The Mycelial Economy: From Conditional Transactions to Unconditional Flow

Opening: The Yearning

I have a memory that haunts me—not in the way trauma haunts, but in the way beauty does. Two years in the Basque Country, living from fruits and what others discarded. No money, no portfolio, no strategic positioning. Just hands, earth, and the quiet intelligence of knowing when something is ripe. I was nobody special, and I was happier than I’ve ever been before or since.

This is what I’ve come to call Stage Clear—a return to simple being, to presence without performance. Not poverty as deprivation, but simplicity as abundance. Not rejection of complexity, but arrival at what remains when you strip everything else away.

And then I returned to the world of headlines: nations simulating the destruction of satellite networks, AI arms races, the relentless acceleration of late-stage capitalism eating itself. I watch as Starlink—a technological marvel that could connect the entire planet—becomes a piece on a geopolitical chessboard. I watch as we build ever-more sophisticated ways to threaten our own existence.

The dissonance is overwhelming. Why does one memory feel like liberation and the other like a trap?

The answer, I’ve come to understand, lies in two opposing logics that structure our world. One is the logic of the economy we have. The other is the logic of the economy I lived—the economy that exists in forests, in healthy bodies, in moments of true generosity. The economy of the mycelial network.

This essay is about that difference. And about what it might take to build bridges from here to there.

Part I: The Two Logics

The Logic of the Vault: Conditional Economics

Our current economy operates on what I call Vault Logic. It’s the logic of “if-then”:

If you give me this, then I will give you that.
If you pay rent, then you can live here.
If you work, then you receive a wage.
If you’re valuable to the market, then you deserve to survive.

This is the architecture of conditional exchange. Everything becomes transactional. Value must be quantified, stored, and traded. Relationships become accounts to be balanced. Life itself is walled off into property, and access is granted only through payment.

The vault is not inherently evil—it emerged as a solution to real coordination problems. How do we enable exchange between strangers? How do we store value across time? How do we signal commitment?

But something happened. The vault stopped being a tool and became the temple. The conditional logic that was meant to serve life began to consume it. Now we’re trying to force everything—water, genes, human attention, care, even the capacity to breathe clean air—into conditional transactions.

This is why it feels soul-crushing. We’re trying to run a living system on the operating system of a machine.

The Logic of the Mycelium: Unconditional Circulation

Contrast this with how a mycelial network actually works.

The mycelium doesn’t “sell” nutrients to tree roots. It doesn’t negotiate contracts or calculate ROI. It forms mycorrhizal networks—living, symbiotic webs where nutrients, water, and even chemical signals flow based on need, not price.

A tree that has excess carbon shares it with the fungus. The fungus delivers phosphorus to the tree’s roots. But this isn’t barter—it’s not “I’ll give you X units of phosphorus if you give me Y units of sugar.” It’s a deeper logic: “I give because I sense your need, because my thriving depends on your thriving, because we are part of the same living whole.”

This is Unconditional Logic. The logic of the gift. The logic of circulation rather than accumulation.

When you watch a parent feed a child, when you see someone stop to help a stranger, when you experience the joy of giving something just because it fulfills a need—you’re experiencing this logic. The giving is the receiving. The flow is the point.

Humans are wired for both logics. We understand fair exchange (conditional), but our deepest sense of meaning and connection comes from unconditional giving and receiving—from love, from community, from acts of pure grace.

The tragedy of our current economy is that it has taken the conditional logic to such extremes that it’s crowding out the unconditional entirely.

Part II: The Problem of Transition

So here’s the dilemma: We need to get from Vault Logic to Mycelial Logic, but we’re currently inside the vault.

This is not a problem that can be solved through purity politics or simple refusal. You can’t just opt out of capitalism and expect the mycelial network to spontaneously emerge. The person who stays poor while maintaining “clean hands” isn’t stopping extraction—they’re just ceding power to those who will extract without conscience. This is the Saint’s Trap—the paralysis of purity that ultimately cedes power to the unconscious.

This is where the real work begins. The work of conscious transmutation.

The Alchemist’s Task

I think of people trying to navigate this transition as alchemists. Not in the fantasy sense of turning lead into gold, but in the deeper sense: working with poisonous materials (money, property law, capitalist mechanisms) to create the conditions for regeneration.

