# My approach to money Let's get one thing out of the way: > [!Note] No one will be turned away from grief ceremony due to lack of funds. > I'm very open to your creative offerings and solutions. > > Some alternative means of reciprocity include: > - exchange of services > - payment plans > - support roles > - "pay-what-you can" In addition, I offer grief ceremony according to a [[Tiered pricing|tiered pricing structure]] that incentivizes wealth distribution. I also offer a robust referral scheme you can read more about and get involved with [[Referral scheme for my public events|here]]. Many people are exploring how we may one day go without money[^1] Alas, I don't yet live in that world. I've made facilitation and organizing my life's work, which means it needs to feed me in material ways, in addition to the non-monetary ways that it nourishes me. All of that said, some further comments on money: ### What *is* money? Money is creative potential. It's a form of energy, like fuel or electricity. A charged battery sitting your basement does no one any good, but in the right hands can be used to enhance the unfurling of beauty. It can power a weed-trimmer to beautify your lawn or an e-bike, taking you and your child on a marvellous adventure to school. In healing my own money wounds, I make every effort to treat money reverently as this form of potential beauty and abundance. Which helps explain my anti-capitalistic approach. Capitalism has long ago shown its hand as a blunt tool, capable of immense efficiency at the cost of human demoralization and the destruction of our home planet. One of the ways it does this is by stealing our energy. This happens literally in the way so many of us work, yet it also happens energitcaly through the ways we manage our money. As an example, take credit cards and payment processors like Stripe or Square. They charge a small fee on every transaction, usually about 3%. What this means is that $100 circulating a local economy via credit cards will exponentially evaporate towards $0. After 77 transactions, nearly all of those one hundred dollars will have left the community.[^1] "Class" is too often colloquially used to describe people who make different amounts of money, when it is more accurate to define class by who has the means to control the development and deployment of technology and labour at scale. As of Spring 2026, we're seeing this play out in a very real way with the scope of speculative investment massively sucking the life out of our economies and funnelling it toward so-called "AI". The leaders in charge of these decisions should get [familiar with shame](https://knowshame.org). Shame on them. There's a reason [[My stance on "AI"|you won't find anything written]] my AI in my public-facing work. I am not a capitalist. I do not have the means to control the distribution of technology. Were I do, that technology would be the technologies we use in grief ceremony. If you have the means, please [[About Me|support my work]]. In doing so, you're putting your eggs in the basket of an ancient and, in my belief, more valuable technology: human connection. [^1]: Standard processing fees are something like 2.9% + $0.30 per successful transaction, not including additional potential fees like foreign transactions, additional payors, etc. You can see a full explication of the math behind this [[77 transactions to $0|here]]