The Third Horizon: Building Toward Meaning

How do we build a society where everyone matters, even those who can no longer contribute?

Photo by sebastiaan stam on Unsplash

The System That Forgets the Unproductive

Before we name a better system, we have to speak the truth about the ones we’ve built. Both capitalism and communism begin with a shared assumption: that labor defines worth.

One rewards competition: your value comes from what the market will bear. The other demands collective contribution: value comes from how you serve the whole. On paper, they seem opposed. In practice, they agree: you matter if you produce. What neither system knows how to hold is a person whose labor is done.

Not lazy. Not resistant. Just… finished. Or broken. Or aging. Or sick. Or weary.

In both systems, the body becomes a tool. A person is a means to an end. A group matters when they can produce. People receive praise when strong, when they contribute, or when we can count on them. When they weaken—when the hands tremble, or the mind slows, or the back bends—the system falters.

It cannot see what it no longer uses. Take your gold watch and go. Sign up for social security. I hope your 401(k) is fully funded. Funding the pension is no longer profitable. So the person begins to vanish. First from the ledger. Then from the room. Then, sometimes, from their own sense of self.

Even retirement carries a hint of this forgetting. We celebrate freedom from work, then immediately fill the space with new demands: volunteer. Mentor. Babysit the grandchildren. Give back. Stay useful. As though the body must remain in service to justify its continued presence. The message is subtle but clear: you still have value, as long as you find a way to keep producing.

This is the tension at the heart of our modern economies: they run on bodies, but forget the person inside them. They count production, but not presence. They sustain the machinery, but starve the soul.

You can feel it in the quiet fear beneath retirement. In the shame that shadows disability. In the way we praise the old only when they “still have it,” as though continued usefulness were a moral victory.

But what if the body was never just a tool? What if the person doesn’t stop mattering when they stop making? What if the end of labor is not the end of value?