The System

The system is the most efficient meat grinder humans have ever built.

The rest of this essay reads as a critique, and the critique will be misread by people who think it implies an alternative. I’m not proposing one. Everything humans have tried other than capitalism — socialism, communism, monarchy, theocracy, central planning, traditionalism, hunter-gatherer agrarianism — has produced worse outcomes for the median human, on every metric we can measure, across every era we have data for. The least-bad arrangement humans have ever stumbled into is the one we’re living inside, and the least-bad arrangement is still, by any honest reading, brutal.

So before I describe how brutal, let me name the floor. When humans are involved, there is going to be a game of winners and losers. No human system has ever escaped this. The only question is the mechanism of selection — what determines who wins and who loses, whether the determination is roughly fair, roughly transparent, and roughly portable across generations. Capitalism is the most merit-based mechanism we’ve ever produced at scale. A poor kid in 2026 with talent, discipline, and a willingness to push has more available paths to a better life than a poor kid in any prior century, in any prior arrangement, on any prior continent. That’s true. That has to be on the page before the rest of the essay can be read honestly.

Now, the vicious cycle.

The publicly traded company has, as its central legal and structural obligation, the maximization of shareholder return. The shareholders aren’t, mostly, the cartoon top-hat-and-monocle figures the populist imagination summons. They’re pension funds, retirement accounts, mutual funds, index funds, sovereign wealth funds — the financial backstops of an enormous population of retired and soon-to-retire humans who have been promised, on average, that their assets will compound at roughly eight percent a year forever. That promise is the leash. The leash pulls back through the entire stack.

The pension fund needs the eight percent to remain solvent. The pension fund’s manager pushes the asset managers for the eight percent. The asset managers push the board of every company they hold. The board pushes the CEO, in increasingly explicit terms, every quarter. The CEO pushes the executive team. The executive team pushes the managers. The managers push the line workers. The line workers — whose wages are flat in real terms, whose hours have crept up, whose benefits have eroded, whose pensions are gone — produce the eight percent. They produce it with their labor, their attention, their bodies, and their families. The labor share of national income has dropped while the capital share has risen, year over year, for forty years. The math of the eight percent is paid by the people at the bottom of the stack, the proceeds flow up to the people at the top, and the whole mechanism is presented to the public as retirement security rather than as the intergenerational wealth transfer it actually is.

We are eating our young. Not as metaphor. The young are the ones whose wages are stagnant, whose housing is unaffordable, whose education was financed on credit, whose careers are gig-shaped, whose health is broken by the food and the schedule the system requires of them, and whose own retirement is being made structurally impossible by the math of the system that’s currently paying everyone else’s. The boomers and the older Gen X are the beneficiaries of the cycle. The millennials and Gen Z and everyone after them are the substrate. The transfer is enormous, it’s documented, and it’s presented as if it were the natural state of the universe rather than the engineered outcome of a specific arrangement that has been running since approximately 1980.

The arrangement is also producing, as a side effect, the deaths-of-despair epidemic, the collapse of the marriage rate, the collapse of the birth rate, the depression and anxiety waves I’ve named elsewhere, the obesity catastrophe, the addiction crisis, the dissolution of community, and the vanishing of the village layer that used to make the rest of life bearable. None of those outcomes are accidents. They’re the downstream effects of an economic mechanism that requires the worker to be maximally productive, maximally mobile, maximally available, maximally indebted, and maximally lonely — because the lonely worker spends more on entertainment, the indebted worker can’t quit, the mobile worker has no community to fall back on, and the available worker is always in the office. The arrangement is, by design, hollowing. The system doesn’t need you to be happy. The system needs you to be functional and consuming and producing the eight percent on schedule.

This is what I mean when I say the system is inhumane. It isn’t inhumane in the dramatic sense — no death camp, no goon squad, no midnight knock at the door. The inhumanity is subtle. It runs through your kitchen as the food your great-grandmother wouldn’t have recognized. It runs through your phone as the feed your great-grandfather couldn’t have imagined. It runs through your calendar as the schedule the seventy-hour-week version of you submits to without noticing. It runs through your body as the chronic disease the prescription pad is medicating around. By the time the worker is fifty, the worker has been hollowed out to a degree no previous generation in human history would have considered acceptable, and the worker still has fifteen more years of producing the eight percent before retirement — at which point the worker becomes, briefly, the recipient of the eight percent that the next generation of workers is being hollowed out to produce.

That’s the cycle. That’s the trap. That’s what the manifesto on this site has been arguing against, in every essay, from every angle.

And — and — I’m still not going to advocate for an alternative system. Every alternative humans have tried has been worse. The bread lines were worse. The gulags were worse. The serfdom was worse. The plague years were worse. The dynastic feudalism was worse. Capitalism is the worst system except for all the others, and I’m going to keep my critique of it inside that frame, because honest critique requires honest framing — and the honest framing is that we’re inside the best arrangement humans have produced and the best arrangement humans have produced is grinding us up.

