What would actually happen if the world erased all debt overnight?
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1. The Starting Point
Let’s start with a fact, not an opinion.
As of 2025, total global debt is about $340 trillion — every mortgage, every student loan, every government bond, every corporate IOU combined.
It is, quite literally, the sum of what humanity owes to itself.
Let that sink in.
To itself.
How can a species owe itself money?
How can the left hand be in debt to the right?
The numbers are real enough on paper — but the logic behind them is absurd.
We’ve built a global system in which humanity as a whole is perpetually indebted to… humanity as a whole.
Meanwhile, the world’s annual GGP, Gross Global Product— the total value of everything we actually create and produce — is about $110 trillion.
So globally we owe more than three times what we make in a year.
We are, in effect, trying to pay ourselves with our own promises, and calling the shortfall “growth.”
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2. The Paradox of Debt-Money
Here’s the strange truth of modern economics:
Money isn’t printed first and then lent — it’s created by lending.
When a bank issues a loan, it simply types numbers into an account.
Those digits are new money, but they exist only because someone has agreed to owe them back.
For every dollar of money, there’s a dollar of debt somewhere else. So of course, since we are constantly creating new money mostly by loans that needs to be repaid with interest which is not created, we constantly need to create new debt perpetually. If everyone repaid their loans tomorrow, almost every dollar in existence would vanish.
The economy wouldn’t just slow down — it would cease to exist. Because money = debt.
Debt isn’t a flaw in the system.
Debt is the system.
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3. The Absurd Scale
Three hundred and forty trillion dollars.
A number so large it almost loses meaning.
To “repay” it, we’d need about three more Earth-sized economies operating at today’s output — three planets producing, mining, farming, shipping, and consuming at full speed just to settle our existing balance sheet.
But we have only one planet, and it’s already showing the strain: melting ice caps, depleting soils, rising seas.
We’ve mortgaged the future to pay for the present, and even the collateral — the planet itself — is running out.
The debt can never be repaid, because repayment would destroy the very money supply that makes repayment possible. The paradox is profound
It’s a snake eating its own tail.
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4. The Thought Experiment
So what if, instead of running faster on the treadmill, we simply stopped?
What if: every government, bank, and individual agreed to wipe the slate clean — erase all debt at once?
Technically, it would be easy.
After all, when a bank issues a loan, it simply types numbers into an account.
Those digits appear from nowhere, authorized by nothing more than confidence in the story.
And just as easily as they’re created, they can be erased.
The same keyboard that made them has another key —
backspace.
Press it once for a typo.
Press it a few more times, and the world is debt-free.
Thus: the so-called global “debt crisis” is nothing more than a collection of keystrokes.
The difficulty isn’t technical.
It’s psychological.
The moment those numbers disappear, the story humanity believes about itself — the story of credit, ownership, and fake obligation — vanishes with them.
For a few hours, maybe days, the world would panic.
Markets would freeze. Banks would have no assets. Governments would have no bonds.
It would look like collapse.
But collapse of what, exactly?
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5. What Would Still Exist
Would the roads disappear?
Would the houses crumble?
Would the hospitals and schools evaporate?
Would the oceans stop moving or the sun fail to shine?
No.
Every physical thing humanity has built and nature has created would still be there:
every bridge, every farm, every power plant, every tool, every ship.
The forests, the animals, the wind and rain — all still exactly as before.
The real world would remain completely intact.
The only thing missing would be the numbers we used to measure it.
That’s the realization: the “economy” we thought sustained us was only a layer of code floating above what was real.
When the code is erased, the world itself doesn’t vanish
— it appears.
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6. The Great Unveiling
That’s the unveiling — the moment when the illusion drops and we see what was always there.
The money world was never the world.
It was a veil — a story of ownership drawn over nature, over work, over life itself.
When that story ends, nothing real is lost.
In fact, reality becomes visible again.
The forests keep breathing.
The clouds still drift and drop rain.
Birds still fly, insects still hum, whales still cross the oceans.
People still wake up, stretch, laugh, argue, cook, and create.
All of it continues as if nothing happened — because to the real world, nothing did.
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7. Seeing the Illusion for What It Was
Imagine standing in a field the morning after the Great Erasure.
The banks are silent, the stock tickers blank, but the sun still warms your skin.
You realize how strange it was to think that this — sunlight, air, grass, breath — could ever be “priced.”
The absurdity becomes obvious: we built a system that claims ownership over everything that already belongs to life.
We invented scarcity in the middle of abundance. Saying only those with enough numbers in their accounts would have an abundance of time to really enjoy life.
We called debt wealth and competition progress.
We covered the real world with a mirage of money — and then forgot it was a mirage.
And yet, beneath that mirage, everything real has been patiently waiting.
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8. What Happens Next
At first, confusion.
If no one owns anything, who decides?
But slowly, reason returns.
People realize they don’t need permission to use what already exists.
Food still grows. Tools still work. Knowledge still lives in every mind. We can peacefully agree to create abundance for all.
Communities reorganize — not around money, but around contribution, skill, and trust.
Value shifts from possession to participation.
Humanity begins to live again as nature does — through exchange without debt, through cycles of giving and renewal.
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9. The Realization
The true catastrophe isn’t the collapse of the money world — it’s that we mistook it for the real one.
The true awakening is realizing the world doesn’t need to be rebuilt — only remembered.
Everything that matters survives the erasure:
the land, the oceans, the people, the animals, the insects, the sky, the sun.
When the numbers vanish, what remains is life — unpriced, unowned, unending.
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10. The Invitation
This is the Great Unveiling: not the end of civilization, but the end of its disguise.
A collective seeing — that the wealth of the world was never in banks, but in being.
Step outside.
Feel the ground.
Everything real is still here.
The world is Waking Up.
Are you?
Follow the former billionaire Benjamin Michaels as he wakes up in a world where this has already happened. Shaken and shocked he staggers out of the hospital where he has been sleeping for a century, only to find his old world of money and numbers completely vanished… Only the real world remains.