“What shall I make of my life?” “What should I do to live a good life?”
These are existential questions every human being should ask. AI agents are unable to.
How much money do you make with every moment of your life? Because time is money, they say. What shall I do with my money, a rich man asks? Where should I invest it to make more money?
According to a money yardstick, he who earned a billion dollars in his life has lived a much more worthwhile life than she who earned no dollars at all and only cared for her family.
By this measure, if I spend my time in the money business figuring out how to make more money from money, I will have lived the most worthwhile life. With no time to care for others. Or even to figure out whether I am wasting my life by spending it on making more money.
What do we live and work for? The poet Robert Frost ends his poem, Two Tramps in Mud Time, which is about the difference between work done to earn money and work done purely for the love of it, with these words:
“But yield who will to that temptation
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one
And work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future’s sakes.”
It is time we all pause and reflect. Humanity is in a civilizational crisis. A civilizational crisis created by the worship of money and using money as the measure of the worthiness of a human being. Also, gauging the quality of a society by the size of a nation’s economy. Whereas with more money, and more GDP, the quality of care reduces as shall see.
Needs for care have increased everywhere. More women are going out to work to earn money: it boosts the economy. And adds to their social esteem too. However, women always give time to care for their families too, as recent studies in the West have confirmed. Overall women spend more time ‘working’ than men do—including the time they spend caring for their children at home. However, only some of a woman’s work is converted into money earned. Thus, women end up earning less ‘money earned per hour worked’ than men. Though they provide more care to others.
Economists are in a bind. With more women spending time away from their children to work for money, their children’s needs for care do not diminish. In fact, they increase. Moreover, with societies aging everywhere—a benefit of improvements in public infrastructure to provide sanitation and clean water and nutrition for all—more older persons also need care.
Who will provide the additional care required for older persons and children? Who will pay those who are employed to provide care? Children, and older persons who have little incomes, cannot pay themselves. Governments are unable to provide funds to pay the caregivers, even if they want to. It is too much of a socialist idea for capitalists to stomach. They want governments to reduce government spending and open markets further for capitalists to make profit—including the market for caregiving services.
Philosopher Michael Sandel explains (in his book What Money Cannot Buy) why some services should not be bought and sold for money. ‘Money cannot buy love’ is an old saw. Also, money cannot buy care. We care because we care; not because we are paid to.
Sandel explains further (in his book The Tyranny of Merit) how the worthiness of individuals began to be measured by the public by the yardstick of how much money a person earns, and how much wealth he is able to accumulate—most of which in 21st century economies is more money made from smartly investing money.
Women have been the primary caregivers in communities everywhere, primarily for biological reasons. They produce new lives with their labor. They nurture children. Humanity would not survive without ‘women’s work’. However, women’s work, which is not easily measurable in money terms, is not valued in the economy, though it has immense societal value.
A child feels her mother’s real love in the caress of her mother’s own hands; not in the money she pays the maid who caresses her while her mother earns money. A child feels his father’s love when his father is there to see him perform his first concert; not in the expensive toys the father leaves him with.
Many older people feel abandoned when their children put them in old person’s homes where their physical needs are professionally provided for while their children can carry on their lives undisturbed. Their children don’t have time for them; they are busy working to earn to pay for care for their own children.
Economic transactions are exchanges in which, if the transaction is a fair one, the value given by the seller and the value received by the buyer must be equal in money terms. Accounts are kept and debts must be repaid somehow.
Relationships between humans in families and communities are not transactions. What is exchanged in human relationships cannot be accurately converted into money; nor should it be—which is Sandel’s point in What Money Cannot Buy.
Social relations are beyond the understanding of economists, whose discipline requires all transactions to be converted into a money measure so that the economic values generated can be added into the GDP. GDP is a measure only of the size of an economy. It cannot measure the quality of a society.
A ‘caring economy’ is an oxymoron. An efficient economy cannot become a caring society. Economic enterprises cannibalize societies’ human assets and use only the labor and intelligence of humans to produce more profits for investors. They use humans until they can be replaced by more efficient (and compliant) robots and artificial intelligence, which money can buy and sell absolving an employer from providing for human’s emotional needs and social security.
Inevitably, humans within economic enterprises will be replaced by machines and AI. Promoters of AI do not deny this. They say AI will create more employment for humans outside their enterprises—in jobs in healthcare and the creative arts for example. Enterprises in healthcare, and even in the creative arts, are using AI to improve their own productivity. They too will require fewer humans to produce their services.
Fewer people will have jobs within economic enterprises in the future. At the same time, societal needs for care are increasing. Which is why economists hope there will be more jobs in the caregiving industry.
The economic problem is: who will pay the enterprises and the workers providing the care? They must be paid by their customers. If the customers who need care cannot pay enough, and the government too does not have an adequate budget to provide social services, it is inevitable that wages in care giving will be low and that good jobs with social security for care workers will be very few.
“You cannot solve an intractable problem with the same thinking that caused it”, Einstein and others have said. The well-being of a human society cannot be improved with economic solutions. Family and community structures, which have been weakened by the growth of large economic enterprises, must be strengthened. Families are founded on strong relationships. And communities are rooted in social structures that bind them.
Humans must relearn how to care for each other without expecting monetary compensation for all transactions.
Finally, rather than women learning masculine ways of thinking and working to enable them to rise in formal economic enterprises, it is men who must learn feminine ways of caring and nurturing to improve the quality of lives of others in their families, communities, their nation, and the world.
Arun Maira
18thMarch 2026