I’ll start with my own. The truth I don’t want to face. I don’t write much these days. Sorry about that. I try to. I can’t. It suffuses me with dread. I feel a lurching nauseousness, just thinking about…writing…yet another…fucking…paragraph…sentence…word…about…

I can’t face it. Word after word. Don’t waste your life like I did. What was it all for?

The world we live in now. It works like this. The “average person” is history’s greatest idiot. They’re unrivaled, unequalled, in the sheer monstrous colossal power of their staggering stupidity. And I know how that sounds. But I mean it. We’re not just living among mere idiots anymore. Our destinies are now controlled by people who’ve squandered everything that five, ten, millennia of human civilization offered them as a gift.

Science, art, literature, truth, justice, reason, democracy. All of it. This “average person” could care less about them. They spit on them every single day. They spit on you and me. They spit on human history itself. They’re unworthy of the inheritance they were left. I’d bet that they could name five influencers, billionaires, or celebrities, but not scientists, great books, or works of art. Fuck that, just five even bad books. This is where we are.

This “average person,” and I put that in quotes precisely to convey my utter scorn, lives a life like this at the moment. They might ever rail against AI and billionaires etcetera. But their lives are absolutely algorithmically controlled. Every last decision they make, from what to eat, to who to date, to where to go, is deterministic. They don’t make any choices. Algorithms make all the choices for them. And pretty soon, AI will handle this job of offering barely-living people a non-life, the clone of a life, the simulation of one, whatever you want to call it. Or they regret voting for some demagogue, or giving all the power in their lives to fascists, or turning their economies over to crooks, and on and on and on in an endless downwards fractal spiral of gut-churning nightmarish sheer stupidity.

Perhaps you see the paradox I’m trying to point out.

Or not. Does it matter? Nothing does anymore. You know it and I know it. But it’s not about them anymore. It’s about us.

You and I were the different ones. From the day we were born. We knew. We were put here to be scientists, artists, writers, thinkers, truth-tellers, journalists, poets, musicians. We were the ones bearing the gifts of this project called civilization to the others. And it was never easy for us to begin with. To be such things doesn’t come with great financial rewards, or fortunes, or even security. We devoted our lives to these endeavors precisely because it is what we were called to do.

And it’s what we were encouraged to do, too. By those who came before us. You see, these were noble pursuits. To be a scientist, a thinker, a writer, an artist, and so on. This was to mean something. To have lived a life in pursuit of a higher good.

But now we’re the useless ones. We mean less than nothing to a world like this. It hates us, even more than it hates itself. We represent everything that it despises, fears. We’re the demons it must exorcise. The ghosts in its machine. We’re the ones who wanted liberation for the rest.

The truth that we can’t face about the world now goes like this. The average person doesn’t want liberation. They do not want to be freed from the bondage of the systems and institutions which enslave and ensnare them. They may say they do, but their actions betray them at every turn. Hardly does much good to rail against billionaires and then be glued to your phone living an algorithmic life, does it?

And this leaves people like you and I in a terrible place. A place of nothingness. Our task, challenge, calling, purpose, was this. To enlighten. And I mean that in a profound and deep and beautiful way. To spark the divine light in the human soul, to create a supernova in human consciousness itself. This is what every masterpiece, whether it’s an equation, painting, song, or poem, does.

But the average person has done something terrible. Unforgivable. Unthinkable. They’ve turned down five millennia of enlightenment, and again, I mean that in a deep way, not a superficial one, not just “the enlightenment,” but the project of the expansion of human consciousness itself. Into a place of love, whose names are both holy and infinite, from mercy to grace to justice to beauty to truth to goodness.

The average person does not want any of that. They have chosen to make a demonic bargain, and I mean that, emphatically, in the sense of Thanatos, the death force, standing against, raping, destroying, ruining, tearing apart, Eros, the life force. These are the two great instincts in existence. And the average person, whoever this motherfucker is, this poor, deluded, weakling, is saying: I only want to hate. I only want something to fuck. I only want someone to kill.

I could care less about the light. The truth. The eternal message. The holy names. Fuck love, beauty, truth, goodness. Damn them, curse them, I spit on them. I piss on their graves. I will murder them and throw them into the ditch of my own fury and ignorance and greed and violence.

