The Ascent of Hee: A Modern Parable
I.
Half of your problems in life are related to money.
This gets carved into the base of the Big Upward Wealth Stairs. Every morning, people show up to watch someone climb them. The stairs themselves—well, they're not exactly stairs. Not a ladder either. They're this thing that rose from the city's heart one day, or maybe it was always there and we just started seeing it. Made from stock tips and algorithms, apparently. Each step catches the light wrong, shows you yourself but stretched out, desperate.
Everyone comes. The non-spiritual types with their coffee and doubt. The fundamentalists who've figured out how to make God profitable. Everyone wondering about income producing assets while their actual lives produce mostly questions. Someone mutters that everything you own owns you back, and yeah, that lands different at 6 AM when you're watching someone else climb toward paradise. Starting at 01%—tiny as a decimal point, someone says—is not a bad place to start. Though starting anywhere feels impossible when you're just watching.
Here's Hee.
The reporters announce it like that, simple: "Here's Hee." They're documenting this upwardly mobile stairway to paradise and other heavenly places, though paradise keeps getting rezoned and heaven's got a waiting list.
II.
However the person with level two examples—that's Hee's angle. Not talking from the top where the air's too thin for truth, not from the bottom where everything sounds like begging. But from that second tier where examples feel almost reachable.
Hee is... what? Part televangelist, sure. Part influencer. Part whatever we need them to be to justify watching this. Their confidence feels real even though we know it's sponsored. That's the thing about advertising—sometimes it accidentally tells the truth.
"What are you good at?" Hee asks. "What gets you out of bed?"
The crowd tries to answer but the answers get tangled. Survival dressed up as passion. The alarm clock pretending to be purpose. Look, it's possible that you have been looking at billionaires in the wrong way. With a warped perspective. Like—okay, like looking at the sun through a keyhole and thinking you understand fire. We can only imagine what your lifestyle is, but where should you focus your frustration or excitement? Hee says this can be separated by a factor of 88.
Why 88? Who knows. It sounds precise enough to be true.
The LED screens around Hee flicker testimonials. Former waitresses who became luxury coaches but they're still serving, you notice. Quiet dads who got into crypto and now their kids inherit volatility as scripture.
III.
A staircase is by no means the same as a ladder.
This matters. Ladders are temporary, emergency. Stairs are architecture. They suggest you're going to live there.
So Hee climbs, placing each foot carefully on the strong cross pieces. The structure's shiny like stainless steel but it's not steel, it's something else. The crowd feels it in their chest—that old mammalian pull to follow the leader up the tree, away from danger, toward fruit. Basic stuff.
"The sun's increasing heat can make you wealthy if you're in the solar racket," Hee calls down. Which means what exactly? Solar panels, sure. But also opportunity, global warming making certain futures profitable. "This profession is much different than a profession that has a dozen legs to secure a better balance of the whole body."
Most of us are standing on two legs at best—salary and hope. The dozen-legged ones, those mythical creatures with multiple income streams, they move through the world like spiders. Secure in their web. But spiders—well. People fear spiders. Crush them. Leave them alone in their geometric perfection.
What percentage of wealth do you have invested in something that is a cash cow or flourishing income producing venture?
The question falls on us like rain. Everyone opens their umbrella of excuses.
What might solve all of your problems? Can you think of something simple?
For someone like Ten Pesos—there's actually a guy in the crowd whose name is Ten Pesos, I'm not making this up—money and wealth becomes more amplified when you are climbing. The climbing itself changes you. Each step shows those come back and moving forward intersections. The thing that can get you closer to becoming different than everyone else. Except everyone's climbing, so...
"Why you say?" someone shouts. Their grammar's loose with emotion.
But Hee's already moved on.
IV.
Households lower on the color spectrum tend to be higher on the low risk potential spiral escalator.
