why are we in this situation?
There is a subtle difference between how we are told to live and how life is actually experienced. For a long time, the script was excel at school, go to college, get the degree, find a job. Academic credentials served as differentiator for a system that functioned for generations because it provided a clear and a predictable map.
If you followed the plan, the plan would carry you. Circa 2026, that world has been hollowed out from the inside. Today the credentials still cost the same time, the same debt, and the same soul-crushing effort, without the guaranteed mobility, stability, or dignity.
We are finding out the hard way that what we purchased was an expired "permission slip" to compete. No refunds, btw. Only debts!
A person can do everything they were told to do and still find themselves stuck in place, realizing that the value of an advanced degree is often eclipsed by those who bypassed the playbook entirely, leveraging early positions in research labs or "learning on the street" to become key players without ever asking for a rubber stamp. What differentiates now is something harder to name, taste.
Taste, as it stands out, is the ability to know what to build versus merely knowing how to build it. Taste cannot be credentialed or taught in a semester as it lives in the gap between technical competence and actual judgment. It is where the real sorting happens now, quietly.
In this new landscape, money buys beyond comfort. It empowers anyone with a unprecedented execution capacity. In the age of AI, a single person with access to strong models, compute, and contractors can execute at levels that once required entire teams. Though it looks democratizing, there is a brutal asymmetry because the person with money can rent intelligence, speed, optionality, and even "retries."
Skill on its own matters less. A talented person without money must be careful, precise, and lucky for the amount of shots is limited. A less talented person with enough capital can buy tools, reach, and multiple chances until something finally sticks. Therefore, survivable risk becomes a differentiating factor. A failed bet for one can be devastating investment for another person.
Visibility has been commodified to the point where the market demands entire package, signal, distribution, and optimization on top of what was built. The work has shifted from the craft itself to the machinery that increasingly belongs to those who already have the capital to fuel it.
For those not fortunate enough to skip the system, life has become a constant necessity to prove and optimize. But there is a point where ambition curdles into submission. The difference is whether or not you can walk away. If you cannot, the action is result of fear wearing the costume of productivity. This is why the modern corporate grind being so "productive", is fueled by the high stakes of losing a position and sliding into an irrecoverable lifestyle.
We have built a workforce that measures its own dignity in productivity metrics, sweeping its exhaustion under a tiny four-hour window of relaxation on the weekend. The maintenance of a household now draws the remaining soul from a person, leaving a generation lonelier and more scared than ever. If loneliness is an epidemic, we must ask if it is a design outcome. When people feel "wrong" about the system, it’s not because they’ve given up on meaning instead they realized the mismatch between what was promised and what they have.
We are witnessing a return to a medieval structure where the "modern network" looks suspiciously like a feudal court, governed by platforms and algorithms. Success still comes down to "who do you know," and meritocracy has become a useful story told by those who have already rigged the competition. It keeps everyone else running on a treadmill. The eternal rat race.
I do not write this as a doomer. Personally I think it is the best time to be alive because there is a possibility for all of us. But at the same time, we must stop lying about the conditions under which building happens. If money now buys competence multipliers and insulation from failure, we should say so. The point is not to stop building, but to stop pretending that those who see the broken contract are "lazy" or "broken."
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