10 Years Of “Owning Nothing and Being Happy”—Please Rate Your Happiness

Notes on living in an economy where you finance your spaghetti longer than you eat them.

There is a particular cruelty in being told to pull yourself up by your bootstraps when someone has already stolen your boots, and an even deeper cruelty in being lectured about hard work by the generation that bought houses on a single income and retired with pensions while you work three jobs and sleep in your childhood bedroom at twenty-six.

According to TransUnion, Generation Z now carries more credit card debt than millennials did at the same age, which would be remarkable enough on its own terms if it were not coupled with the fact that their purchasing power has collapsed by roughly eighty-six percent compared to what baby boomers enjoyed when they were entering adulthood.

Let that figure settle into your consciousness for a moment. Eighty-six percent. This is not a marginal decline. This is not the ordinary friction of economic cycles. This is the methodical, systematic extraction of an entire generation’s future, conducted over decades by institutions that understood precisely what they were doing and did it anyway.

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First-time home buyers have fallen to their lowest level in nearly fifty years. Institutional investors—faceless aggregations of capital that treat shelter as a spreadsheet entry rather than a human necessity—are now projected to own more than forty percent of all single-family homes within the next four years. The question that emerges from these statistics is not whether Generation Z will achieve the American Dream, because that dream has already been foreclosed upon, auctioned off, and converted into a rental property managed by BlackRock’s algorithm.

The question is whether what remains can even be called a life, or whether it has been reduced to something more accurately described as a subscription service—a monthly fee for the privilege of existing in a society that has monetized every aspect of human experience while offering nothing in return but the opportunity to keep paying.

The comfortable classes—those whose wealth insulates them so completely from the consequences of the system they defend that they genuinely cannot fathom why anyone would struggle—will tell you, with the benevolent condescension of aristocrats explaining table manners to the help, that this is simply how markets work. They will invoke the sacred liturgy of supply and demand as if reciting scripture, genuflecting before the altars of efficiency and innovation, creative destruction and economic dynamism. These are incantations, ritual phrases designed to end thought rather than encourage it, the economic equivalent of “thoughts and prayers” after a school shooting.

They will suggest, with the serene confidence of people who have never once in their pampered lives experienced the cold sweat of checking a bank balance before buying groceries, that if young people simply worked harder, saved more diligently, learned to code, relocated to cheaper cities, cancelled the streaming subscriptions, skipped the avocado toast, and adopted a sufficiently positive attitude, they too could achieve the prosperity that previous generations stumbled into with all the effort of falling off a log.

A boomer who bought a house on a factory worker’s salary in 1978 will lecture you about financial responsibility while sitting in a home that has appreciated 1,200 percent without requiring a single additional hour of labor on their part. A man whose college cost five hundred dollars a semester will earnestly explain that your generation just doesn’t understand the value of education. Someone who never competed against four hundred applicants for an unpaid internship in a job interview conducted by a malfunctioning AI will wonder aloud why you haven’t “just gotten a foot in the door.”

The advice comes relentlessly, pouring from Twitter threads and Thanksgiving dinner tables and newspaper op-eds penned by columnists whose starting salary in 1985 would buy a house their grandchildren will never afford: stop eating out, cancel Netflix, make coffee at home, stop buying new phones every year. As if the four-hundred-thousand-dollar gap between wages and housing prices could be bridged by switching to instant coffee. As if anyone under thirty-five is actually able to buy a new phone annually rather than financing it or trading it in once the battery has died after 18 months of average use.

My phone is six years old, and I am still wondering when exactly I might be able to afford a house based on my salary—and more pressingly: where? Tierra del Fuego? It is a consideration worth having at this point. Perhaps I could purchase a modest dwelling somewhere in the subarctic wilderness, far from the reach of institutional investors and algorithmic landlords, where the only neighbors would be penguins—who have, it must be said, apparently demonstrated considerably more spine than this bloated, self-aggrandizing, self-congratulatory, terminally incurious society that spends its time lecturing the drowning on their swimming technique.

The “Nihilist Penguin” will walk toward certain death rather than submit to conditions it finds intolerable. The average American will absorb another lecture about Starbucks coffee (never in my life have I spent a single dime at Starbucks by the way) from someone whose entire net worth derives from buying a house in 1987, nod along politely, and wonder privately what is wrong with themselves. The penguins, at least, retain the dignity of their convictions. The rest of us have traded ours for the privilege of being told we are failing correctly. But please, do tell me more about my profligate spending habits. I’m sure another lecture about fiscal responsibility from someone whose mortgage payment is smaller than my health insurance premium will finally crack the code.

This advice would be merely insulting if it were not also a form of gaslighting so comprehensive, so relentless, so perfectly calibrated to make the victim doubt their own perception of reality, that it amounts to psychological warfare waged against an entire demographic cohort. When you work sixty hours a week and cannot afford rent, and someone tells you the problem is your mindset, they are not offering guidance. They are telling you that reality is not real, that your lived experience is a hallucination, that the boot on your neck is actually a massage and you should be grateful for it.

