Wealth & Money Quote by Doug Coupland

Money doesn’t just buy things in Doug Coupland’s world; it decays. By likening currency to a radioactive element with a “half-life,” he turns a supposedly solid social fact into a substance with built-in expiry, the kind of invisible instability you only notice once the damage is already done. It’s a classic Coupland move: take the bland infrastructure of modern life and reveal its weird, anxious metaphysics.

The intent isn’t to predict a literal bank run so much as to puncture money’s main trick: its claim to permanence. A half-life implies inevitability, not scandal. You can’t negotiate with physics; you can only measure the rate of decline. That’s the subtext: capitalism’s core symbol of trust is also a story we keep telling each other, and stories can lose their grip. People don’t “realize” money is fragile in a calm seminar way; they realize it in spikes of panic, during inflation, layoffs, housing bubbles, crypto manias, or any moment when the number on the screen stops mapping onto a life that feels livable.

Coupland came up through the late-20th-century North American boom where money became increasingly abstract: credit, derivatives, brands, lifestyle signaling. His line reads as pre-emptive post-2008 intuition and post-internet unease: value untethered from material limits, circulating faster than meaning. The collapse he’s describing is psychological as much as economic. When enough people sense the currency of status, security, and future-planning is degrading, they don’t just spend differently. They start imagining different rules.