That's a brutal sentence when you think about it. There's another structure beside the main stairs—dimmer, steadier. Going nowhere particular but getting there reliably. It's painted in survival colors, not success colors. The people riding it know that sometimes not falling is its own kind of rising.
Once you grasp the concept of what is needed to create a small lifestyle change—and Hee lets "small" hang there, doing its cruelty—you start to see the difference. Between motion and progress. Between climbing and actually ascending.
"As you hire blue and gold security," Hee says, voice echoing now, "you can start to take a little bit bigger risks with your investments."
Blue and gold. The colors of bruising and blessing. Sky you'll never touch, metal you'll never have enough of.
But wealth is not something that puts on boxing gloves to punch out a good old coin. It's subtler. It's compound interest quietly compounding. Inflation eating everything while you sleep. Markets moving like oceans, indifferent to drowning.
The difference between those who build something as a means to try to solve non-construction personal problems—they're building bridges to nowhere. Scaffolding around empty buildings. Stairs that circle back.
Don't forget which wealth staircase you started to climb in the first place.
Too late. Most of us already forgot there was ground.
V.
As you get towards the top of the stairs milk and honey becomes less useful for getting your children to unconditionally love you.
This is math applied to affection. Diminishing returns on love.
The milk's gone sour with privilege. The honey crystallized into expectation. Kids born at this altitude know the price of everything, especially love. They know unconditional is a luxury brand.
"Find what's right for you," Hee calls, voice getting thin. "Employ yourself to do something—anything—that you're really gifted at or good at, and people will faithfully pay you for it."
Faithfully. Like payment is worship.
"Pay you for the useful and or helpful things you are coming up with and producing."
But what about the useless things? The unhelpful things that make life bearable? That moment before sleep when your mind finally stops calculating—who pays for that?
Enjoy all that life has to offer without going overboard, without being submerged in debt.
This is written on the stairs in fine print. The syntax is suspicious. How do you enjoy "all" without going "over"? Where's the board's edge in an infinite ocean?
VI.
Within colonial or capitalist cultures money touches every part of life because it represents survival, control, freedom, and self-worth.
No. "Represents" is too clean. Money doesn't represent these things. It becomes them. Digests them. Excretes them as credit scores.
Colonial arithmetic: everything can be counted, everything counted can be owned, everything owned can be sold. Even resistance becomes a market. Revolution has a price point.
Psychologically, it fuels anxiety, comparison, and identity. We check our self-worth like checking stock prices. Economically, it's tied to unequal systems that create chronic stress and insecurity. Systems that eat the anxiety they produce. Call it growth.
Countless problems trace back to money because it's the gatekeeper to both our basic needs and deepest fear. It stands between body and soul, charging admission both ways. Money still matters because it mediates almost everything—our safety is rent, our choices are tuition, our dignity is healthcare, our time is hourly wages, our belonging is the price of admission.
It stirs social comparison. Ancient primate software updated for capitalism. We measure position not by strength or wisdom but by numbers in computers. Imaginary quantities determining real survival.
Money in our cultures is inherently life's center. Not by choice—by architecture. It sits at the junction of what we need to live and what we fear to lose. In that overlap, money quietly to loudly governs relationships and daily peace. Whispers in marriages. Shouts in divorces. Determines who eats and who watches.
Even when money isn't the root problem, it's often the soil in which problems grow. The pH balance. What flourishes, what withers, what stays underground spreading through roots we'll never see.
VII.
Knowing clearly what moves you can illuminate your path, but expecting that clarity to be fixed, constant, or fully articulate can create its own kind of pressure.
We might rise for a deep calling or simple ritual. We might rise from from sorrow. For no clear reason. The bed releases us each morning like a reluctant mother. We'll return damaged and hungry.
Purpose is not always a grand declaration. Sometimes it's barely there. It can be a flicker of want—small as a birthday candle. A pull of curiosity—the last human emotion capitalism hasn't monetized. A responsibility you didn't choose. Or a tender refusal to go numb.