But won’t you go with them, too, my friend, we ask gently?

It’s become a genre all its own. The “people who regret voting for Trump and can’t quite believe what’s happening to them” kind of article, segment, whatever. LOL. Am I supposed to…what the fuck…are you fucking serious…have sympathy for people this stupid? Just fucking take a razor blade and cut my throat open. Let my blood pour into the soil and sanctify it with the sweet despair of a wasted life.

At least I tried.

I don’t regret wasting my life. That was my job. The fates took me in their arms and whispered to me: you are called. And no mortal soul can disobey their wish. I know that you’ve heard it, too, if you’re like me. A wasted life isn’t the worst thing in the world. You know what is? A fucking stupid one. One that was never really lived at all.

Where does this leave us? You see, we’re the last of our kind. There won’t be any more after us. Not for some time to come now. Scientists. Writers. Thinkers. Artists. Scholars. Poets. Musicians. Yes, there will be people who call themselves those things, in the same way that billionaires call themselves geniuses, LOL. And yes, there’ll be people who do those things. But those roles in society will no longer exist. They are already disappearing.

We often talk about the impending disappearance of the white collar class. It’s going to happen, and if that’s you, you’re fucked. You’ll never have an income, career, profession again. Sorry about that. Like I said, these pathetic idiots fucked us all. But the truth is that above and beyond lies the disappearance of the…I don’t know what to call it. The class or group of people that orient, guide, teach a civilization. Who to be, what to be, how to be, why to be.

Remember civilizational hyperspace, the space of all possible civilizations? It’s the thinkers, scientists, artists, writers, teachers, scholars, poets, musicians, and that’s not an exhaustive list, you get my drift, who pull a civilization forwards and upwards in this hyperspace. Who guide past local maxima and towards higher and higher peaks. Of human possibility, of prosperity, of discovery, of human consciousness itself.

We will not exist anymore. We are now entering a dark age. You know it and I know it. Maybe in a few generations, a few decades, all these things will make some kind of resurgence. Democracy, truth, justice, reason, science, art, etcetera, you know the list by now. But we will not exist anymore.

And we have to face that. This fire in this torch dies with us. It will die with us. It is dying with us. Think of the last dark age. The fire of human knowledge burned out, and only embers were kept alive, by the “barbarians,” in that case, Arab scholars, who retained antiquity’s lessons and manuscripts etcetera. What use do you think these dumb fucks are going to have for scientists over the next few decades? Smoke’s billowing into America from climate change, and Trump’s answer is…LOL…tariffs on China. You voted for him morons. What use do you think these motherfucking idiots are going to have for writers? They can barely read a sentence anymore anyways.

The fire dies with us.

In our future, there are no more of us. Scientists, artists, thinkers, scholars, etcetera. There are influencers, grifters, hustlers, people who love demagogues so much they’ll die for them, morons, idiots, self-immolators, people who don’t know what a book is, people who think a song is AI tokens strung together, people who'll give you a blank, baffled look if you tell them about something called a “poem” or a “theorem.” There are no more of us. The world has no use for us, because it’s decided that it doesn’t want to have a mind, soul, conscience. It just wants to feast on the blood and flesh of its own suicide.

How do we face that? I don’t know. I can’t. That’s why writing another word makes me feel nauseous. I know that I’ve wasted my life trying to teach the world why democracy, truth, reason, justice, decency, equality, etcetera matter. And that’s OK. There are worse ways to waste a life, like I said. What makes me feel soul-sick is that the fire will die with us. That the average person is really willing to throw it all away, all five, ten, millennia of the sum total of human knowledge, just to have someone to hate, something to fuck, someone to kill, just for violence, greed, rage, death.

And I don’t know how to bear that.

That’s the truth I can’t face. Maybe it’s the one you can’t face, either. I don’t know. I don’t think I have anything left to write about. Maybe I’ll write more about that. How long are people like you and me supposed to try and the rest of these motherfucking idiots that yes, things like democracy and science and art and and and…matter? For their own fucking sake, not ours?

