Hearthbroken: Chapter Three

The Market Myth: How the Market Rewrote Home

Hello friends. A sincere thank you for staying with me through the more academic, foundation-laying chapters. So far we’ve traced the condensed version of the long story of the hearth, then waded into feminism and the complicated ways it reshaped women’s lives and domestic life alike. This week we step into the next force that rewrote everything: the market. It is wildly efficient at producing and distributing goods, but it has no real way to recognize the value of care and connection. This is a short chapter, so I’m giving you a two-for-one this week and publishing the next chapter, Embers in the Dark: The Cost of Untended Flames. This is where the foundation meets the fallout.

But fret not. Part Two of the book is hopeful as we turn toward revival, with real reasons for hope and practical paths forward. It’s also where I finally dig into the “Age of AI” part of the title, and why I believe this technological wave, if met with wisdom and directed with intention, could actually help restore the hearth instead of erasing it.

So grab a cup of tea, pull your chair a little closer to the fire, and come read (or listen to) how the market moved into our homes and started rewriting what we value.

“The more eagerly we pursue what the market promises, the more we feel the ache of what it cannot provide.”— Michael J. Sandel, What Money Can’t Buy

I’ve spent my life tending hearths. But it wasn’t until 2017 that I started to see how the hearth I’d spent my life defending had been undermined, not just by feminism, but by something far subtler.

That year, the world felt unmoored. I was angry, confused and hungry for voices that could make sense of the chaos. Like so many others, I turned to podcasts, those digital campfires where new ideas can catch fire. I stumbled across thinkers I’d never heard of — philosophers, futurists, oddballs, but one voice stopped me cold.

I was in my kitchen chopping onions for a stew when I first heard Tomas Björkman on a podcast talking about his book, “The Market Myth.” A Swedish financier, social entrepreneur and philosopher, Björkman argued that the market has become our “ultimate authority,” a socially constructed system that we’ve unconsciously elevated to fill the existential abyss left by the decline of earlier meaning-making frameworks — first nature’s primal rules, then religion and later science.

In a later book, “The World We Create: From God to Market,” Björkman wrote: “The market is a self-organizing complex system, but in contrast to life, consciousness and other biological systems, it is a system that we have created ourselves, virtually without noticing it. We may not see the market as God, yet by virtue of the power it wields in our personal lives, the way it structures our social reality, and how we tend to ascribe it almost divine magical abilities, it has almost come to behave as one.”

He went on to say that the market is a shield—efficient at distributing goods but weak at addressing deeper human needs like connection and purpose. Collectively and unconsciously, we’ve embraced a story that crowns consumption and production not as a means to an end, but as life’s central purpose.

Björkman described how early postmodernist theories, although correct in their critiques of the established systems, had inadvertently created a moral void into which this “market myth” had silently slipped. I’d wrestled with postmodernist thinkers back in my sociology days at college wading through the dense texts of Baudrillard, Foucault, and Lyotard, nodding along to their dismantling of grand narratives and their criticism of power structures. But Björkman drew connections I hadn’t seen before.

Postmodern “cultural relativism” theories insist that truth isn’t universal; it’s shaped by culture and power, a chorus of competing narratives. It’s seductive and liberating at first but ultimately leaves us on unsteady ground. Without a uniting moral framework how do we act, or judge right from wrong? We’re left questioning everything. Adrift in a sea of subjective meaning, we become vulnerable to existential anxiety, a gnawing unease that comes when life’s big questions have no firm answers.

We’ve dulled our discomfort with market distractions: endless TV shows, glossy magazines, mall hauls, and now dopamine-hacking apps, anything to dodge the pain of living in a disconnected world. With no shared moral framework left to challenge the market, I realized he was right, consumer capitalism has indeed become our new ultimate authority, offering not liberation or revelation, but endless choice — without meaning.

As I listened to Björkman something cracked open inside me. Had I been serving this unseen force all along? Had the market subtly rewritten my life script? My perceptions of home and hearth? It was sobering to realize that yes, indeed, I had bought into the new market religion hook, line and sinker. What’s more I had been unconsciously judging stay-at-home moms and hearth-tenders for not chasing the metrics I’d held dear without ever understanding why.

It was the type of epiphany that starts in your belly and hums in your bones before it hits your brain. I’d spent my life studying culture and yet, like a fish who cannot see the water around her, I’d missed this completely.