That last one might be the most revolutionary act in an anesthetized age.
Knowing what gets you out of bed matters. But so does being gentle when you don't know. When the answer is "nothing" or "the bathroom." Sometimes mercy is in the not knowing. In that space between sleep and purpose where you're briefly free.
Direction is meaningful. Presence is essential.
One implies movement, promises arrival. The other admits we're already here. That arrival is an illusion. That the journey metaphor—yeah, that's product too.
VIII.
Billionaires are not just people at the top.
They're products of deep, often invisible systems. Economic rules written in disappearing ink. Cultural myths that feel like morning air. Societal compromises so old we forgot they were negotiations.
By casting them as either saviors or devils, we simplify something more revealing. They're mirrors—but not simple ones. Funhouse mirrors. They show not your face but your desires. Your fears. Your permission structures. Your entitlement. Your power if you had it. Your powerlessness because you don't.
They show us how we measure worth. In numbers exceeding comprehension. In influence that bends reality. They show us how we tolerate imbalance. How we confuse accumulation with virtue. How we mix up having with being.
What world made them?
But really: What world made us need them? As heroes or villains? As proof the system works or doesn't?
It's not just about them. It's about us. What we believe success should look like. Must look like. For the stairs to keep standing.
IX.
The pursuit of wealth has become a universal spectacle.
Not entertainment, though it entertains. Not religion, though it saves and damns. Something that swallows all these. A story that explains all other stories.
In watching Hee climb their Big Upward Wealth Stairs, we're not just witnessing personal success. This is modern salvation performed. Financial ascent replacing spiritual transcendence. Heaven's been privatized. God accepts direct deposit.
The advice given rich in every sense. Rich in promise, delusion, technical truths that miss human truth. Designed to appeal to all: the disenchanted pragmatist who thinks they're too smart for hope but hopes anyway. The quietly devout who pray for money then feel guilty. Even the zealot who's made extremism profitable.
It asks no creed but desire. No prayer but ambition.
Money becomes the common language of hope. More universal than English. More precise than math. More believed than any gospel. The staircase becomes a stage. Hee becomes both prophet and product. Rising not just in wealth, but in symbolic authority. The authority of having climbed. Of being above. Of seeing further even if what they see is just more stairs.
This spectacle flattens difference. Makes all colors grayscale. All languages binary. All stories the same story with different fonts. It sells the same dream to the atheist and the absolutist alike. Not by bridging belief systems—by bypassing them. Tunneling under conviction to reach soft need.
In this theology, the climb itself is the faith.
It's not about who Hee is. Hee could be anyone. Is everyone. Is no one.
It's about what we're all being asked to believe in.
X.
We are gathered.
Eyes wide. Breath held. Watching Hee ascend the big upward wealth stairs.
The stairs are carved from polished stock tips. Gold-plated algorithms. Each step reflects our longing back at us. Distorted. Magnified. Unrecognizable.
The staircase gleams like a modern ziggurat. Remember Babel? Where humans built toward heaven and God confused their language? We solved that. Money is the universal translator. All human expression converted to a single syntax of success.
It spirals past tired cathedrals. Past cracked civic halls where democracy went to die and came back incorporated. Promises altitude over insight. Elevation over enlightenment. The view over vision.
Hee is part televangelist selling salvation on installment. Part influencer influencing nothing but the influenced. Part self-help oracle helping the self help itself to more self. Robed in tailored ambition. Fabric worth more than most make in a month. Cut to fit the shape of shapelessness.
They rise not with humility—who can afford that?—but with smooth certainty. They've learned to monetize hope. Package possibility. Sell solutions to problems they're creating.
LED screens flicker around them like stained glass. But stained glass told stories. These sell them. Testimonials stream from the faithful: former waitresses turned luxury coaches. But who's waiting on whom? Quiet dads turned crypto prophets. Propheting profits.
The air smells like ozone and printer ink. The incense of our time. Electricity trying to become money. Paper trying to become power.
