Imagine this: someone drops a hundred million dollars in your lap. One catch—you have thirty days to spend every single cent. No stashing it away, no risky bets, no setting it on fire just for kicks. It just has to be gone. Sounds like a dream, right? But the way folks respond to this game, it tells you a lot about the world we’ve built, and honestly, about how small our dreams have become.
Most of the time, the answers are pretty predictable: fancy houses, private jets, all the usual luxury stuff, maybe even trying to pull some strings in politics. What you almost never hear? “I’d change the system.” And that, right there, is the heartbreak.
It’s like even our wildest fantasies are still trapped inside the walls of capitalism. Even when literally anything is possible in our minds, we can’t seem to imagine beyond the limits we’ve been taught to accept. It’s a sad, quiet kind of poverty, isn’t it? The kind that creeps into your imagination and tells you that the boring, broken world is all there is.
David Graeber, bless his heart, talked about “bullshit jobs” – those roles even the people doing them know are pointless. But the real sting in his idea wasn’t just about work; it was about meaning. How in our economy, looking busy is often more valuable than actually making a difference.
And it’s the same with how we see money. We’re fed this line that the only responsible way to handle wealth is through all these complicated rituals: investments, tax dodges, “strategic” giving. So, even in our make-believe worlds, we just copy what the rich folks do, instead of dreaming up something truly new.
It’s not that we’ve lost our spark, our creativity. It’s that the rules of this capitalist game have woven themselves so deeply into our brains that even our made-up lives feel like a bureaucratic nightmare. It’s enough to make you just feel… tired.
When people suddenly get rich in their minds, the first instinct is often to escape. Buy an island, a private plane, a ridiculously expensive car, a ranch out in the middle of nowhere. The logic is simple, and it’s crushing: the world’s a mess, so the best you can do is get out. And for those who stick around? Influence. Buy politicians. Launch campaigns. Dominate the conversation.
But both of these instincts—escaping or dominating—they come from the same place: a deep, quiet resignation. A feeling that you can’t truly reimagine the system, only exploit it. So, money just becomes a stand-in for force. It gives you the power to shield yourself from the world’s ugliness or bend it to your will. But never to heal it. And that, too, feels by design.
The Black Panther Party, though—they knew better. They weren’t dreaming of yachts or private jets. They were dreaming of clinics, of schools, of food programs, of housing where people actually owned their homes. They didn’t see money as an escape hatch. They saw it as leverage for building things together. For dignity. For survival. For community.
Their vision wasn’t some airy-fairy utopia. It was practical, yes, but also radical. Radical precisely because it refused to play within the tiny, cramped limits of capitalist imagination.
Today, if someone suggested spending a hundred million dollars on a network of tenant-owned buildings, or internet co-ops for everyone, or even just bail funds for people stuck in the system, they’d be laughed out of the room. Or worse, seen as not serious. Because imagination that actually threatens the way things are is always labeled as naive. And that’s what leaves me feeling so incredibly sad.
There is no greater poverty than losing the ability to imagine freedom. Not as some fancy luxury, not as perfect efficiency, not as total control—but as interdependence, as mutual care, as a world where no one is forced into anything.
What these hypothetical scenarios really show us isn’t how clever we are, but how much our inner lives have been colonized. If the first thing we think to do with a fortune is just copy what the powerful already do—or just mock them—it’s because our whole culture drills it into us to accept the world exactly as it is.
But we don’t have to. The Panthers showed us how to make revolution look like breakfast, like feeding your neighbors.
So, the question isn’t what you would do with a hundred million dollars anymore.
The question is what you’ll do with the broken fantasy that you ever needed it in the first place.
Let’s imagine something else entirely.
