Sometimes I feel like a character in a story I had no part in writing. Everyone around me seems to be inside the same story. To get necessities, I go to a store or shop online with my plastic money. It is recorded, like everyone’s money, as digits in a machine so ever-present it seems to enclose the Earth like a dome — a machine directly connected to my phone.

I got my plastic money by trading my time and effort over a lifetime. This is the story. Is there any other way to make a living? Is there some villain who wrote this story or is it the machine itself that demands compliance and consumes what it encloses.

Am I the only one who feels walled-in, almost like the coal miner who croons:

You load 16 tons and what do you get?

Another day older and deeper in debt

St. Peter don’t you call me cause I can’t go

I owe my soul to the company store.

But surely we in the USA aren’t walled-in. We have many places to shop and to work. The story tells me I am a free actor — free to choose my own means of earning, free to choose the objects of my spending. But never free to leave the story of earning and spending that defines and confines my control over my own life, even when earning and spending become hopelessly out of balance. At the center of the story is the demand that those with more than they need must direct investments toward whatever brings the highest returns without taking into consideration what it is like for the majority who have to work for a living. The story claims that the mechanism itself has replaced slavery, peasantry, and sharecropping, but it omits that it has replaced them with another kind of hierarchy. The earlier systems had their own stories. Kings had divine rights, the “owners” of land — because of their noble blood — deserved to control those who toiled on it, some were meant to serve while others lived without having to work.

The story highlights moments when the machine’s benefits were undeniable, at least for some. Prosperity increased for most Americans in the 1950s and 1960s when the U.S. dominated global economic and military power. But the majority of Americans have seen their share of prosperity steadily decline until we arrive at a point today where the richest 1% (who have no need to “earn” a living) control as much wealth as the bottom 90%. And as the economy becomes increasingly global, the disparity between wealthy countries and the rest mirrors what is happening within the U.S., but on steroids. Wealthy countries now pay poorer ones to accept their unwanted trash, leaving those less lucky with little choice but to sell their souls.

Before we can even think about getting to a better world, we must acknowledge that what we live within now is not some eternal reality, but only a story. It’s hard to see this when the story is blared at us constantly from every direction and from the very devices in our hands. But when your home is foreclosed, you lose your job, and your plastic money can’t provide your necessities, the cracks in the story become visible. We are told to blame “losers” for their dilemma rather than question the story that tells them: “Go back and work harder, take an additional job, take out a loan and then another loan to pay that one at increasing interest rates.”

But it is not only the most helpless who begin to owe their souls to the machine. We are all confronted by something that feels uncannily like one endless store and one massive employer that leaves us with little real control over our own lives. Was this the plot all along?

Like the divine right of kings, this story will one day be seen for what it is because sustaining the planet itself is incompatible with the big parasitic mechanism that continues to metastasize. That’s the real story. The company store is in our hands and in our heads.

Patrick McGreevy lives in Greenfield and invites comments at pmcgreevy64@gmail.com.