FIRE Chats #001 - Y’all ’Bout to Be Poor
By Niko — punk dad, floor prophet, unlicensed economist, follower of a Jesus that doesn’t sell merch
📘 This piece is part of my FIRE CHATS series — dispatches from the basement floor, where truth gets written through struggle. For deeper dives, check out my book Capitalism Crossover — a radical essay collection on what happens when collapse meets creativity, and how to fight back with punk spirit, spiritual grit, and soul-rooted action.
⛓️ Opening: The Shout Before the Collapse
Ok — I want to give some firsthand tips and insights for what many are about to experience: first-time poverty.
I have experience with the forced life of 21st-century survival — most recently from the years of 2018 to 2024. And though I’m still nowhere near financial sufficiency or sustainability, I’ve had brief moments of stability. Enough to carve out some truths. Enough to speak from the center of it. Enough to take measurable action toward framing a life, naming values, and crafting a self-sufficiency that might carry the remainder of my life, my marriage, my family, and my offspring...
If they want it. And it’s ok if it falls on deaf ears.
This is all in response to an invisible, gut-wrenching push to at least shout out a voice — the kind of voice I wish I had heard when I was younger: a lonely teen, a stubborn husband, a pushover dad. Someone honest enough — even if they were just a digital stranger I’d never meet.
Like a band you find on a mixtape. You hear the melody, the rhythm, the lyrics, and suddenly you’re absorbed in a world of abstraction that feels more concrete than the concrete world around you.
So I type. I write. I put it out there to shut up the voices. If I’m applauded or shunned — so be it.
I’ll sleep well on my twin mattress in the basement. Pleasant dreams interwoven with the unseen divine world — a more accurate explanation than the 21st-century expert consensus of “we have no idea why we dream.” Bravo, materialist genius. Here we go…
🏚️ What’s Coming: Job Loss as Judgment Day
You will likely lose your job in the next 12–24 months.
You’ll be replaced. Or your position will vanish. And yes — as science-fiction as it all sounds, the endgame is near.
The goal of corporate capitalism has always been free labor. The masters have mastered the economics of maximizing profit by squeezing the labor force as cheaply, quietly, and illegally as possible.
This isn’t a glitch. It’s the blueprint. From the beginning.
📜 The Economic Origin Story (Spoiler: It’s Blood)
The colonies were not started for individual liberty or utopian community. That was propaganda. They were a resource extraction project — feeding the “motherland” for profit.
Labor? Always human. Always inconvenient. Always seen as a “necessary evil” in the production equation. Whether indentured, enslaved, converted, or conquered, human effort has always been the first domino to fall.
Free labor made America. Period.
From 1619 to 1775 — the pre–United States years — Black humans were legally considered property. Bought. Sold. Rented. Broken. Treated as less than livestock. This was the economic engine that allowed the U.S. to even enter the global market.
That’s not a metaphor. It’s the table they set before the Declaration of Independence was even a draft.
🕊️ The Founding Hypocrisy
The Declaration of Independence had to be shamed into including even an asterisk of hope that all humans were equal.
Meanwhile, the same men — those poets of revolution — sat sweating in rooms, writing a foundational document about liberty, while owning people. No one batted an eye. Because the only eyes that mattered were white, male, wealthy, and locked behind those sweaty Philadelphia doors.
And we wonder why this empire is cracking.
It didn’t last.
It already died — maybe 150 years ago.
They just never told you.
🧱 You Cut the Net You’re About to Fall Through
There’s a new class of non-working Americans heading down the terminal, following signs that point to the stations of departure.
They think they’ll receive:
A job
Food
Shelter
Legal help
But you — yes you, middle class poser riding the wave of inheritance or post-divorce greed — you’re about to torpedo through the very holes you helped cut in that safety net.
Your gossip. Your apathy. Your proud “Christian” silence while voting to defund the poor. That net? It’s shredded. And now you’re falling through it.
You remember those dinner table comments about “lazy people” and “bad choices” and “nobody wants to work anymore”? That commentary was your scalpel. Those judgments were the scissors. And now the floor is yours — and there’s no net to catch you.
💥 Mercy Was the Assignment
Remember Jesus?
The one you supposedly follow?
He didn’t whisper. He shouted. He made it plain: take care of your neighbor. Not your cousin. Not your political tribe. The Samaritan — your sworn enemy, the person left beaten in a ditch — that’s who you stop for. That’s how you know God.
And your leaders — the ones who looked religious, pious, “godly” — walked right past the broken man in the ditch. That’s not just a parable.
That’s you.
And that is not the Spirit of Christ.
⚠️ Reality Check for the Spiritually Numb
You’re about to lose your job.
Maybe your house.
Maybe your ego.
And maybe — finally — you’ll sprout a shred of empathy in that oil-slicked, blacked-out heart of yours.
You’ve been at war with mercy.
But mercy wins.
It always has.
You want something to do about it? Start with this:
Go to your kitchen. Make a sandwich. Take it outside and give it to someone without asking questions.
Call someone you’ve wronged — not to fix it, but to own it.
Read the Sermon on the Mount and don’t look away.
None of that will solve the system. But it might just rewire your soul.
🔥 What You Must Do Now
Beg for God’s mercy.
Beg for good soil.
Beg for eyes that see and ears that hear.
Bury yourself in His words, not the words of men with microphones and tax-exempt real estate.
Protect yourself from self-righteous delusion.
Remember:
You are created.
You are a servant.
You are enslaved… to God.
Your Creator.
Your Father.
Your Source, Soul, and Eternity.
“My sheep will hear My voice.”
Lord — give us ears.
📘 From the Basement to the Bookstore
This FIRE CHAT is just the first dispatch.
To read deeper on how capitalism breaks the soul and how we take it back — with faith, with community, with raw honesty — read my book Capitalism Crossover. It’s a battle cry, a love letter, and a survival manual stitched into one.
Subscribe to FIRE CHATS for weekly truth from the floor — World Series dispatches, punk dad theology, economic survivalism, ADHD gospel, and unfiltered stories from the edge of collapse and the beginning of something better.
🛰 Find Me in the Non-Toxic Corners of the Internet
No doomscroll, no ragebait — just stories, experiments, and the occasional middle finger to the algorithm.
Bluesky: 🌤
@nikosekoya.bsky.social
Mastodon: 🐘
mastodon.art/@nikosekoya
Substack: 💻
substack.com/@nikosekoya
Neocities: 🌱
nikosekoya.neocities.org — direct to the ship I’m steering.