The alchemist must:

Touch the poison without being consumed by it
Use the tools of the vault to build the mycelium
Operate with conditional tokens (money) while practicing unconditional logic (flow)

This is extraordinarily difficult. Money has gravity. It wants to accumulate. It creates attachment. It whispers promises of security and significance. This is the Spiritual Hazard—the slow, neurological capture where the alchemist starts serving the vault to protect their own identity. Every day, you must choose: Am I serving the flow, or have I become the vault?

This is why protocols matter. Why structure matters. Why accountability matters.

From Nodes to Network

The beautiful thing about mycelial networks is that they don’t require everyone to change at once. They start with individual nodes—individual organisms—choosing to participate in unconditional circulation.

A few trees connect with fungal partners. Those connections strengthen. More trees join. The network grows. Eventually, what started as isolated experiments becomes a living system that transforms the soil itself.

The same can happen with human economic relationships. The transitional agent acts as a Membrane—standing at the wall of the Vault, absorbing the “Stock” of the old world and releasing it as “Flow” into the new. We do the dirty work of composting capital, taking the dead energy of hoarded wealth and breaking it down until it becomes the fertile soil of the commons.

When you:

Give without expecting return (like paying off a stranger’s medical debt anonymously, severing the chain of obligation)
Liberate land from ownership into stewardship
Circulate capital as flow rather than hoarding it as stock
Fund mutual aid and frontline communities without strings attached
Create commons-based infrastructure others can build on

…you become a mycelial node in an emerging network. You’re not waiting for the system to change. You’re being the change, in a way that can actually spread.

Part III: What Becomes Possible

Imagine an economy that works like a forest.

Not a forest as we’ve romantically imagined it—not individual trees “competing” for light. But a forest as science is revealing it to be: a superorganism of interconnection, where the oldest trees nurture the youngest, where species that seem to compete are actually coordinating, where the health of each being is inseparable from the health of the whole.

The Mycelial Economy

In a mycelial economy, resilience is a function of the network’s health, not the size of one’s vault. Value is measured by the velocity of circulation, not the mass of accumulation. Property becomes an act of stewardship—land isn’t something you own to extract from, but something you’re entrusted to care for. Work transforms into gift—you contribute what you can because you see need and have capacity, and your survival is guaranteed by the network’s abundance, not by individual hoarding. Competition evolves into the deeper intelligence of collaboration, where success isn’t zero-sum because the goal isn’t “winning” but participating in collective thriving.

It looks like a floor of guaranteed dignity where no one has to “earn” the right to breathe. It looks like land that has been liberated from the market to belong only to itself. It looks like solidarity economy networks where a baker provides bread to a childcare cooperative, whose parents include mechanics and healers, creating webs of mutual provision that operate alongside—and eventually replace—the cash economy.

Not Utopia—Evolution

This isn’t utopian fantasy. This is ecological reality scaled to human economics.

Every living system works this way. Your body doesn’t operate on market logic—your heart doesn’t charge your kidneys for oxygenated blood. Healthy ecosystems don’t have billionaire apex predators hoarding all the biomass. They circulate. They flow. They thrive through interconnection.

And importantly: this isn’t about abandoning technology. It’s about building systems so sophisticated that they stop demanding our attention. A healthy nervous system doesn’t ask you to manage your heartbeat. A healthy economy shouldn’t ask you to manage your survival. The technology exists—satellites, AI, distributed networks—to make the artificial support systems vanish into the background, leaving us free to simply be.

We’ve forgotten that humans are part of the living world. We’ve been taught to see ourselves as separate, as competitors in a zero-sum game. But that’s a recent, cultural story. For most of human history, for most indigenous peoples still today, the economy was mycelial. Gift-giving, reciprocity, mutual aid, commons-based resource management—these aren’t naive ideals, they’re proven technologies for collective thriving.

The question isn’t whether mycelial economics can work. We know it can. The question is whether we can recover and scale this logic before the vault collapses under its own contradictions.

Part IV: The Work Before Us

Stage Yellow: Building the Bridges

In Spiral Dynamics terms, what I’m describing is the emergence of Stage Yellow consciousness—the capacity to see and integrate multiple systems, to think in terms of networks and flows rather than hierarchies and competitions.