They are asking you to participate in your own erasure—financially and ethnically—, to accept that your failure to thrive in a rigged game, in which you will always be the asshole for simply existing, reflects some deficiency in your character rather than the architecture of the game itself. And the cruelest part is that some of you will believe them, will internalize the lie, will spend years wondering what is wrong with you before realizing that the only thing wrong with you is that you were born thirty years too late to benefit from a social contract that has already been cashed out and burned.

The truth is simpler and darker: every generation has entered adulthood under worsening economic conditions, most visibly reflected in the steady decline of home ownership, but the compounding effect of decades of policy failures—each one focused exclusively on the next election cycle or financial quarter rather than any coherent vision of the future—has left Millenials and Generation Z to absorb the full accumulated weight of systemic decay. They are not struggling because they are lazy, entitled, or insufficiently entrepreneurial. They are struggling because they have inherited an economy that has been systematically engineered to extract maximum value from human beings while providing minimum security in return, an economy that has reverted to conditions not seen since the Gilded Age, an era of unprecedented inequality and corporate dominance that the antitrust laws and labor protections of the twentieth century were specifically designed to prevent.

History, that great teacher whom no one ever listens to, has already shown us where this leads. Throughout the late eighteen hundreds, more than four thousand American companies collapsed into roughly two hundred and fifty firms, transferring control over prices, labor, and production into the hands of a small elite whose names still echo through the corridors of wealth: Carnegie, Rockefeller, Morgan, Vanderbilt.

Andrew Carnegie controlled an estimated twenty-five percent of global steel output, exceeding the production of entire industrial nations such as Great Britain. John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil achieved a ninety percent market share, with Rockefeller himself holding nearly two percent of the nation’s total wealth—a figure that sounds almost quaint compared to the concentrations we are witnessing today, when seven technology companies account for more than a third of the entire S&P 500, the most concentrated share in American market history.

The robber barons understood something that their modern successors have rediscovered: once the economy becomes dependent on concentrated power, calls to improve wages and working conditions can be dismissed as threats to economic progress itself. The rhetoric has barely changed in a hundred and forty years. In the Gilded Age, demands for basic human dignity were repackaged as dangerous communistic propaganda, foreign agitation threatening the American way of life.

Today, any suggestion that perhaps corporations should pay living wages, or that healthcare should not bankrupt the sick, or that housing should be affordable for the people who actually live in it, is met with accusations of socialism, class warfare, economic illiteracy, or the perennial favorite of the comfortable: envy. The workers of the Gilded Age were forced to contend not only with unprecedented corporate power and corrupt politics, but also with the societal bootlickers who defended the system that crushed them—ordinary people so thoroughly propagandized that they believed their own immiseration was natural, inevitable, perhaps even deserved.

The most devastating example of this phenomenon was the opposition to child labor reform, which came not primarily from industrial elites or politicians, but from working-class parents whose wages had been driven so low that family survival depended on their children’s income. The system had created conditions so brutal that exploitation became self-perpetuating, with the victims themselves defending the practices that destroyed them because they could imagine no alternative. This is the genius of comprehensive economic capture: it does not merely impose suffering, it conscripts the suffering into defending the sources of their pain.

But history also records what happens when inequality deepens beyond the point of tolerance. As unrest escalated nationwide, as strikes turned violent and public backlash grew impossible to ignore, political leaders were increasingly forced to respond not to passive American voters content to accept whatever scraps the market provided, but to a workforce that had discovered its collective power through bitter experience. The passage of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 represented an early attempt to prevent private power from overwhelming the democratic system entirely, establishing the precedent that consolidation was not a natural endpoint that Americans were obligated to accept. The Progressive Era (yes, I say the terrible word in a non-derogatory context!) expanded these protections through press laws, labor regulations, and the gradual recognition that an economy exists to serve human beings rather than the reverse.

And for a time—a brief, shining interval that the comfortable classes now pretend never existed—this approach worked. It was not so long ago that the nation emerged from the Gilded Age into a period where a firm handshake and a willingness to work could grant you a lifelong career. Where a minimum wage worker earning just seventy-five cents an hour could afford an entire month’s rent with less than a week and a half of full-time work. Where nearly sixty percent of American workers owned homes at median prices equivalent to roughly one hundred twenty-eight thousand dollars today. Where close to forty-five percent of the Silent Generation owned homes by age twenty-five—not through parental assistance or inherited wealth, but through the simple mechanism of wages that actually corresponded to the cost of living.

