The Economy of Empty Hands

Our wanting has turned violent and algorithmic. A hunger that arrives pre-digested, already metabolized by fourteen thousand others’ appetites before it reaches our mouths. We scroll through desire like a feed, consuming want itself as content, mistaking the performance of longing for the real thing. By the time you recognize your own taste in someone else’s post, it’s already a commodity. The restaurant with the perfect light is booked through 2026. The artist you just discovered has been discovered by private equity. Even your dreams come with surge pricing.

Meanwhile, the most magnetic people alive are running on empty.

Not empty like depleted. Empty like a cathedral. Empty like negative space in a good painting. They’ve somehow escaped the gravitational pull of perpetual wanting, that endless orbit around consensus that keeps the rest of us dizzy and broke. They move through the world with their hands open, demanding nothing from you, which is precisely why everything seems to flow toward them. They don’t need you to validate them or make them feel okay. It’s not a trick. You can’t fake that kind of porousness. People smell desperation through designer perfume and Substack prose. They know when you’re performing abundance versus when abundance is just what happens when you stop white-knuckle clutching.

The real alphas (god, what a cursed word, but stay with me) aren’t the ones with the best timing on trends. They’re the ones who’ve figured out how to stop playing hot potato with other people’s desires. They see you at your weird, unformed, unmarketable worst and think: interesting. They invest in the human equivalent of empty lots, not because they’re calculating future returns but because emptiness recognizes emptiness. Space recognizes space.

This is the paradox that breaks people: you can’t win by wanting to win. The moment you start optimizing for charisma, you’ve already lost it. The second you start calculating which friends are going places, you’ve turned them into positions in your social portfolio. So many are trying to collect people before they become collectible, treating friendship like insider trading, then wondering why every relationship feels like work.

The people who actually compound, whose presence appreciates over time until you realize, years later, that knowing them changed the literal shape of your life? They’re not investing. They’re not even believing, really. They’re just... there. Present tense. No strings attached, no term sheets hidden in their back pockets. They liked you before you liked yourself, not as some strategic bet, but because they actually saw you. They give you the rarest thing in our economy built on scarcity: the feeling that there’s enough time. Enough space. Enough of whatever it is we’re all so afraid of running out of.

And maybe that’s the cruelest thing about modern life. Not that it punishes desire, but that it’s made us forget what desire feels like when it’s not immediately monetized. We’ve been trained to want only what’s already wanted, to love only what’s already loved, to see people as either too early or too late but never just *on time*, right now, in this moment that’s not trying to be anything other than what it is.

The real early adopters aren’t adopting anything. They’re just paying attention to what’s already there, before the world prices it in. They saw the neighborhood’s soul when everyone else saw blight. They held (god, held) not because they were waiting for returns but because holding is what you do when you actually love something.

We keep looking for alpha in all the wrong places. It’s not in having conviction about where things are going. It’s in being able to exist without needing to know. To show up empty enough that other people don’t feel like they need to perform their potential for you. To demand nothing, which is the only demand that actually changes anything.

The market rewards scarcity, but humans compound through abundance. The most charismatic people know this. They’re not playing the game. They’re not even aware there is one. They’re just out there, radiating possibility, making everyone else remember what it felt like before we all became our own hedge funds.

That’s the thing about empty hands: they’re the only ones that can actually hold anything. The ones you cleverly “discovered early” won’t matter as much as the ones who discovered you before you were worth discovering, and stayed because being present with you was enough.