Now the endpoint.

The system has exactly one terminal state, and I want to name it clearly: artificial intelligence. The system has been running, since roughly the Industrial Revolution, on a steady automation of labor — the loom replaced the weaver, the assembly line replaced the craftsman, the spreadsheet replaced the bookkeeper, the database replaced the records clerk. Each wave displaced workers, who were reabsorbed into newly created categories of work, because the prior wave of automation also produced new kinds of demand. That arc has worked, more or less, for two and a half centuries. The arc is about to stop working, because the next wave of automation isn’t going to replace specific tasks. It’s going to replace general cognitive labor — the substrate on which almost every white-collar job in the developed world is built — and the reabsorption mechanism that worked for prior waves is structurally incapable of working for this one.

I’m not a doomer about AI. I’m also not a utopian. The honest read is that the transition from the current system to whatever-comes-after-AI is the most significant economic and civilizational transition humans have attempted since the Neolithic Revolution, and we’re attempting it with a population that has been hollowed out by the system the transition is supposed to end. The people who are supposed to navigate the transition are the same people whose marriages have collapsed, whose bodies are broken, whose attention has been captured, whose community has dissolved, whose children aren’t being born, and whose ability to think long-term has been atrophied by forty years of quarterly thinking. We’re running into the most demanding civilizational test of the modern era with a deeply weakened civilization.

I’m not sure we make it. That’s the honest answer. The technical problem of building useful AI is largely solved or about to be. The technical problem is the easy part. The civilizational problem of distributing the gains, retraining the displaced, maintaining the infrastructure, sustaining the rule of law, and keeping a population worth living among through a decade or two of disruptive transition — that’s the hard part, and the hard part is being attempted by a population the prior arrangement has made measurably less capable of handling it.

Maybe we make it. Maybe AI delivers on the abundance case — energy too cheap to meter, medicine that actually works, materials that build themselves, education that finally educates, leisure that produces craft instead of consumption. The optimistic version is a real possibility. I want it. I’m rooting for it. I’m also, like any honest person watching the system, aware that the optimistic version requires a coordination problem of historic difficulty to be solved by a coordination apparatus that has been visibly degrading for thirty years.

Maybe we don’t make it. The pessimistic version is also a real possibility. The pessimistic version is that the system breaks before the transition completes — the pension promises can’t be paid because the workers underneath them can’t produce the eight percent because their bodies and their families and their attention have been ground up by the same system that’s now demanding they produce more — and somewhere in the second half of the 2030s the whole arrangement reorganizes, not by plan, not by election, not by orderly transition, but by collapse. That has happened to every prior arrangement humans have built. There’s no rule of physics requiring this one to be the exception.

This is, in plain language, why I bought the land. The land isn’t a doomer move. It’s a portfolio diversification against a tail risk that has, on inspection of the prior arrangements, been the modal outcome rather than the tail. The land is the substrate that keeps producing what a body needs whether or not the rest of the system is honoring its promises in any given decade. I’m going to learn to work it, with my own hands and Effie’s, because the relationship with land is itself part of the answer to the hollowing-out — and because, if the worst case shows up, I’d rather be the person who knows how to feed the household than the person who has been counting on the system that has stopped being honest about its capacity to feed them.

I’m also not building a bunker, not stockpiling silver, not waiting for the collapse with anything like enthusiasm. I’m hoping for the magical era on the other side. I think the magical era is genuinely possible. I think we have, maybe, a fifty-fifty chance of getting there. The fifty-fifty number is generous compared to the read most informed observers would give you privately, and the read most informed observers will give you publicly is more optimistic because the optimism is institutionally required.

Whether we get the magical version or the collapsed version, the system as it currently runs is going to end. The system is structurally incapable of continuing in its current form much past this decade. The pensions can’t mathematically be paid out under any plausible projection of worker productivity, in either direction. The eight percent forever isn’t a property of the universe — it’s a promise that requires the substrate to keep producing the returns, the substrate is being consumed faster than it can regenerate, and at some point the regeneration will stop and the math will assert itself.

That’s the macro. Inside the macro is the household, and the household is what I have the agency to run. The protocol on this site is the household’s response. Build the body that can survive either version of what comes next. Build the marriage that can run on whatever the household has to grow on its own land. Build the inner ring whose members will catch each other when the village layer the system has dismantled doesn’t return on the timeline anyone hopes for. Hold the standard the system would prefer you didn’t hold, because the standard is the only thing the system can’t get inside.

Hope we make it. Be ready if we don’t. Either way, the cycle as we have known it is ending. The honest move is to spend the closing window of the system using the system’s tools — the index fund, the early retirement, the land purchase — to build a household that isn’t entirely dependent on the system continuing. The system was never going to be your friend, and it isn’t going to apologize on the way out.

The system is going to end. That has always been the only ending available. The question was always whether you were going to be ready for the next thing or whether the system was going to take you with it when it went.

I plan to be ready. I hope you do too.