Annual healthcare costs for the average family required only about two to four weeks of work. With roughly thirty percent of the workforce unionized, workers held real leverage to negotiate higher wages, pensions, and benefits. Upward mobility was not an inspirational poster slogan or a Ted Talk platitude—it was structurally accessible, built into the economic architecture through deliberate policy choices that recognized workers as human beings rather than disposable inputs. The system was not perfect, not by any stretch. But the basic bargain held: if you worked hard and played by the rules, you could build a decent life. That bargain has been systematically dismantled, even if so many of those, who have had the chance to reap its benefits, happily ignore this reality.

Over the following decades, currency debasement eroded the purchasing power of wages while asset prices soared, enriching those who already owned property while making ownership increasingly impossible for those who did not. Endless wars consumed trillions of dollars that might have funded infrastructure, education, healthcare, housing—anything that might have improved the lives of ordinary citizens rather than the profit margins of defense contractors. Regulatory capture transformed agencies designed to protect the public interest into lobbying arms of the industries they were supposed to oversee. And through it all, the promise of trickle-down economics provided ideological cover for what was, in practice, a massive upward redistribution of wealth and power into the hands of a select few.

As enforcement weakened and consolidation accelerated, labor lost leverage, ownership gave way to access, and management incentives once again rewarded the suppression of unions. The societal bootlickers returned, their arguments updated for the digital age but fundamentally unchanged from their Gilded Age predecessors: this is just how markets work, regulation kills jobs, unions are outdated relics of the industrial era, if you don’t like your working conditions you’re free to find another job. Never mind that the jobs available offer the same conditions or worse. Never mind that the “freedom” to choose between exploitation and homelessness is no freedom at all. Never mind that the entire framework presupposes individual solutions to systemic problems, placing the burden of adapting to a broken system entirely on those least equipped to bear it.

Generation Z has entered an economy that is, in many respects, just a few mergers away from resembling the very Gilded Age conditions that antitrust laws and labor protections were originally designed to prevent. And nowhere has this reversion become more detrimental than in housing, that most fundamental of human needs, now transformed into a speculative asset class that exists primarily to generate returns for investors rather than shelter for human beings.

Following the 2008 financial crisis—itself a consequence of deregulation and financial engineering that enriched the architects of the collapse while devastating ordinary homeowners—tens of thousands of small and regional builders were bankrupted or absorbed by larger competitors. The crisis that destroyed so many family businesses and personal savings became, for the well-capitalized, an unprecedented buying opportunity. New construction fell increasingly under the control of a handful of firms, and today the top ten builders capture nearly forty-five percent of all new single-family home closings, the highest share ever recorded. Just two companies, D.R. Horton and Lennar, control well over twenty percent on their own.

Research by Luis Quintero at Johns Hopkins University demonstrates what this concentration means in practice: these dominant firms can now control the timing, volume, and pricing of new construction without fear of outside competition. They have reduced annual housing supply by roughly one hundred fifty thousand units per year, or nearly 2.6 million homes since the recession, while increasing price volatility by more than fifty percent. Why build affordable housing for middle-class families when luxury and higher-margin projects are so much more profitable? According to Redfin, the luxury housing market has grown three times faster than the mainstream market. By late 2024, only 6,700 lower-cost rental units were under construction nationwide, compared to nearly half a million higher-end apartments.

The result is a market increasingly detached from household income, where Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies reports that roughly half of all renter households now spend more than thirty percent of their income on housing—the traditional threshold beyond which housing costs become burdensome. A record 12.1 million households spend more than fifty percent just to keep a roof over their heads. These are not people making poor financial decisions. These are people trapped in a market that has been deliberately structured to extract maximum rent from captive tenants who have nowhere else to go.

And once housing is engineered to serve the highest bidder rather than the average household, it attracts capital that treats homes not as places to live but as income-generating assets to be managed by algorithms and property management companies that have never met and will never meet the tenants whose lives depend on their decisions.

In 2021 alone, roughly twenty-eight percent of all homes sold in Texas went to institutional investors. Across the Sun Belt, more than a third of single-family purchases are now tied to private equity and large rental operators. These are not individuals building communities—they are financial entities extracting value from human necessity, pushing median home prices above four hundred fifteen thousand dollars and leaving Millenials and Generation Z facing a price-to-income ratio of 10.5, more than double any previous generation.

And while about thirty percent of Generation Z has technically managed to buy a home by age twenty-five, nearly seventy-eight percent required parental assistance to do so—the highest share on record. The American Dream now comes with an asterisk: available only to those whose parents can afford to subsidize it. More than fifty-two percent of Generation Z remains living with their parents, priced out of home ownership entirely, their independence deferred indefinitely while they wait for a market correction that may never come, or for the inheritance of devalued wealth from the very generation whose policies created these conditions in the first place.

The same consolidation that has reshaped housing has taken hold across the food system, though the comfortable classes who shop at Whole Foods and frequent farm-to-table restaurants rarely notice. In the early twentieth century, Congress recognized the outsized power of dominant meatpackers and passed the Packers and Stockyards Act of 1921 to break their grip on the food supply. But over the past four decades, weak antitrust enforcement and aggressive corporate mergers have allowed that power to return with a vengeance.

