Fiat Music — a clinical lens from my forthcoming book, applied to current news on this hub.
What this lens is
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Most people believe we are living in a golden age of music because you can access any song ever recorded for ten dollars a month. As a couples therapist watching human nervous systems break down under the weight of modern culture, I look at our endless playlists and see something entirely different. I see a famine. I call this Fiat Music.
Fiat music is what happens when art loses its anchor in effort, scarcity, and shared meaning. Just like fiat money is printed out of thin air, our current system pumps out an infinite supply of disposable sound. Streaming platforms pay musicians fractions of a cent per play, forcing them to abandon the album as a deep artistic statement. Instead, we are fed short playlist bait engineered strictly to hook your attention before you skip to the next track. The creators are not the problem. Their nervous systems are simply adapting to a machine that rewards engagement over soul.
I see the clinical cost of this shift in my office every week. For all of human history, communal listening was a primary way we built secure bonds. We gathered, we listened, and we regulated our bodies together through shared rhythm and melody. Today, that shared physical experience has been replaced by solo earbuds and algorithmically personalized feeds. Music used to be a slow meal that nourished us. Now it is an intravenous drip of constant, isolated stimulation.
If you recognize your own exhaustion in this pattern, you know exactly what fiat music feels like. It is the restless habit of skipping a song after seven seconds because it did not immediately spike your dopamine. It is the realization that you use music as background noise to numb out rather than as a portal to actually feel your own heartbreak, joy, or longing. Your nervous system is being trained to tolerate only fast, cheap stimulation, leaving you completely stripped of your capacity for deep presence. You think you are consuming art, but your nervous system is actually starving on empty calories.
You cannot heal your relationship with the world until you recognize how these systems are reshaping your biology. Explore the essays below to see exactly how fiat music is altering our culture, our artists, and your own capacity to feel.
Get the chapters as they are written
Fiat Music is one of the lenses in my forthcoming book, Proof of Work: From Fiat Life to Thriving in the AI Age, with Greenleaf in 2027. The waitlist is my Substack, where the chapters are being written in public.
Essays applying this lens to current events
Essays applying this lens to current news will appear here as they publish.
Read more about the book · About Figs
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Figs O'Sullivan
Founder · EFT couples therapist
“What I would tell you at 10pm, if I could.”