The fates took me in their arms and whispered: my child, the night is an endless sea of stars. We put you here in the eternal name of love. And never must you betray it. I knelt, when I was just a boy, and accepted the curse.

Love,

Umair (and Snowy!!)

Things around us are dying now. Great and noble things. Pillars and foundations whose stones took millennia to lay down. You and I exist in one of history’s most tragic ages. And the question before us is this: how do we do that well? Just exist in…amid…through…this tragedy?

Let me be more precise. Things around us are dying now. Democracy. It’s in an implosive state. Science. How long will it last? I opened up my hometown paper, The Washington Post, now a plaything of a billionaire, Bezos, and there was an op-ed which not so long ago would’ve been a stain on its name—it called for the “abolition” of the NIH. Literature, art, which barely exist at all anymore, and no, “BookTok” doesn’t count, LOL. Peace. Justice. The idea of a world, not merely a jungle, a prison, a body to rape, naked earth to scorch.

Do you understand what I mean? I feel alone these days. I feel that too few of us see what’s becoming of all of us. Things around us are dying now.

I’m going to call all this the Necrocosm.

That’s not because it needs a clever name, but because I want you to see it clearly with me, through me. There are those of us who still believe in life. That it must, can, should, be better, wiser, and nobler than…this.

But what is “this”? What I’ve described to you is a process of necrosis. Let’s not play the games pundits play. Ezra Klein, Chris Hayes, such good boys. Polite. Nice guys. One gets the sense that the world could crumble around them, and the nice guys would smile, shrug, and…go on being very, very nice about it at all.

I’m not a nice guy. I’m bad. Rotten to the core. I always have been. I never believed the point of life was to make money, amass power, and play games with it all. I believed in love, and I lived my life that way, to the edge, at the brink. My friends joke that it’s dangerous just to be around me. That’s because I have a bad habit of shaking them out of any complacency they might have. Of challenging them to live.

The Necrocosm. Let’s see it clearly together now. The nice guys won’t take you a tour of places like this. They’re too busy pretending everything’s going to be OK. LOL, fuck that.

Democracy. It took human beings five thousand years to build this pillar. Five thousand years. Science. There is a broken line from Archimedes and Aristotle to Galileo to Einstein and beyond, scarred by dark ages and inquisitions. Literature. Between the birth of drama, in the hands of figures like Sophocles, to the revolution in Camus, lie two and a half thousand years. Art. Its earliest traces, are found fifty to seventy thousand years ago. Ethics, reason, justice, truth, wisdom. I could go on. But perhaps you see my point.

All these things are now dying around us, and. And sometimes I run out of words when I think that thought. I feel a terrible emotion for which there is no name. A sense of wrongness at where we are in history, and where we should have been.

Then I think of hypercivilization. It’s just the space of all possible civilizations. There’s another us for whom all these things didn’t begin to die. Another trajectory, place, state, in this space of all possible civilizations. Just as there’s a different set of lives for all of us, so too there are for civilizations. We could have been one which carried all these great projects forwards.

And this is the tragedy of us, of now, of it all.

We really do live in an age where “the world is falling apart,"“ or “things are going very badly,” but these colloquialisms badly understate—and fail to apprehend—the nature and weight of the issue, the problem, our plight. Millennia of human civilization are turning to dust in our hands.

When I say that “things are dying around us,” I’m describing a process of necrosis. Parts of the body are dying. They’re turning black. Infected, gangrenous. Here, the hands of democracy have been struck by a flesh-eating bacterium, moving at lightning speed. There, the mind of humankind is being liquified, turning to mush. There, the Eros of humanity is disintegrating into nothing, meaning our libido, if you like, in a crude way. Within, what’s left of our will is paralyzed, by narcotics, sedatives, as we’re drugged asleep while the process of necrosis accelerates.

I’ve called them “things.” What I’m discussing with you are the fundamental institutions of civilization. And when I use this word, “civilization,” I do so in a different way. Academics, here, I think, have failed a little bit. They’ll say that civilizations are all equal, and if you’re simply going to study them impartially, I suppose, that’s true. But I think that civilizations can—and should—learn from one another. Grow. Mature. Unfold.

