How did we get here.
Here we are, in the big 2026. We have been told for years that the world gets better every year. That it gets better for each generation.
This has been true for almost every single generation, but as with everything, there are highs and lows.
Sometimes the futures of the younger generation improves, sometimes it declines.
We are now, once again, at such a downturn. I don't even know where to start with this. The whole problem is that today things are very different from what they were a thousand years ago, or a hundred years ago, or even just ten years ago. Society has changed so much in just decades that it is almost impossible to predict where it is going to go.
While I'm writing this, I've come to the realisation that society cannot be put in a black box. It cannot be put in a formula. People have different goals in life, people have different prices, people have different ideas, people have different standards. And telling everyone, "If we all just do this together, then society will be solved" simply doesn't work. It is not possible to tell people to work together on everything. To actually achieve any kind of future — a better future — we will need a system, a mindset, an approach that allows people to be more.
If you ask people on the street, people at universities, people at work, you'll get different answers. Some of them will claim it's capitalism's fault. Some will blame the left, or China, or the right wing politicians. In reality, we cannot lay the blame on a single entity, because no single entity and no single person is really at fault. People, just like companies and countries, will prioritise themselves.
Thousands of years ago, when humanity numbered less than a million people, people knew each other. Not everyone, but they did know each other. They only knew about their inner circle: the village, the neighbourhood, their families, their friends, their enemies. They might have known which lord they served, but they did not know what was just twenty kilometres away from the village. If something bad happened a thousand kilometres away, they might not even have known about it. They focused on the here and now. They did not have the resources to focus further, to improve the next generation, the kids, the future. They believed, they tried, they worked to improve things for their kids, and their kids, and their kids. But when you're poor, that is almost impossible. It is not something you can just solve.
Not all work is equal, and here's the problem: in the last fifty years we have connected the world together. First came the mail, then the telegraph, then the telephone, then the internet. Today you're able to write to anybody in the entire world, to read news about the entire world, to move to almost any place on Earth within a reasonable amount of time. For a while it looked like that would actually help society. It looked like it would help people get richer, live a better life. That is what the American Dream was: everybody should live a better life, and everyone should have the right to strive for a better future. Sadly, after so many years, I believe that dream — while noble — has a limited number of spots.
It's not that people don't want to get rich and have a better life, but there are only so many places at the top. And if a single place is too rich and takes too many resources, then everybody else must share what's below them. If one person takes too much, everybody else loses. But if that one person does not take it, then he himself will lose. We are playing a dirty game where, unless people are greedy and take everything from everybody else, they will lose. And they know it. They know they must continue working and fighting for their own future without any consideration for anybody else.
So what the fuck do we do? Here's the problem: we cannot fucking solve it. Because, again, we cannot just say, "Everyone should share with everybody else." That was the idea behind communism, and that absolutely does not work. We need something else. We need something that's actually good, something that actually works properly — and that is what I want to solve. That is what I want to come up with, and that's what I've been thinking about for so long.
We cannot just change the world. We cannot change the system. We must somehow make it better. We must adopt it, improve it in such a way that it makes everybody's life better. Because if we do not, we will have an even worse situation waiting. The situation right now is kind of fucky, it's kind of bad, but it can become so much worse.
Currently we have one massive issue: we are educating everyone to an absolute degree, so that people can work as consultants and other, honestly, unskilled, highly qualified labour. We're going into a world where we prioritise service-based work instead of actually doing something that brings value. Not just, "We invest some money and we get twenty percent back and a massive bonus" — that doesn't help the world, it just puts money into a limited number of people's pockets. But at the same time we tell people, "Go get educated, because you must do it to have a better life." Yet there aren't the right spots. You cannot have, in a country of ten million people, eight million consultants and advisors. Who are they going to consult? Who are they going to advise? There aren't enough people.
And now you also try to import people from other countries — professionals and unskilled labour — while at the same time trying to educate other countries. At some point we're going to reach a point where there aren't enough people to work the normal jobs, the ones that actually produce something of value. Is it going to be billions of consultants consulting for nothing? We're going into a spiral of making more money just to make more money. Money should just be a reward for a good job, for something tangible that you have brought to the world. Instead, we are making it the be-all and end-all. You must get rich, otherwise you will fucking die in this rat race. And what do we do? The solution doesn't really exist. Currently we do not have a solution.
So how the fuck do we fix this? How do we actually make it work? How do we ensure that the next generation has it better than us? How do we ensure that there is a next generation — because that is the other problem: people are just not having kids. Why aren't people having kids? To have kids takes time. It is more and more expensive by the day, and sometimes you don't even have the time to take care of them. How are you going to have kids if you do not have the possibility to actually care for them?
