Never enough money. You're hooked on the stuff. Strung out. Money is a highly addictive, consciousness-contracting drug and constant abouse of it has damaged our brains, shrunk our minds to the extent that we can no longer imagine how to live without it. It has got so bad that people who cannot get enough money drop dead.
At first it is free. When you were a kid they gave you a little bit of it so you could buy a toy you wanted or some candy. You didn't want the money, you wanted the toy. the money was only a means to an end. But you got a taste of it and it gradually, inevitably, grew into a hunger and now you live in the Money World.
The Money World poisons the Life World and feeds off it and it will eventually kill the Life World. Then, the Money World will also die, because it needs the Life World. But the Life World doesn't need it.
You need it, though, or you think you do, because you are are crazy. The money has made you crazy. You can't eat and you live on the street because you don't have any money. You need money and you'd humiliate yourself to get it. You'd get a job and people would walk in and piss on you and then someone would hand you some money -- but never quite enough money. Never enough, they never give you enough.

Survivor: Manhattan
A Reality Show

A million and a half people are dropped onto the island of Manhattan and left to fend for themselves. The winner of this game is the man or woman who manages to maneuver, manipulate, and insinuate herself or himself and achieve total isolation. They from alliances, work out survival strategies, cooperate or compete, befriend or betray, cultivate or conspire, scavenge, scheme, steal, starve. It is survival of those who fit in. One by one, contestants are removed from the island. The tribe, in a mockery of democracy, votes, and whoever is the least liked at the moment, is cast out.
After a certain number of days or years a single member of this artificial tribe will remain. Only one is left behind.
Manhattan will be depopulated democratically, but the last Manhattanite will survive, not because he or she is the strongest or most excellent in any way, but because he or she was lucky or unlucky enough to adapt to the everchanging rules of the game.

I am the last member of my tribe. Everyone else went away many moons ago and now I am the only one to walk in the old ways.
I alone make the cappuccino and serve the blueberry scone. I am careful to keep the napkins stocked and the sugar packets, plastic spoons, and wooden stirrers also stocked, as they were in the old days. I alone write and publish the New York Times, and I alone sell it on the street, even though I sell it only to myself, and all the news is about me. Every day I play the tribal music playlist and I drink the coffee and eat the scone, just as I have always done and as it always was done in the old days by those of my tribe who are now gone.
One day soon I too will be gone and no one will be left to walk in the old ways.
And the cappuccino machine will be silent forever.

Manhattan Survivor.mov

Wikipedia history for January 1, 2000

▪ Despite the fact that the millennium will not end until December
31, 2000, premature millennium celebrations take place all over the
world. Y2K passes without the serious, widespread computer failures and
malfunctions that had been predicted.

My anti- futurist friends were disappointed when the world failed to end at midnight. They didn’t really want it to be destroyed, only brought to a standstill and given a chance to repent. They had hoped the world’s great electronic brain would have a seizure, confounded by the zeroes of the millennial end or beginning, and the big money machine would break down, TV would go blank, cars would stall, shopping malls would be boarded up, and microwave ovens would shut off, leaving dinners frozen.
On New Year’s Eve, we sat in a mountain cabin in the Catskills, warmed by an iron woodburning stove in the golden glow of kerosene. Off the Grid. We intended to stay off until daylight. but at midnight we gave in and turned on the portable radio and desperately spun the tuning knob scanning the atmosphere for cries of panic and disaster. But the radio only had old music and the usual preachers with incomprehensible sermons.
We went out into the dark and looked up and saw that life in the Milky Way had not changed and that our world moves on through star spattered infinitude.