Part 1: The System Is Breaking, and It’s Not Your Fault
It was COVID that made me say it out loud for the first time.
Something has shifted. Something fundamental. And it’s not coming back.
I’ve been watching this for years — studying history, following economic trends, observing the people around me. But the pandemic made it impossible to ignore. The gap between what people work for and what life actually costs has become absurd. Not uncomfortable. Absurd.
People who were born in the seventies could earn enough to buy a home. That’s just a fact. Work hard, save carefully, and in a reasonable number of years, you’d have a place that was yours.
That world is gone.
Today, no matter how hard you work, homeownership is slipping out of reach for most people. Wages have stagnated. Prices keep climbing. Assets keep appreciating — for those who already have them. And the people doing everything right are falling further behind every year.
This isn’t personal failure. It’s structural. But the structure is invisible enough that millions of people are blaming themselves for it.
How Capitalism Swallows People Quietly
Capitalism is, at its core, a growth-dependent system. It needs expansion to function. When real growth slows, the system finds other ways to keep moving — financial engineering, currency expansion, technological disruption. For decades, that worked well enough.
But now something different is happening.
AI and robotics aren’t just a new wave of productivity tools. They represent a fundamental restructuring of who gets paid for what. We’re not talking about wages stagnating anymore. We’re talking about entire categories of employment disappearing.
When I look at what’s happened in the United States — a country I’ve studied carefully because its patterns tend to show up everywhere else, eventually — I see a society that has lost its moral counterweight to capital.
In the 1980s, there was still a balance. American manufacturing had pride. Companies felt some obligation to the communities they operated in. Products were made to last. That balance has been completely dismantled.
Today, food companies sell nutritionally devastating processed food at low prices — and the same system charges people catastrophic amounts to treat the illnesses that food creates. Insurance premiums climb. Manufacturing hollowed out decades ago. Asset prices float upward, disconnected from any economic reality that ordinary people experience.
Money became the only measure of good.
The Invisible Choke
Here’s the part that I think matters most — and the part that almost nobody talks about directly.
When oppression is visible, people resist it. History is full of this.
When governments send tanks into streets, people march. When leaders seize power openly, movements rise up. The target is clear. The enemy has a face.
Capitalism’s decline is different. It doesn’t have a face.
There’s no decree, no curfew, no moment when someone points a gun and says your life is getting worse now. Instead, wages fall behind inflation by one percent per year. Housing appreciates just fast enough to stay out of reach. The squeeze is so gradual, so distributed, so structurally embedded that people can’t see it as a system problem.
So they see it as a personal problem.
Take a typical person in their thirties — working at a decent company, performing well, moving up. Then they do the math on buying a home and realize it’s not possible. Not without significant family wealth. Not within any timeline that makes sense.
The rational response would be to recognize that the system has changed. That what was possible for their parents’ generation at the same age is simply not possible now — not because of individual failure, but because the structural conditions are completely different.
But that’s not what happens. What happens is: What am I doing wrong? Why can’t I manage my money better? Why am I falling behind?
The system made the problem invisible. And when a problem is invisible, the person standing inside it blames themselves.
What AI Changes — And Why It’s Not Just an Economic Story
The arrival of AI at scale changes the equation in a way that I think is genuinely historic.
When AI and robotics can produce goods and services at a fraction of current cost, something interesting happens to prices. Inflation — the quiet mechanism that has been eroding real wages for decades — may finally lose its grip. The cost of production drops. Things get cheaper.
But capital concentrates at a scale we haven’t seen before.
The people who own the systems that replace human labor accumulate wealth at an exponential rate. The people whose labor was replaced have lower costs of living — but potentially no income at all.
This is the situation we are moving toward. And it raises a question that I think is one of the most important questions of our time:
If money is no longer the primary measure of a good life — if the old equation of work hard, earn more, live better is broken — what replaces it?
I’ve spent years thinking about this. I want to tell you what I’ve concluded.
The Answer Is You
Not your productivity. Not your output. Not your market value.
You. Your mind, your body, your inner life. Your capacity to know yourself, to care for yourself, to orient your existence around something that doesn’t disappear when the economic system shifts.
When I was writing and researching my book on AI and the coming changes, this idea kept surfacing with more and more clarity. To use AI well, you need to know what you want. To know what you want, you need to know who you are. To know who you are, you have to have a real relationship with yourself.
And a real relationship with yourself requires love.
Not sentiment. Not self-esteem as a concept. Real, practiced, daily love — the kind that means you pay attention to yourself, take care of yourself, treat your own inner life as something worth tending.
That’s where Part 2 goes.
This is Part 1 of a two-part essay. Part 2 covers the concept of Existentialism and the Age of the Mind — what they mean practically, why they matter now, and how MINDPT connects to what’s coming.
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