XI.
At the base of the staircase, crowds gather in echo chambers.
The echo is how we convince ourselves our voice is truth. That repetition is revelation.
YouTube comments become scripture. Church pews become viewing platforms. Quiet desperation becomes loud aspiration. From everyday skeptics—skeptical of everything except the climb—to holy firebrands who've made damnation profitable. They nod together. Synchronized agreement that feels like thinking.
If Hee made it, so can we.
But the stairs don't creak. Built too well. Or not built at all. They don't crumble. That would imply they were ever solid. They ascend infinitely invisibly. A carrot that's learned to tie its own stick.
We call it motivation. We call it vision. We kneel before it even when we don't believe. Because the liturgy of wealth promises deliverance without introspection. Salvation without transformation.
Hee's advice flows: Own your mornings. As if ownership were the only relationship with time. Monetize your purpose. As if purpose were product. Discipline is sacred. The sacred disciplined into submission. God loves margins. The margins where profit lives. Not where the marginalized survive.
Doesn't matter if you believe in chakras, Christ, or chemistry. This system converts all languages into one currency. Your inner life—if you have one, if you can afford one—is optional. Your upward motion is mandatory. Not by law. By physics. By the gravity of economy pulling everything down unless it's constantly climbing.
XII.
And so we watch.
Not just Hee. Ourselves reflected in the mirrored risers. Each step a different distortion. Our comparisons. Our conversions from human to human resource. Our quiet fear that stillness is failure.
We clap not for who ascends but for ascent itself. The abstraction more real than achievement. Our applause: one hand hitting the other hoping noise equals approval equals value equals worth equals meaning equals purpose equals reason to wake up tomorrow.
Wealth has become a modern ritual of transcendence. But transcendence from what? From the body that hungers? The heart that breaks? The mind that questions? The soul that suspects this might be sophisticated falling?
A staircase anyone can worship. Ascent itself is the faith. Desire is the new devotion. Not desire for anything. Just desire. Pure and purposeless and perpetual.
After
Of course you have the choice to disagree with all of this and that's okay also. It's a free country.
Free as in speech, not beer. Not freedom. Free as in falling.
Some in the crowd turn away. Not rejection—recognition. They've been watching themselves watch someone else pretend to climb stairs that might be descending.
A staircase, unlike a ladder, suggests dwelling. What kind of dwelling is made entirely of stairs? No landings. No rooms. No rest. Every surface angled toward ascent. Home always somewhere higher. Higher always somewhere else.
Don't forget which wealth staircase you started to climb in the first place.
But maybe the real question is whether to climb at all. Maybe find ground solid enough to stand on. Ground that doesn't need climbing to prove its worth. Earth. Foundation. Where things grow rather than rise.
Where worth isn't altitude. Where problems aren't solved by ascent. Most problems are horizontal—about connection not elevation. About reaching across not up. Where what gets you out of bed isn't the promise of more but the simple, radical act of being enough.
The Big Upward Wealth Stairs gleam in the morning sun. Same sun that makes wealth for those in the solar racket. Same sun that rises and sets regardless of market hours. That doesn't climb but simply is. Simply burns. Simply gives light without calculating return on investment.
The stairs wait for the next Hee. The next crowd. The next performance.
And somewhere—in homes invisible to the spectacle, in hearts that beat without counting beats, in minds that remember circles instead of lines—people are finding other ways to rise. Ways that look like falling to those on the stairs. Ways involving descent. Digression. Wandering. Stillness.
The earth itself is wealthy in ways that can't be climbed toward. Only sunk into. Root-deep. Soul-deep. Deep as the sleep we sacrifice to climb stairs that lead—
Where?
The question hangs there. The stairs continue. Patient geometry. Generating their own necessity. Their own logic. Their own upside-down sense.
Maybe falling—falling properly, falling freely, falling with grace—might be the only way to truly rise.