I think that these pillars, democracy, science, literature, art, reason, justice, and so on, are the greatest accomplishments of humankind. And they have endured across civilizations. Not in a simple, linear way. Many have been lost for thousands of years at a time. But for those civilizations which choose to learn from their predecessors, and build on the great pillars, the project of civilization continues. Advances. Grows and matures.

And it’s in this sense that I came up with the concept of “hypercivilization.” Precisely so that we can see that successful civilizations build upon the great pillars they inherit, and don’t merely squander themselves, by destroying them. There are many forms and patterns civilizations can trace. Let’s take the idea of human sacrifice. We’d be foolish to pick on that practice, because it led nowhere. Like slavery. And yet here we are, back at the brink. When Americans die because they can’t “afford healthcare,” how different is it really from a human sacrifice to placate a vicious god? Oh, shit. The nice guys will say that’s controversial. I told you I’m not a nice guy.

The Necrocosm is a place in hypercivilization. And others have been here before. Decadent Rome. Weimar slash Nazi Germany. The parallels and examples are obvious. Think of civilizations who didn’t build on the great pillars, but turned wrecking balls on them. How did it work out for them?

I’m writing all this so that you can see. I want you to be able to visualize what I do, to see this all the way that I “see it in my head.” Because…that’s a complicated question. And I often wonder myself. Why bother? What’s the point? By now, if you’re intelligent, you know, and if you’re the other kind of person, you don’t give a shit. You’re too busy pissing all over democracy, science, art, literature, truth, meaning, love. You’re how and why the Necrocosm happened.

People come to me and ask questions about money. And I always tell them what I’ll tell you. Money is nothing. Civilization is everything. In our lifetimes, the great tragedy is this. Civilization is nothing, and money is everything. How many trillionaires does it take to screw in a light bulb? Infinity, they’re too busy screwing the rest of us to care about the lights going out. Bad joke. Sorry. The point is this.

If you want to understand things like economics, finance, and wealth, you had better begin here. The rest is all bullshit. How long do you think “money” is worth much in a hypercivilizational state where democracy doesn’t exist? How long do you think economies will “grow” when there’s no science, knowledge, literature, or intellect left, just dumb fucks glued to their idiotphones? What happens as we cross the threshold from aspiring to be a peaceful world, to a place of billionaire dynasties whose robot armies kill each other over the last few resources of a dying planet? What happens when AI takes everyone’s job, anyways, and the idea of an “income” is a distant memory? Do people just sell their kidneys to feed their kids?

Don’t fuck around with this. Don’t be a nice guy. Or girl. Or grandma. Be angry. Be upset, disappointed, horrified. Be intelligent. Fucking see it all for what it is. Then and only then will you begin to understand where you are, and what you should do about it. Think you can live your life the old way? Are you kidding? Would you seriously advise a kid these days to try and be a…LOL…scientist…journalist…writer…teacher…executive…anything of substance…and no, that’s not an exhaustive list? What are we supposed to do now? First, just this much.

See where we really are.

Love,

Umair (and Snowy!)

What point is there in seeing into the shadows of a dark age? I don’t write much anymore. There’s little point. So: are you sure? That you want to know what happens next? Should we even care anymore…about a world like this? Let me try again. Here’s what happens next. You won’t like it. As you read this, if you need help, please get some.

I’ve died many times. And I’ve been lucky, or blessed, or fortunate. Someone or something saved me and brought me back to life. I was an abused, suicidal kid in America. I stepped off a train in Canada, and everything changed. I was alive again. Fast forward thirty years. Doctor after doctor around the world told me I was going to die. I’d lost fifty pounds in a month. I couldn’t eat. I went on a date, just to make conversation. My future wife told me: you have a rare condition where the light can kill you.

But of all the times I’ve died, the worst has been, the one I’d never wish on anyone—let me pause there. Sometimes people say: you almost died. I shrug. To face the certainty that you’re going to die is a kind of death, in all the ways that matters. Spiritual, emotional, intellectual. I was never the same person after standing face to face with death each time I did. Nobody is. You die. The old you is annihilated. Blown apart. And if you’re lucky, you come back to life. Only the fates can say why. But you’re never the same.

