Memo From Claire

Pricing happiness at wholesale

— and that’s how the song starts. In the middle of a sentence nobody remembers beginning.

Because that’s where we already are. There’s no clean beginning to point to. There’s just… this. Already in progress. Already too late to ask how the terms were agreed to.

Konrad had the rhythm first. Something that felt like a spreadsheet trying to dance — very precise, very insistent, slightly wrong in a way that was exactly right. Mage built the sound around that wrongness. The music sounds like it believes in what it’s doing.

The lyrics came from noticing how often the language of economics shows up where it has no business being. Happiness at wholesale. Fame in bulk. The moon repurposed as storage. It sounds absurd because it is absurd, but it also sounds familiar, which is the part that interests me.

We measure everything now, including things that collapse the moment you try to measure them. Happiness. Attention. Love. The vocabulary of the balance sheet has moved into places it was never meant to go, and we stopped noticing somewhere along the way.

There’s a line near the end — “reality is deductible” — that I think is the center of the whole thing. Everything else in the song is orbiting that.

But Claire from accounting says we’re fine.

Economies Of Scale is available now.