Today, over ninety percent of all broiler chickens are raised under contract systems where farmers do not own the birds, the feed, or the processing rights. They own only the debt they took on to build the facilities that the integrators require, and the labor they expend raising animals according to specifications set by corporations that can terminate their contracts at will. Just four companies—Tyson, JBS, Perdue, and Sanderson—control roughly sixty percent of American chicken production, wiping out the millions of small mixed-purpose flocks that existed in the early nineteen hundreds and reducing independent producers to just twenty-five to thirty thousand contract growers, down from the hundreds of thousands who operated at mid-century.

In beef, the top four firms now control roughly eighty-five percent of American processing, up from just thirty-six percent in 1980. In pork, four companies produce about seventy percent of all output. Price-fixing allegations in these highly concentrated markets have revealed firms coordinating supply cuts, pushing wholesale prices higher, adding hundreds of dollars per year to the average family’s food bill while allowing corporations to widen their margins. All of this hidden behind the headlines of inflation, as if rising prices were some mysterious natural phenomenon rather than the predictable consequence of allowing a handful of companies to control the supply and pricing of essential goods.

The concentration has enabled these firms to standardize production around the cheapest and most inhumane methods possible. Ninety-nine percent of farmed animals in the United States are now raised in factory farm environments, despite three-quarters of the American public opposing these conditions. But public opinion means nothing when the market is controlled by entities large enough to ignore it. The same dynamic plays out across every sector: consolidation creates power, power enables exploitation, and the exploited have no meaningful recourse because the market offers no alternatives.

When understanding the systemic decay of the labor market, economists measure concentration using the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI), which tracks how much control is concentrated into the hands of a few firms. Historically, anything above 2,500 signals a highly concentrated market capable of anti-competitive behavior—a threshold that has since been lowered to 1,800.

Research from antitrust economists José Azar and Ioana Marinescu shows that the average labor market HHI now sits around 4,378. In many local and occupational markets, workers are effectively choosing between just two dominant employers. This level of concentration results in an average twenty percent wage reduction, fewer job options, and weakened bargaining power as leverage shifts entirely into the hands of employers who no longer need to compete for workers because they have carved up the market among themselves.

Nowhere is this more visible than in technology. According to a 2021 report by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, Amazon’s expansion has contributed to the disappearance of roughly forty percent of small apparel, toy, and sporting goods manufacturers, along with nearly one-third of small book publishers. Amazon played a key role in the collapse of major employers like Borders and Toys R Us, which together employed roughly ninety thousand workers. The company has been caught using its venture capital fund to invest in startups only to later copy their ideas and launch competing products, in some cases intentionally devastating the very businesses it backed.

Amazon is not alone. While the FTC and DOJ occasionally block high-profile mergers, the more common tactic is for dominant firms to invest in startups, secure board seats, and quietly influence their direction—a strategy known as “co-opting disruption,” steering future competitors away from innovations that could genuinely threaten established market power. When Nvidia, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google, Meta, and Tesla now account for more than one-third of the entire S&P 500—the most concentrated share in American market history—we find ourselves in an economy where the nation’s prosperity depends on the output of a select few companies whose interests probably not align with the welfare of ordinary citizens.

This dependency leaves Generation Z to contend with the mass outsourcing of American jobs, layoffs disguised as AI optimization, the looming automation of entire careers, fake job listings flooding hiring platforms to create the illusion of opportunity where none exists, and the worst job market graduates have faced in over a decade.

Today, seventy-two percent of Generation Z lives paycheck to paycheck, while nearly half are working three or more jobs just to survive. Not to build wealth. Not to advance their careers. Just to survive—to pay rent, buy groceries, make minimum payments on the credit card debt they accumulated trying to finance an education that was supposed to be their ticket to a better life.

And when a handful of firms essentially control the job market, they dictate not just wages but access to healthcare. According to the Employee Benefit Research Institute, the share of employers offering health insurance has steadily collapsed as consolidation has accelerated. By 2022, one or two health systems controlled the entire inpatient hospital market in nearly half of all metropolitan areas. Under current federal guidelines, seventy-three percent of metropolitan hospital markets are classified as highly concentrated, up from seventy-one percent in 2014. Under the DOJ and FTC’s proposed merger guidelines, that figure would jump to roughly ninety-five percent.

Research from the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Healthcare Costs Institute shows that this consolidation directly raises prices. Hospital mergers alone increase private insurer costs by roughly thirty-five to forty-five percent, without improving patient outcomes. Nearly half of all metropolitan areas are dominated by a single insurer controlling at least fifty percent of coverage, while on a national level just four companies control nearly half of all private insurance. As healthcare premiums surge faster than wages, smaller employers are increasingly unable to offer coverage at all, leaving workers in a situation where access to basic healthcare requires joining one of the larger consolidated firms—the same firms that are outsourcing and automating American jobs as fast as their algorithms will allow.