All these deaths gave me gifts. Strange and mysterious ones. Foresight, intellect, judgment, wisdom, courage. And in that way, I thank the creator for them. But of all these deaths, the one that I almost couldn’t bear, the one that was too painful, pure agony, was this one: losing everything.

And I’m gently telling you about my life because now a whole lot of people are going to die just this way.

There are many ways to die. Disease, old age, illness, infirmity, a sudden accident. But the worst of them all, the unkindest, the most unbearable is this one: losing it all. I don’t mean that metaphorically. Two of the world’s great economists (and when I use that term, I mean it, because we have very few left) studied what they came to call “deaths of despair.

This is what happened to America’s blue collar or working class, as deindustrialization ripped the heart out of everything they’d had and held dear. Livelihoods, towns, communities, professions, a future.

And now those deaths of despair are coming for everyone else. Especially America’s white collar class, but not just them. Young people, middled aged people, the elderly. Let me be clear: when we see life expectancy shrinking, this is a function of people dying in very real ways of preventable causes, and they’re interlinked, rivers pouring into a sea.

So let me try to explain what I mean by “losing it all.” You might think that AI will cause a wave of suicides, and that it certainly will. Scores of professionals will kill themselves when they realize they have no future left whatsoever. And so will legions of young people. In one of the grimmest statistics I’ve ever read, Americans fear running out of money more than dying, which is something that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world, and which should begin to illustrate the point I’m making.

But what about the survivors? The ones that don’t choose suicide? They will face a life like this. They will slowly grow poorer and poorer. From a place of relative affluence and stability. And there will be no way out. In the beginning, they’ll try and retain the cheer and bravado Americans are famous for. Everything will be OK! But they will have to spend their savings, month after month, year after year.

And in the end, the math will only add up to one thing, one number, one digit.

Zero.

How long will people last without incomes? Imagine that you have a million dollars in the bank today. Do you feel safe? Most don’t with even that amount. That’s because it buys you, in America, maybe ten years, at a pretty mediocre quality of life. The math only adds up to one thing, one number, one digit: zero.

And the descent to zero is the most painful and terrifying thing, if you ask me, that there is. I’ve been there, right at the edge of the other ways of dying. When I was doubled over in pain, a stick figure, and the doctor couldn’t understand what was wrong with me? I felt a sense of peace. A spiritual revolution lit my mind on fire. At least I’d lived a good life. When I was a kid, being beaten by my neighbors, in an America that wanted everyone like me dead? I felt a sense of anger, resolve, determination. I’d be the one to end things on my terms. And I found my consolations: music, art, nightlife.

But it was when I was losing everything that I understood what pain truly was. And the truth is that nobody can bear it. Take a look at the unfortunate souls you see every day. They’re the products of this trajectory. And many, if not most of them, have been driven out of their minds, by the trauma.

Losing everything is different. Illness comes for us all. Accidents are strokes of misfortune. But losing everything is the unkindest death of all because it’s slow, long, an endless night. It feels like a nightmare that never ends. You wake up, and the panic sets in. How much more will I lose today? It’s the inevitability of it that kills, in the end. And this is what “deaths of despair” are about.

Losing everything involves everything. It’s never just about money. It puts everything else at breaking point too. Relationships, marriages, families, friendships. In those days? When I was losing everything? I’d reach out to friends for some advice, and hear a busy tone, or voicemail. Friends I’d made a great deal of money for. Friends I’d always been there for. Etcetera. This is the way life works. Really works. People aren’t there for you when you need them most. They can smell the despair on you, and don’t want it to infect them. Especially not in America, where weakness equals death.

So losing everything is losing everything. This is what the two great economists, Angus Deaton and Anne Case, by the way, were trying to teach us. It wasn’t just about money and jobs, but the consequent chain reactions of loss those detonated, like an explosion that never ended. For men, especially, we will see a great wave of death, because their identities and selfhood are tied to their professions and jobs and incomes.

It came for the blue collar, and we all know it’s now coming for the white collar. But I think that most people don’t understand, not one bit, just the scale and devastation of what we’re talking about. So I’ve tried to put it for you in stark terms above. Human ones. Many people are going to lose everything. They will never have jobs, professions, or incomes again, and step by step after that, everything else will go, too. And almost nobody can bear this kind of pain and live through it.

