Sinners, Systems, and the Markets We Live In

I watched Sinners recently and found myself, unexpectedly, identifying with the vampires.

Not because I want immortality or power. But because of the posture. The invitation. I am your way out. This world already left you for dead. Won’t let you build. Won’t let you fellowship. We will do just that. Together. Forever.

When I talk about investing in global markets — about owning public companies, about participating in interconnected capital systems — I am doing something similar. I am inviting people into something I believe is better. Better than watching inflation quietly erode savings. Better than financial fragility later in life. Better than hoping the system will somehow take care of you if you refuse to engage with it.

And yet what I’m inviting people into is not clean. It is riddled with contradictions. It is part of a structure that has amplified inequality. It is entangled in environmental strain.

It is the very system that has benefited me disproportionately.

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There’s an old philosophical thought experiment — the trolley problem. A trolley is barreling toward five people. You can pull a lever to redirect it, but one person will die instead. Do you pull it? Many of us want to reject the premise. We don’t want to play the game.

But the trolley is moving whether we participate or not.

Modern markets feel similar. Retirement still arrives. Healthcare still costs money. Inflation still compounds. Wealth still compounds for those who own assets.

Refusing to invest does not stop the system. It simply means you experience it without ownership.

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Here is what makes this complicated.

Since the rise of industrial capitalism and global markets, extreme poverty worldwide has declined dramatically. Billions of people have moved out of subsistence-level living. Infant mortality has fallen sharply. Life expectancy has risen in nearly every corner of the world. Capital formation and trade were central to that shift.¹

At the same time, wealth concentration has intensified. Asset ownership compounds advantage. Those with capital benefit from growth in ways those without capital cannot. The same mechanisms that generate prosperity also reinforce hierarchy.

And the natural world has borne real cost.

The system has built and strained at the same time. That is the system we live in.

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A day or two after watching Sinners, I listened to an episode of The Ezra Klein Show with George Saunders. I wasn’t looking for a theme. But one found me anyway. Saunders talked about the moral burden of being a decent person inside an indecent system — not retreating into purity, not collapsing into cynicism, but staying awake inside the tension.

Yoga asks for that same thing. Awareness of participation. Awareness of consequence. Awareness of the web we are already inside.

Pattabhi Jois used to say that yoga was “everywhere looking, only God seeing.” I think about that when I think about markets. Not in a religious sense. But in the sense that everything is implicated. Everything is connected. There is no view from outside.

Interconnection is not spiritual metaphor. It is structural reality. Your bank deposits are lent. Your consumption supports supply chains. Your retirement account — if you have one — is already tied to global enterprise.

There is no true outside.

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Here is the part I feel obligated to say plainly:

I have benefited immensely from this system.

My career exists because of it. My stability is tied to it. My professional credibility rests inside it. When I advocate for long-term participation in markets, I am advocating for a structure that has worked very well for me. And I am fully aware that capital ownership is one of the drivers of class division.

I never want to use yoga language to sanitize that reality. Yoga, for me, is inquiry. It demands that I examine my own advantage.

So I ask myself: Am I empowering people? Or am I inviting them deeper into a hierarchy that already favored me?

The honest answer is that both can be true.

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And yet I still believe participation is better than abstention. Not because the system is morally pure. Not because markets are innocent. But because opting out does not dismantle the structure. It simply leaves you more vulnerable within it.

Ownership, however imperfect, creates agency. It allows you to build resilience, to direct capital toward more responsible enterprises, to benefit from growth instead of being eroded by it.

This is how I personally respond to the environmental tension: I direct capital toward companies and funds that prioritize sustainability. I believe markets evolve under pressure. I believe engaged ownership matters more than disengaged critique.

Is it enough? I don’t know.

But refusing to pull the lever does not stop the trolley.

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Am I empowering people? Or am I inviting them deeper into a hierarchy that already favored me?

I don’t know. I’m still asking. But the universe keeps dropping me little signs… I finished last week seeing one of the final performances of Hell’s Kitchen on Broadway with my fifteen-year-old daughter. It was a fun show. And I was reminded that:

Where there’s light, there must be a shadow.

- Alicia Keys

Not one or the other. Both. Always both.

¹ Global under-five mortality has fallen by more than half since 1990. Sources: UNICEF, World Bank, Our World in Data