Compared to just a decade ago, Generation Z now pays roughly forty-six percent more for health insurance. Two-thirds of young adults skip medical appointments due to cost. This also strongly discourages self-employment and entrepreneurship—precisely the qualities that the comfortable classes claim to value when lecturing young people about pulling themselves up by their bootstraps.

And while this analysis has focused primarily on the United States, the same collapse of the social contract is playing out across much of the developed world. In Australia, researchers at the University of Sydney point to a growing Generation Z mental health crisis driven by economic insecurity and social instability. In South Korea, the pressure to succeed has become so suffocating that young people refer to their country as “Hell Joseon”—a hellish, hopeless society. In China, young people call themselves “rat people,” describing burnout, high unemployment, and disillusionment within the rat race. In Germany, Generation Z faces the same struggles of a failing job market while being blamed for laziness and entitlement by those who entered adulthood under incomparably easier conditions in a booming post-war Germany. In Canada, despite Generation Z saving more than any previous generation, they have effectively given up on home ownership.

This is not an American problem. This is a global pattern—the coordinated restructuring of economic life around the principle that human beings exist to serve capital rather than the reverse, that housing, healthcare, food, and labor are commodities to be optimized for maximum extraction rather than necessities to be provided for human flourishing. The dream of ownership has been replaced by the reality of usership—a life composed entirely of subscriptions, where you will own nothing and be expected to express gratitude for the privilege of renting access to the basic conditions of existence.

The comfortable classes will tell you to maintain a positive attitude. They will suggest that negativity never won anything, that you should take your life by the reins and make something of it, that mindset is everything and victimhood is a choice. This advice comes from people who have never had to choose between groceries and medical care, who have never worked three jobs while going to school full-time, who have never calculated whether they can afford to be sick this month. Their positivity is the positivity of those insulated from consequences, the serene confidence of lottery winners advising the unlucky to simply believe harder.

But here is what the lectures about positive thinking never acknowledge: the strongest opposition to change always comes from those who have internalized their own exploitation. The Gilded Age parents who fought against child labor reform because they needed their children’s wages to survive. The modern workers who defend billionaires against taxation because they have been convinced that someday they too might be billionaires, or at least that the billionaires’ wealth somehow trickles down to them through mechanisms no economist has ever been able to identify. The young people who attack their peers for “doomerism” because admitting the scale of the problem feels too overwhelming to bear.

We have become, especially in the last decade, so hyperindividualist that all the content on social media reduces every systemic problem to tips and tricks and productivity hacks and personal responsibility. Just budget better. Just learn a marketable skill. Just do one of many side hustles in oversaturated markets. Just work harder, sacrifice more, believe in yourself with sufficient intensity. This advice is not wrong, exactly—personal effort matters, always has, always will. But it systematically obscures the structural reality that no amount of individual optimization can overcome a system designed to extract value from human beings rather than provide it.

And the hyperindividualism serves a function. It divides people who share common interests. It transforms collective problems into personal failures. It ensures that instead of organizing to change conditions, each person struggles alone, believing their inability to thrive reflects some deficiency in themselves rather than the architecture of a system that was never designed for their benefit. The loneliest generation ever recorded is not lonely by accident. Loneliness is the intended outcome of an economy that benefits from atomized individuals who cannot coordinate, cannot organize, cannot imagine that things might be otherwise.

The billionaires keep saying money doesn’t make you happy, yet their own research shows otherwise. People making over a hundred thousand dollars a year report being less lonely. Higher incomes directly correlate with happiness in study after study. The wealthy know this—they simply don’t want you to know it, because a population that understood the relationship between material security and wellbeing might start asking uncomfortable questions about why such security is becoming impossible for an ever-larger share of the population to achieve.

There are now over three thousand billionaires in the world. In just three months of 2025, they added another five trillion dollars to their collective wealth. The rate is accelerating. It is not a coincidence that as their wealth explodes, so does the cost of everything else. We are on track to see five trillionaires within the next decade. For the first time in modern history, more billionaires are created through inheritance than through entrepreneurship. The United States will see twenty-nine trillion dollars passed down to billionaire heirs over the next thirty years. So much for the mythology of self-made success. They own the boots. They own the straps. And they are charging you rent for the privilege of trying to pull yourself up.

To some, I may now sound like a socialist. I assure you, I have not contracted that particular disease. I remain unconvinced that the solution to our problems is to hand more power to the same incompetent, arrogant bureaucratic apparatus that created them, and I retain my conviction that socialism is, at its core, an ideology for those who wish to live parasitically off the labor of others while draping their mediocrity in the language of justice.