Losing everything is the worst way to die. It will drive you to drink, drugs, self-hatred, abuse of every kind. It is every demon screeching madness at every midnight. It’s one thing not to have had much—the mind and spirit can accommodate that, somehow, but they cannot so easily adjust to having had something, enough, and then losing it all. To fall from a white collar to being part of a “permanent underclass” is a transition that many simply won’t survive. Too much pain and trauma will be involved. The hopelessness will be unendurable.

Let me sketch out the chain reaction now. A profession. A job. An income. Savings. A home. Retirement. A family. Relationships. A community. Friends. A town, city, etcetera. This is the way a life ends. When you lose even half of this much, people don’t easily “recover.” More often than not—especially when there is no hope or chance of ever regaining what has been lost—there is nothing left to live for. And so people become dead men walking. You can see the light has left their eyes. They are not really here anymore.

Right now, people are sanguine about having already lost a great deal. Things that don’t matter to them, because many people are fools. Democracy. Truth. Justice. Science, art, literature. People, being fools, don’t understand that these are mere bagatelles and beginnings. When these pillars are lost, the rest crumbles, too, because these are what an individual life stands on.

They will not be sanguine for long. When reality sets in, that they are going to lose everything, and there is no way out, there will be a psychic shock unlike any other. Not even during the Industrial Revolution, no, because then, people did not have much to lose. Now they do, especially the kinds of people who have won some level of affluence and comfort, and can scarcely comprehend that everything has been for naught, all of it, education, career, working, saving, day after day—bang, gone, and now there’s just a slow, inevitable descent to…

A single digit, a single number.

Zero.

And when that terrible number is hit, everything goes with it. Especially in America. There is no such thing as dignity already. Everything is tied to “a job.” Everything needs to be bought. What happens when you can’t buy anything anymore?

Many of these people will kill themselves. Many others will try to last as long as they can. How long is that? A million dollars buys you ten years. Half a million, five. It’s not much time. And even that time isn’t good time. It’s agony, torture, panic. It’s day after day lived in the terror of ruin. This is why losing it all is the worst way to die.

And this is how people’s lives will end in our age. Nobody will care. Not failed systems and institutions, not those with more than enough to buy the planet, not even their own class, which will have long turned on itself in rage and despair, for whatever crumbs are left. A different way should have been chosen.

Please understand, I’m not encouraging anyone to kill themselves. Quite the opposite. I believe everyone should have resources, dignity, a reason to live, money, democracy, civilization.

I don’t write much anymore precisely because there is nothing left to write about. I hope you understand what I mean now. There is nothing left to write about because we are the ones who threw five millennia of human civilization away. And that is an act so profane it only deserves silence and contempt.

Losing everything is the worst way to die. To have to say anything about it at all is obscene, an insult, a disgrace to being and its nobility and power. So. Curse these words, and burn them in the name of all that has ever been holy.

Love,

Umair (and Snowy)

Hi! How’s everyone? Today we’re going to talk about…everything…or, more succinctly, how there’s nothing left to talk about, except…

There I was. Standing next to the cafe. Sneaking a ciggie. I’m on the West Coast these days, and I’m an alien here. People scowl at me everywhere I go. I don’t go to the gym, I don’t care about the state of my hair. Joyless bastards, I chuckle. This is where we are in the world. I get scolded for having a cigarette, while the world…

Fucks itself to oblivion.

The city sped by. I was reflecting on why I don’t write much anymore. The answer’s very simple. It’s about what I’ll call Where We Are in Hypercivilization, or Fuck These People. That’s a mouthful, forgive me. We live in times hostile to intellect, LOL, sorry let me correct, we live in world where absolute fucking morons, the kind of people who’ll giggle at YouTube and TikTok all day but haven’t read a book in several years, the kinds of people who adore dictators and think the return of polio’s Something Wonderful, are are in deeply and madly love with…

Fucking themselves to oblivion. Fucking everything into oblivion.