The Market Rewrites Care

The market didn’t arrive with fanfare or decree. It seeped in, a slow drip of values into a culture already in upheaval. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, while postmodernist theories were taking hold in universities, the Vietnam War’s chaos was shattering faith in traditional forms of authority. Feminism’s wholesale rejection of domesticity was cresting around the same time. The convergence of these forces precipitated the broader cultural shift that allowed the market to engulf us all.

As women entered the workforce en masse, by 1975 nearly half of American women held jobs (up from a third from 1960), the market was there to lend a helping hand. The homemade version of food, care and wisdom gave way to profit-driven substitutes: my grandmother’s sourdough, kneaded over hours, traded for nutritionless Wonder Bread; her lullabies outsourced to daycare. I felt the pull myself: proud to trade apron strings for a chef’s coat, building a career in hospitality, yet unsettled as I witnessed the slow rhythms of care supplanted by service industries.

Fast forward two generations, and the numbers tell the story. In 2022, Americans poured billions into our hollowed-out hearths: $362 billion on fast food, $61 billion on childcare, $37 billion on home entertainment, $12 billion on residential cleaning services, $9 billion on prepared meal delivery, figures that dwarf the humble labor they replaced.

But the market’s rewrite cut deeper by peddling a seductive story to young women: true fulfillment waits at the desk, not around the hearth, not in the tender moments of a child’s first words or steps. It planted the idea that purpose and worth bloom only in corner offices or sales figures, rarely in the unseen hours of tending home and hearth. It normalized the idea that we should shoehorn our precious fertility window into career timelines and chase market success before children, underestimating how swiftly the years slip by until biology shrugs and says, “too late.” I saw it in my own circle: friends who delayed, trusting the clock could be bargained with, only to face the market’s costly fix. Expensive and unreliable fertility tech like IVF that served as a literal lifeline for some, but an uncertain gamble for others, often riddled with its own failures and griefs.

Homemaking and caregiving became costs to minimize. We stopped defending both vocations and watched as they fell to the bottom rungs of our status hierarchies. By calculating our self worth in terms of public sphere wages, the market, born of the Industrial Revolution’s churn, convinced us that the hearth’s warmth was a relic we could no longer justify prizing.

As I listened to Björkman, I felt the weight of my own “hearthbrokenness,” a loss I hadn’t been able to name until that moment. A realization that hit me mid-chop, the tears flowing not from the onions, but from a grief I didn’t know I owned.

On the Road

In 2017, feeling unsettled, I took to the road in Casita, my rolling refuge. I was 52 years old, single, recently ousted from my role as CEO of my company and feeling bruised and laid bare — but also free for the perhaps the first time in my life. I was still trying to make sense of the life script I’d acted out and wondering who I would become without these old masks?

With time to read and listen to fresh voices from the road, Casita became both sanctuary and classroom as I traveled through a nation I barely recognized — a country that had just elected Donald Trump. Yet I felt open and genuinely curious, about what I might discover.

That year, thinking about how the market had shaped my own life, I quickly realized how little I had grasped of what it had done to the rest of the country. Out there, in America’s heartlands, it had gutted towns and livelihoods and eroded communities and the pride and purpose that once came from steady work and strong ties.

Waffle Lessons

I didn’t plan to spend my 53rd birthday perched on a vinyl stool at a Waffle House in Pensacola Florida, but a last-minute business trip meant that I was alone for the day. I’d always wanted to try their famed waffles and thought, why not ‘carb’ it up for my special day? When I asked for extra butter, my weary, heavy-set waitress brought a bowl of plastic packets labeled “Butter” in bold print, but upon closer inspection, “like substitute” was written directly underneath in teeny, tiny print. Behind me, I overheard a young man confiding to his friend that he had $10 to stretch over two days, plotting his meals like a survivalist. At one point I must have let slip that it was my birthday, and two waitresses (perhaps sensing I could use a boost) sang “Happy Birthday” with a kindness that pierced me. Here I was, far from home, a stranger out of place under that fluorescent glow. I wasn’t met with skepticism but with recognition, my fragility seen and met with warmth and care.

Yet the market, our “ultimate authority,” wasn’t tending them. Trapped in what I think of as the cheap carb economy, a food system of processed, empty calories, they bore its weight in their bodies. The market had flipped the scales on them. Wholesome food, like butter that was once an everyday staple, now carried a premium they could no longer afford, while its 10 ingredient substitutes flooded their grocery store shelves. From the South to the Rust Belt to the West, I encountered a system that had left good people sick, addicted and depressed. I listened to their stories about factory jobs shipped to China and small shops crushed by big box retailers or bought out by private equity. There was no safety net.