Taking a step back, and this may be controversial, but I do believe that putting every single person — men and women — into the workforce full time has been a net negative for the future of society. I believe that a single 40-hour workweek must be enough to pay for three people: a father, a mother and a child. The logic is actually very simple. It has been proven that in societies where both men and women strive for a career and for money, they will neglect actually having a family, because work will take so much time from their actual lives that they will not realise how much time actually passes when you're tired every single day, Monday to Friday. In the end, they will not make a family. They will not have kids because they do not have the time to have kids. They do not realise that time is passing. Time is marching on, and by the end they are thirty or thirty-five, and then they realise, "Oh shit, we actually need to have kids." And they can maybe get one kid out because the wife is already too old. Sorry to tell you, but there is this thing called biology which makes it harder for people to have kids the older they become.
My belief is that we need to have a society with different types of jobs. We need to ensure that people can be independent if they need to be. I'm not here to say, "Let's put women in cages and force them to breed babies." No, that's not what we're doing here. We need a society where a single man can actually work and take care of himself, his wife and a kid on just a single income, and have a positive life for themselves at the same time. Of course, we need to ensure that there are jobs that fit women. There will always be women who want to have a career, and there will be women who want to have kids, and that's fine. But we need to ensure that even women with kids have the possibility to work and make money, because just being a housewife will realistically not really work at this point.
We have far too many household appliances that take care of everything — you know, washing machine, dishwasher, vacuum — enough that the amount of housework needed today is far, far less than what was needed a hundred years ago. At the same time, I believe women should not necessarily be forced to work 40 hours a week, and should instead be offered something more like 20 hours a week, so that they have the time, the ability to earn money, the ability to support things like vacations, and the ability to have experience — so that if they decide after a couple of years, "This is not for us," and they get a divorce, the woman can then get an actual job, with a career, if she so chooses.
But I do believe that, for society to thrive, we need to ensure that a whole family can thrive on just one salary. As basic as it sounds today, a single salary can barely pay for a single person, meaning that if both people work, that is just enough salary for roughly two and a half people. Meaning a kid is not only expensive, it dramatically reduces the quality of life of the whole family.
Now let's move on to the next topic: bread and circuses. Today, getting food is possibly the easiest thing you can do. You have a supermarket everywhere, restaurants everywhere. The food prices have gone up quite a lot, but it's still entirely possible to get any kind of food at basically any point in the day, cheap and fast. People are satisfied. People are slightly angry because the prices have gone up quite a bit after COVID, but people are still happy because they can get food — food that kings could only dream about two thousand years ago. So the bread part of bread and circuses is fulfilled, and we now have the actual second part of the circuses: social media.
Social media is the second part of the circuses. Social media has been specifically engineered to extract as much value as possible for every second you're looking at it. In the early 2000s, when Facebook and Myspace and all that stuff came out, social media was a curated platform. You had your friends, you had your page, and you saw on your page what your friends posted. Your social media space was very limited: your friends, your family, your acquaintances — but people you actually knew on the platform. Today, social media is so much more.
Social media has two different versions. Version one would be the old style of social media: things like Reddit, Myspace, the first version of Facebook. The second generation of social media started with Twitter, and then the new generation brought a new algorithm, a new page on Facebook — the "for you" page, as it's called. And the final boss of this version two is TikTok, which is social media specifically made to extract every single possible second out of the viewer. There is no possibility to get exactly what you want. There is no possibility to just check a single thing — you cannot just check, "OK, I'm interested in this game, let me just check that." No, you get what the algorithm serves you, and what the algorithm serves you is specifically made to ensure that you spend as many hours as possible on the platform, because then you see more ads, and the company can extract more value from you as they get more time from you.
I personally believe that this type of social media has had a massively negative effect on society. People can now open TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, any kind of social media, and get all the dopamine they feel they need instantly. They no longer need to actually go and read a book. They no longer need to go outside and socialise the same amount. You want dopamine? Open up the app and you get it within five seconds. A book grants dopamine whenever you reach the climax, whenever you reach the turning point, whenever you reach something interesting — yet a book takes time. You need to read hundreds, possibly a thousand pages. Yet with TikTok you only need to look at it for a minute and you get more dopamine delivered.
And this is the second part of bread and circuses: the circuses. People are mentally extremely broken, but they actually think for themselves that this is fine — that they do not need anything else. They doomscroll for ten hours a day, they don't even realise that the day has passed, and in the end they're like, "Oh yeah, whatever." What can you do? The circuses are no longer a place you need to go to visit. It is no longer a place you need to pay for. It is no longer a place where you can choose what to watch. The circuses are now in your pockets, on your phone. They're there for free, they're there 24/7. The circuses decide what you watch, the circuses provide you with dopamine and the satisfaction that you have achieved something.