I was wrong, I suddenly thought. There are three questions left to talk about. Or topics, themes. But…they’re useless. Even thinking about them is…pointless. There is no meaning whatsoever to them, and wasting your life on them is a terrible error. Let me explain what I mean.

Question one. How stupid is the average person? How much more stupid can these dumb fucks even get? On a spectrum that ranges from “I can’t name a single great scientist, artist, or writer who ever lived, but I love scrolling influencer-videos on my phone!” to “I’ll set my babies alight if my favorite dictator tells me to!”, just how fucking mind-meltingly idiotic is the average person at this point?

I’m sure the Good Boys will debate this. Oh wait, they already are. Today I saw Ezra Klein and Chris Hayes almost discussing this very theme. Very politely. Please don’t call the idiots fucking idiots. Why, that would be rude! Let us be genteel! Pistols at dawn, my good man! Who knows? Maybe another one of them, whoever the fuck it is, doesn’t matter, will chime in at some point, and they can fix the world with the carefully manicured hand of politesse. Such good boys! Fucking kill me.

There is no point to even asking this question. Not for people like us. We’re the intelligent ones, or at least the ones who cared. We devoted our lives to better things. Art, science, music, science, discovery, enlightenment, truth, beauty, justice, reason. This question—are these people really this stupid?—is useless. You can’t do anything with it. It can’t help us advance one step, or even slow the rate of regress.

Please see that clearly. We’re now debating angels on the head of a pin, like medieval theologians. And while God may or may not exist, human stupidity certainly does, but questioning where the bottom or end is is completely fucking useless. To you, to me, and to human civilization. Because even if we can answer this question, it will yield no scientific breakthroughs, no artistic masterpieces, no musical triumphs, nothing. Just a resounding, guttural cry of pain, echoing into the endless night.

Speaking of the night, let’s come to question two. How long will the Dark Age we’re now entering last? Five decades? Three? A century? More? Again, this is a useless question. There’s no point in debating it, nor is there much point to debating “if” we’re in one.

Remember the Good Boys? Those insipid motherfuckers are still too pants-pissingly polite to even get here. Hell, it’s fucking Caligula in the White House, replete with cage matches. Etcetera. See the signs. The Good Boys never do. Not in the bar, not in the boardroom, and certainly not in the fucking clubhouse of posers preening and grinning and earnestly still telling us “everything will be OK!” LOL, please, just fucking shoot me, good boys, or at least let me have my fucking cigarette, because the world is fucking itself to oblivion.

Question three. What happens now? We all know what happens now. The world plunges into chaos, turmoil, violence, vengeance, theocracy, fascism, and every other form of stupidity and folly, for decades to come, and this is just the beginning. Perhaps a few bright spots of democracy will be left. Canada, parts of Europe, etcetera. Maybe. The rest? It’s cooked. How long will Americans have social security and medicare? Good luck living that life.

Again, this is a useless question. We can’t do anything with it. No science, art, music, truth, beauty, goodness, anything useful or noble or true, can come from it.

So. There are things left to talk about, but—and here’s the painful part, for us intellectuals and artists and scientists and discoverers and explorers and rebels and misfits and revolutionaries and thinkers and poets and scholars, for the lovers among us—they don’t matter anymore. The more time that we waste on them, the more we waste of our precious lives. The more we spin our wheels against the greatest rock of all, the impregnable, immovable spire of human stupidity.

Now let’s talk about what I called “hypercivilization.” That just means…the space of possibilities that a civilization has available to it, or “lives inside.” Think of the other us. The one that didn’t choose to…

Fuck itself to oblivion.

That us went on to do beautiful and noble things. It created, discovered, explored, expanded. It grew into adulthood, past childhood, and its infantile-narcissistic concerns. It matured, and as it did, it came to a semblance of self-understanding, and with that came equanimity and wisdom.

