This is not ‘we are evil’ and not ‘I’m pure.’
This is adult responsibility.
I want to speak honestly, without pretending I’m outside the system.
I’m not.
I use its money.
I benefit from its passports, its currencies, its mobility.
And that’s exactly why I have to speak.
Because today, colonization rarely looks like violence.
It looks like opportunity.
It looks like foreigners arriving with stronger currencies,
raising prices, reshaping communities,
and calling it development.
It looks like sacred places turned into backdrops for self-realization.
It looks like Costa Rica, Tulum, Atitlán, Bali —
not being invaded, but consumed.
The empire no longer needs to rule territories.
It rules value.
And the dollar is not neutral.
It is a force.
When we price life, healing, and worth in a currency born from extraction and war,
we carry that history with us — even when our intentions are good.
My fear is not that people are greedy.
My fear is that we’ve normalized a system
where earning ten thousand a month is called success,
while entire cultures are priced out of their own land.
This is not about guilt.
Guilt changes nothing.
This is about responsibility.
Responsibility means asking:
Who pays the invisible cost of my freedom?
It means slowing down.
It means redistributing, not just consuming.
It means creating systems where value circulates locally,
not only upward and outward.
We cannot heal the world with the same logic that broke it.
And we cannot pretend to be awake
while outsourcing the consequences of our comfort.
The work now is not to escape the system,
but to interrupt it —
with humility, with restraint,
and with structures that actually nourish life.
This is not a call to be perfect.
It’s a call to grow up.