciers archive the punch‑line.
These are not glitches; they are line items. Each catastrophe lands on a spreadsheet where accountants ask, How many deaths per margin point? Thus far, the market shrugs, answers more, and the cycle refreshes.
This is the banquet hall Erysichthon wished for—vast enough to seat an empire, fueled by the sacred grove stacked as firewood. The table lifts fork to flesh without ever tasting its own name.
Starving the Vacuum, Seed by Seed
Erysichthon’s fate warns us that appetite, left unexamined, can become a predator wearing our own skin. Our era’s version of the curse is sophisticated enough to feel like ordinary life—but every choice that feeds or withholds oxygen from the system still begins with us.
First, cultivate awareness. Trace the supply chain behind what you buy, the interest rate behind what you borrow, the side‑effects hidden behind what you swallow. “Enough” is not asceticism—it is a conscious line that keeps desire from turning feral. Cooking fresh food, mending what still works, sharing knowledge freely: these daily habits loosen the vacuum’s grip one quiet notch at a time.
Second, act together. Join a tenants’ association, a mutual‑aid network, a local credit union. Vote for officials who treat housing and healthcare as public infrastructure instead of private windfalls. Support legislation that reins in predatory pricing and ties executive compensation to long‑term community outcomes, not quarter‑to‑quarter spikes.
Third, design alternatives. Imagine prosperity measured by flood‑proof neighborhoods, evenings free of second jobs, elders who can afford preventive care, children who grow up without the background hum of scarcity. Cooperatives, land trusts, community gardens, and restorative taxation are not utopian dreams; they are working prototypes scattered across the map, waiting to be scaled.
None of this requires torches or shattered glass. It requires sustained attention, principled spending, and the patience to build scaffolding where the vacuum once sucked value away. As more of us redraw our personal and civic budgets around sufficiency rather than perpetual acquisition, the system’s negative pressure weakens.
You will know it is working when silence follows a marketing blast and nothing inside you moves to fill it. In that pause, plant something—an herb on a balcony, a policy in the city charter, a conversation that refuses to frame hunger as destiny. Little by little, the grove renews itself.
How many sacred groves must fall before we remember they were never ours to burn?
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