But here is where I part ways with the comfortable defenders of the status quo who will dismiss everything I have written as leftist grievance: what we are living under is not capitalism. It has not been capitalism for some time. What we have is a rigged casino operated by a cartel of oligarchs who have purchased the regulatory state, captured the legislative process, and transformed the entire economy into a mechanism for extracting wealth from those who create it and funneling it upward to those who manipulate it. They call this the free market. Gary Allen correctly calls it communism.

Consider Tesla, since we are speaking of trillionaires. Here is a company that built its brand on being the future—sleek, electric, autonomous, a vision of tomorrow sold to people who wanted to believe they were buying more than a car. And what has this temple of progress delivered? In 2026, Tesla quietly took autosteer—a basic lane-keeping assist feature that has been standard on most vehicles for years, that Honda and Toyota include on their cheapest models—and moved it behind a ninety-nine-dollar monthly subscription. What was once included in the price of the vehicle is now a recurring fee. What was sold as a feature is now rented back to you.

The 2026 Teslas ship with nothing but basic traffic-aware cruise control; if you want the car to stay in its lane, the functionality you already paid for when you bought the vehicle, you must now subscribe to “Full Self-Driving.” This matters beyond Tesla owners, because every other automaker watches what Tesla gets away with. When Tesla proves you can strip a safety feature from a car and charge a subscription to restore it, every boardroom in Detroit and Munich takes notes.

And why has Tesla done this? Because in November 2025, shareholders approved a compensation package for Elon Musk with a potential value of up to one trillion dollars. To unlock this payout, Musk must hit certain milestones—among them, ten million active FSD subscriptions. Every subscription you purchase directly contributes to making him the world’s first trillionaire while he marinates the willing world in an AI gooning hell that was once called Twitter. His current net worth hovers around 788 billion dollars. He was already on track to cross the trillion-dollar threshold without this package. This is the purest expression of avarice the modern economy has produced: a man worth more than most nations stripping features from cars so that every monthly payment nudges him closer to a number no human being has ever reached, while the legal fine print admits the software does not do what the marketing implies.

A California court ruled that Tesla engaged in deceptive marketing by using the names “Autopilot” and “Full Self-Driving,” which imply an autonomy the vehicles do not possess. Tesla was ordered to drop the “Autopilot” branding. Their response was not to fix the problem but to monetize it—they removed the label, rolled its functionality into FSD, and started charging a subscription for what used to be included. The official Tesla legal definition of FSD describes it as a driver-assistance system requiring a fully attentive driver at all times.

Meanwhile, Musk tweets videos of Model Ys driving themselves with no one inside and claims the drives are “fully autonomous” with no driver or remote operator. Waymo had been running genuinely autonomous highway rides since 2024. Musk’s claim that his video represented a “first” was simply false. But the marketing continues, the subscriptions accumulate, and the trillion-dollar finish line draws closer.

FSD is currently under federal investigation by NHTSA. Tesla has failed to properly report crashes involving Autopilot and FSD. Studies indicate that Teslas have the highest fatal crash rate per billion miles of any automotive brand, with the Model Y’s rate running several times the national average. The system does not qualify as an autonomous driving system under federal classification, which is why Tesla does not appear in autonomous-vehicle crash statistics despite the “self-driving” branding. What they are selling is a legally-classified driver-assist system that is statistically more dangerous than average, marketed as though it were nearly ready to operate as an unsupervised robotaxi.

To sell this, Musk deploys urgency tactics older than the automobile itself: buy now before prices go up, transfer your FSD before the deadline, act before February 14th, act before the end of Q1. These deadlines align suspiciously with his compensation milestones, which also include cumulative vehicle deliveries. The entire apparatus is designed to pump quarterly numbers so that each earnings report brings him closer to a payout that exceeds the GDP of most countries on Earth. He has promised autonomous driving has been “two years away” every year for a decade. One million robotaxis were promised for 2020. “Very close to Level 5” has been the refrain since the Obama administration. The promises recycle; the subscriptions accumulate; the trillion approaches.

This is not capitalism. Capitalism would mean Tesla competes with other automakers by offering a better product at a better price. What we have is a company that built regulatory moats with government subsidies, captured a market with promises it has not delivered, and now extracts recurring revenue from customers for features those customers already purchased—all to fund a compensation package of unprecedented scale for a man of unprecedented wealth who markets safety-critical software that is under federal investigation for being unsafe. And if you object, you will be told you do not understand innovation, that you are holding back progress, that the future belongs to those who believe.

I do not begrudge wealth. I do not resent success. What I resent is being told this is the free market while I watch billionaires purchase legislation, strip features from products, paywall safety systems, and extract subscription fees from the working and middle classes to fund compensation packages that would make a Roman emperor blush—all while the same billionaires lecture the public about pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. The bootstraps were sold off years ago. The boots are now a subscription service. And the people tightening the straps have three-quarters of a trillion dollars and are angling for more.