Yellow doesn’t reject Orange (achievement, innovation, strategy). It includes and transcends it. Yellow can use money, can engage markets, can build sophisticated systems—but it does so in service of something larger than winning.

The practical work of Yellow is:

Creating protocols that allow participation in the current system without being captured by it
Building infrastructure that makes mycelial logic easier to practice
Forming communities of mutual accountability
Demonstrating that another way is possible

This is the work of the alchemist. The conscious code-switching between vault and mycelium. The strategic use of conditional tools for unconditional purposes.

Stage Turquoise: The Living Whole

And beyond Yellow is Turquoise—the consciousness that doesn’t just see the connections, but feels them. That experiences the Earth as one living system and humanity as its emerging nervous system.

From Turquoise, there is no “arms race” because there’s no “enemy.” There’s only one organism, currently sick, attacking itself. The work isn’t to win the competition, but to heal the body.

Turquoise is where the mycelial economy becomes not just a practice but a lived reality. Where the distinction between “my thriving” and “your thriving” dissolves. Where the economy and the ecosystem are recognized as one.

The Personal and the Planetary

But here’s what I keep returning to: this isn’t just about grand systemic change. It’s about the quality of each individual life.

When I imagine that state of “simple being”—foraging in flow, nobody special—I’m not imagining escape from economy. I’m imagining the economy we need. An economy where my survival is guaranteed by the network, where my contribution comes from joy rather than fear, where my relationships are based on gift rather than transaction.

That state isn’t waiting on the other side of some revolution. It can begin right now, in small ways, in how we relate to resources and each other. Every act of unconditional giving, every choice of flow over stock, every moment of recognizing our fundamental interconnection—these are the mycelial threads weaving the new world.

Closing: The Garden We’re Weeding

I’ll return to where I started: that memory of simple being in the Basque Country.

That feeling wasn’t a fluke or an escape. It was a glimpse of what’s possible—a lived experience of the economy that emerges when vault logic finally yields to mycelial wisdom. I wasn’t happy despite having no money. I was happy because I was living in the flow, part of a network of provision that didn’t require me to be anybody special.

The work we’re doing now—the protocols, the frameworks, the conscious navigation of this transition—this is the work of weeding the garden. We’re pulling out the invasive species of accumulation and extraction. We’re creating space for the native plants of circulation and gift to take root again.

It’s hard work. It’s unglamorous work. It requires us to get our hands dirty with the very systems we’re trying to transcend. But it’s the only work that actually changes anything.

Because transformation doesn’t happen through rejection. It happens through composting—taking what is and turning it into soil for what could be.

So we use our capital as flow rather than stock. We liberate land from ownership into commons. We build slipways and infrastructure for others to use. We practice unconditional giving while protecting ourselves with protocols. We become nodes in an emerging network.

And one day—maybe not in our lifetimes, but maybe sooner than we think—the network will be strong enough, widespread enough, that the mycelial economy will no longer be an experiment. It will be the ground we stand on.

And then, perhaps, we can all rest in simple being. Foraging fruits in flow. Nobody special. Just alive, together, in a world that finally works like the living system it always was.

I know this is possible because I’ve lived it. Not in some distant future, but in the Basque Country, with nothing but what the earth and community provided. The question isn’t whether it can work. The question is whether we’ll clear the ground for it to spread.

The economy is not separate from nature. It never was. We just forgot how forests work.

It’s time to remember.

Companion Reading & Pathways

This essay outlines a vision. The following resources explore the practice:

For the Protocol:

The Alchemist’s Dilemma: Holding Power Lightly in the Transition - The practical “how-to” for navigating the transition as an individual with capital

For the Systems:

Project Janus - A framework for modeling human nature as integrated whole
Global Governance Frameworks - Explorations of the macro-scale systems that could institutionalize mycelial logic

For Further Theory: For those interested in the intellectual foundations, the works of Charles Eisenstein (gift economics), Elinor Ostrom (commons governance), Robin Wall Kimmerer (indigenous wisdom), and Lewis Hyde (the gift) provide deep wells of insight.

This essay is offered to the commons. May it nourish the network.