I’d once scoffed at these “crazy MAGA” Americans from my elite coastal blue bubble, blind to their plight for too many years, but their steady warmth and decency, mile after mile, humbled me. The people who built our country with their hands and hard work, were not failures, they were surviving a powerful unseen force that didn’t have their best interest at heart. While I didn’t share their presidential choice at the time, I finally grasped it – they had voted against the shit sandwich that had been handed to them.

By the end of my year-long trip, I had shed my old masks and worn out beliefs about who I thought I was. I felt a fierce resolve growing in my belly. A primal instinct I suspect pulses in most women as we age, an elder’s drive to ready our replacements for their leg of the human journey, so they can carry our shared story onward.

I’d tangled with the market before. I had intended for my food company to be a rebellion against its cheap carb racket, but it ended up serving only my upper-middle and upper class neighbors. This was different. The market might have bruised me, but I’d be damned if I’d let it unravel the next generation without a fight.

The Market Rewrites Childhood

We’re in the early stages of another massive technological revolution and we’re already witnessing its impact on our youth.

Not long ago, parents stood guard at the front door. Home was a buffer, a place where values were shaped by family and community, where childhood unfolded at a human pace. Even as television advertising crept in, parents still held some control over what entered the home and how much access their children had to it.

That era is gone. The market no longer knocks at the door — it’s moved in. Its tentacles reach deep into our inner sanctums, speaking directly to our kids, often bypassing us entirely. Our homes have become a portal through which algorithms, not parents, shape our children’s emotions and minds before they’ve had a chance to do the slow work of ‘becoming.’ Jonathan Haidt’s, “The Anxious Generation” pulls back the curtain on the market strategy behind our new digital roommates: “The companies are competing against each other for users’ attention, and, like gambling casinos, they’ll do anything to hold on to their users even if they harm them in the process.”

Likes, shares and infinite scrolls aren’t harmless diversion; they’re engineered for dependency, hijacking developing brains with the same dopamine hits that keep gamblers tethered to the slots.

As I was in the final stages of writing this book, I became mesmerized by “Adolescence,” the 2025 Netflix series. It wasn’t just the gripping storytelling or the single-take cinematography that held me, it was the gut punch of recognition. The show portrays how naive we adults truly are. How helpless we feel in a world we no longer understand. We work hard, we try our best, we assume love and good intentions will be enough. But will they?

Watching Jamie’s story unfold, I couldn’t shake the feeling that his could be any family. His parents weren’t cruel or neglectful; they were simply outmatched by forces they couldn’t see. We assume our kids are safe when they’re at home, tucked into their bedrooms. Yet, people we would never allow near them, let alone invite into our homes, have unlimited access to their impressionable minds. Before we realize it’s happening, these unseen influences shape their beliefs, desires, and even their sense of self.

How do we protect children from a world that profits from their vulnerability? How do we guide them when the rules of childhood have been rewritten? The evidence mounts that this trajectory is unsustainable. The studies on health and wellness, signal this is a crisis we can no longer ignore.

And here comes AI, barreling into a society still staggering from the first wave of this latest technological revolution. Its speed outpacing our evolutionary capacity, leaving us, as primates wired for presence, ill-equipped to metabolize or make sense of such relentless change.

We Rewrite the Market

The problems we face are complex and systemic. The market economy, for all its efficiencies, has no mechanism to capture the long-term, holistic benefits of care work. It cannot measure the resilience of a family nurtured by shared meals, the self-esteem of a child raised with patience and attention, or the continuity of traditions passed through generations. And yet, these “immeasurable” outcomes form the bedrock of any healthy society.

In elevating the market to near-divine status, we’ve allowed it to dictate how we spend our time and what we deem worthy of our time. Björkman’s words remind us that the market, though powerful, is a creation of our own making. It is not a natural force but a human construct, one we can reshape if we choose to see value in the things it currently overlooks.

As author Benjamin Graham aptly pointed out in 1949, “Mr. Market is a terrible master but a wonderful servant.” We would do well to remember which one we are meant to be. We must question the assumptions that tie worth to wages and find ways to honor the work of care and connection.

I don’t have all the answers or a map for the future, but I have been around long enough to know that we cannot outsource care. We cannot automate connection. And we cannot afford to let the hearth go cold.

Note to readers: Looking for sources and deeper listening? See Footnotes by the Fire: Sources + Podcast Companion