So no, I have not become a socialist. I do not want more government. I do not want more incompetent mediocrities—guided by their personal feelings, their petty grudges, their worldviews assembled from YouTube video essays and TikTok shorts watched between campaign fundraisers—to impose ever more idiotic laws upon me. Because that is all they do. That is the entirety of their function. They do not solve problems; they create compliance frameworks. They do not represent you; they represent whoever paid for their last reelection campaign, and they dress that representation in the language of public service while you foot the bill for their failures.

Have you noticed how every law passed only ever seems to negatively affect you? Not in theory—in theory, every law is for your protection, your safety, your benefit. But in practice? In the lived reality of your actual existence? Every regulation adds a fee. Every reform adds a form. Every protection protects someone else from you, or protects you from something you never asked to be protected from, while leaving you exposed to the things that actually threaten your livelihood. The laws that might constrain the powerful are written with loopholes the size of aircraft hangars. The laws that constrain you are written with the precision of a scalpel. The billionaire finds a way around; you find a fine.

These are the people we have elected to govern us: incompetent, corrupt pieces of shit whose understanding of economics was formed by skimming a Paul Krugman op-ed on their phones, whose grasp of technology comes from a lobbyist’s PowerPoint presentation, whose foreign policy expertise derives from whatever talking points their staffers pulled from Twitter that morning. They could not run a lemonade stand without a consulting firm, a focus group, and a bailout, yet they presume to reorganize entire sectors of the economy based on feelings they mistake for principles. They have never built anything, never created anything, never risked anything—and they govern as though consequence is a concept that applies only to their constituents.

Watch them operate. Watch them pass sweeping legislation they have not read, drafted by lobbyists for industries they do not understand, affecting lives they will never live. Watch them congratulate themselves for “doing something” while the something they do makes everything worse for everyone except the interests that wrote the bill. Watch them stand at podiums and speak of the working class as though it were an exotic species they once saw in a documentary, mouthing platitudes about kitchen tables they have never sat at, about struggles they have never faced, about choices they have never had to make between groceries and rent.

And when their policies fail—as they inevitably do, as they are designed to do, because failure for you is often success for their donors—they do not reconsider. They do not adapt. They double down. They blame the previous administration, or the obstructionist opposition, or the ignorant public that simply does not understand the sophisticated brilliance of their vision. They are never wrong. They are never responsible. They are perpetually the heroes of their own stories, valiantly fighting against dark forces that somehow always turn out to be you: your car, your diet, your thermostat, your small business, your choices, your stubborn insistence on living your life without their permission.

The professional politician is a species that has evolved to survive exclusively in the ecosystem of government. Remove them from that habitat and they would perish within weeks, unable to navigate a world where words must correspond to actions and actions must produce results. They have perfected the art of speaking for hours without saying anything, of promising everything while delivering nothing, of taking credit for successes they did not cause and deflecting blame for failures they did create. They are credentialed without being educated, experienced without being competent, confident without being capable. And they rule over us with the serene certainty of people who have never once faced a consequence for being wrong.

I do not want these people to have more power. I do not want them to have the power they already possess. I want them to leave me alone—to stop pretending that every problem requires their intervention, that every crisis demands their management, that every aspect of human existence falls within their jurisdiction. But that is not an option on the ballot. The only choices offered are which faction of credentialed incompetents will mismanage the next four years, which set of donors will write the next set of laws, which flavor of failure we prefer. And we are expected to be grateful for the privilege of choosing.

The capitalism they sold us—the one where hard work and good products win, where competition drives innovation, where the consumer is sovereign and the market is free—no longer exists. What remains is a protection racket dressed as progress, a grift wrapped in the language of disruption, a world where the wealthiest man alive takes features out of your car and charges you monthly to get them back, and expects you to thank him for the privilege. If that makes me sound like a socialist to those who have confused crony extraction for free enterprise, then perhaps they should examine what exactly they have been defending all these years—and whose interests it actually serves.

The cracks are starting to show. The system that seemed so permanent, so inevitable, so natural is revealing itself to be fragile and contingent, dependent on the continued compliance of those it exploits. Ninety percent of respondents in a recent poll said they expect the cost of living to get worse in 2026, not better. Pew Research surveyed thirty-six nations and found that fifty-four percent view the wealth gap as a massive problem, while sixty percent believe the rich have hijacked politics. People are not merely unhappy—they are furious. And fury, properly directed, has historically been the precondition for change.

The Gilded Age did not end because the robber barons had a change of heart. It ended because workers organized, because reformers agitated, because the contradictions of the system became so acute that political leaders were forced to choose between modest reform and revolutionary upheaval. The Progressive Era happened because ordinary people refused to accept that the degradation they experienced was natural or inevitable. They built unions, they marched, they voted, they organized, and they changed the structural conditions of American life in ways that benefited generations to come—including the very generations that dismantled those protections and are now lecturing their grandchildren about pulling themselves up by their bootstraps.

This is not doomerism. Doomerism would be accepting that nothing can change, that the current trajectory is fixed, that the best we can hope for is individual adaptation to collective catastrophe. The truth is more demanding than doomerism: it requires us to put the phone down and recognize the scale of the problem, to understand how we got here, to identify the structures that perpetuate these conditions, and to build the coalitions necessary to change them. This is not the work of a single election cycle or a single lifetime. It is the ongoing project of democratic society, the eternal struggle to ensure that economic life serves human flourishing rather than the reverse.

Generation Z is developing skill sets through these struggles that previous generations never had to acquire. They are learning, through bitter experience, how systems work and how they fail. They are building solidarity across geographic and demographic lines through digital networks that the robber barons of the Gilded Age could not have imagined. They are refusing the false choice between resigned acceptance and impotent rage. And as they step into positions of leadership—as they inevitably will, because time moves in only one direction—they will bring with them knowledge that was purchased at great personal cost, knowledge about what happens when consolidation goes unchecked, when labor loses leverage, when housing becomes speculation, when healthcare becomes extortion, when you’re being called a racist Nazi in your own country simply for having the wrong skin tone.

The near-term future is bleak. Pretending otherwise would be dishonest, and the system depends on dishonesty—depends on people believing that things are basically fine, that any problems are temporary anomalies rather than structural features, that individual effort is sufficient to overcome collective extraction. But the bleakness of the near term does not determine the shape of the decades to come. History is not a conveyor belt carrying us inevitably toward predetermined destinations. It is a contested terrain where the outcome depends on what people do, how they organize, what demands they make and how effectively they press them.

The bugs on the windshield are many. The scrubbing will take time and effort and persistence in the face of setbacks. But the alternative—accepting permanent subordination, ceding the future to those who profit from human misery, teaching your children to expect less than you had and your grandchildren to expect less than them—is not an alternative at all. It is surrender dressed up as realism, defeatism marketed as maturity.

The robber barons of the Gilded Age believed they had won permanently. They controlled the government, the courts, the press, the economy. They could not imagine that their dominion might be temporary, that the workers they exploited might organize, that the system they had captured might be reformed. They were wrong. The techno-feudalists of our age make the same mistake, their hubris amplified by algorithms and surveillance capabilities that would have seemed like science fiction a generation ago. They too will discover that concentrated power generates its own opposition, that extraction has limits, that human beings are not infinitely patient with conditions that reduce them to line items on someone else’s profit and loss statement.

The question is not whether change will come. The question is what form it will take, how much suffering will precede it, and whether we will be wise enough to build something better on the other side—or whether we will simply replace one set of masters with another, as has happened so many times before. That outcome is not predetermined. It depends on choices made by people who understand what is at stake and refuse to accept that the present arrangement is permanent or inevitable.

We are either going down with the ship, or we are all making it together. There is no third option where the clever and the fortunate thrive while the rest of the world burns. The interconnection of modern life makes that fantasy impossible—the same systems that enable billionaires to accumulate wealth require functional societies with educated workers and stable institutions. Push extraction far enough, and the whole edifice comes down. The billionaires building bunkers understand this, even if they pretend otherwise in their public statements. They are preparing for a collapse they helped engineer, hoping to ride out the consequences of their own predation in comfortable isolation.

But bunkers are not a solution. They are an admission of failure, an acknowledgment that the system they built cannot sustain itself, that the extraction they practiced was never sustainable, that the future they are creating is one they themselves find intolerable. The bunker mentality is the endgame of a philosophy that treats human beings as resources to be exploited rather than ends in themselves. And it is a philosophy that, for all its apparent triumph, carries within it the seeds of its own destruction.

The choice before us is not between optimism and pessimism, between positivity and doomerism, between individual striving and collective despair. The choice is between understanding the system well enough to change it and accepting conditions that will only grow worse if they go unchallenged. Generation Z did not choose to inherit this broken economy, this captured government, this concentrated power, this eroding social contract. But they will determine what happens next—whether the Gilded Age patterns continue deepening until something breaks catastrophically, or whether the hard work of reform begins in earnest, guided by clear-eyed analysis rather than comfortable illusions.

Hold some hope. But recognize there is a lot of work to do. And understand that the work cannot be done alone, cannot be accomplished through individual optimization, cannot be achieved by out-hustling a system designed to extract everything you have. The work requires solidarity across the divisions that power uses to keep us separated. It requires organization that can match the coordination of capital. It requires political engagement that holds leaders accountable for the choices they make and the interests they serve. And it requires the patience to persist through setbacks, the wisdom to learn from failures, and the courage to keep pushing even when the obstacles seem insurmountable.

The robber barons thought they had won forever. They were wrong. The architects of our current extraction think they have optimized human exploitation to perfection. They are wrong too. The future is not yet written, and the pen is still in our hands—calloused and tired though those hands may be. The only question is whether we will use it.

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