In practical terms, we ended hunger, violence, deprivation, disease, war. We built institutions and systems to do what’s obvious, necessary, good, like educating every single child on the planet, or giving everyone a home, income, resources, dignity. In that us, everyone that wanted to, I don’t know, do a PhD in quantum physics or biochemistry or anything at all could do it for free, because knowledge is the ultimate lever of human prosperity. I could go on, but the point is…

To see us in “hypercivilizational space.” Our set of possibilities imploded. We will never be that us now. Maybe fifty years or a century onwards we can try again. But now? Impossible. We’ve spent too much money on truly fucking idiotic stuff. Because all of these fucking idiots put together…their idiocy didn’t just add…or even multiply…it exponentiated, went thermonuclear, reached critical mass, exploded, started a chain reaction,…these shit-for-brains motherfuckers…

Fucking everything into oblivion.

They’ve destroyed us hypercivilizationally. We will never be what we could have been, and that doesn’t mean we won’t “get there one day,” but it does mean that you and I won’t be alive to see it. Imagine a world where a certain orange guy never happened, and maybe you see my point.So isn’t that absence of what could have been…cruel, evil, terrible? I can’t imagine much worse than that, if I’m honest. To just…

Throw five millennia…of human accomplishment…from democracy to science to art to truth…into…the garbage can…then take a colossal shit on it…then do a victory dance in the foul garbage-shit-slop like you did something wonderful…miraculous…because you’re that much of a fucking idiot.

Is there anything dumber than that? Literally? Stop and think about the sheer mountainous weight of idiocy we’re talking about. Five millennia. Turned to dust.

And so the truth goes like this.

We shouldn’t give a fuck about these people now, or ever again. They’ve proven that they are not worthy of caring about or for. They do not deserve anything from us anymore. Our gifts, which we’ve spent our lives acquiring by the way, must never be wasted in this way. Let me make it very, very clear why.

You want me to help you with…science…art…truth…reason? LOL. After you slit their throats open, bled them out, and then pissed on them? Now you want your money back? Your future? Your democracy, freedom, rights? Law? Justice? Fairness? A country? Now you’re asking me for my fucking help? Are you fucking kidding me?

You’re such a moron you didn’t realize that setting five millennia of human civilization on fire, giving everything you were given, everything you ever had, to fascists, crooks, lunatics, and bastards….all that…didn’t come with a money-back guarantee?

Now you’re asking me for help? All of us? The very ones who told you not to fucking burn down the house because Big Daddy told you the flames would set you free? Now you want to be saved from your own stupidity?

The line to kiss my ass begins over here, motherfucker. Why should I help you now? What’s in it for me? All I can see happening is this. If I do, you get to do this all over again, the moment you’re placated, and I’ve made everything OK all over again, because we know that’s what entitled, grandiose, clueless whiny little bitches always do.

This is a pattern. A cycle. And it’s not working. Should the smart ones go on fixing everything for the fucking idiots, the mess they’ve made, just so they can burn it down all over again two, three, five years from now, the next time they throw a bitch-fit-tantrum and cry for Big Daddy, or should we let them learn their fucking lesson?

All that’s the lesson for us. It’s why the three things we have left to talk about aren’t worth talking about.

Fuck these people. Fuck these absolute staggering morons. Who fucked us all into oblivion. Five millennia. Remember? We’re smart enough not to pay the price, or at least not as much as these absolute shit-for-brains motherfuckers already are. Oh, sorry, you lost your money to the dictator you voted for? Well, shit, Sherlock, now you want democracy back? Oh, now it’s time for me fix all the things you broke? So you can do it all over again?

Fuck you. You made your bed, now lie in it. Don’t ask me to clean up your fucking mess anymore.

Fuck these people. History will damn them. You know it and I know it. But so should we. History begins with us. It always has.

Remember the Good Boys? There they are, pretending like it all didn’t happen the way it did. No, really, it wasn’t people so fucking unbelievably, brain-meltingly stupid they’d burn themselves right down to the bone with sulfuric acid if their beloved dictator asked them all to. They didn’t fuck everything to oblivion. Not their fault! Hey, let’s debate it! Must’ve happened some other way. Spare me this fucking LOL-vomit-inducing intellectual bankruptcy, because the idiocy of throwing five millennia of human civilization away was already a crime too grave to bear. Fucking kill me, just put a razor blade in a bullet and aim it right between my eyes. It’d be faster than Death by Pundits, which is just a slower, more boring sequel to Death By Idiots.

You know what I think? Remember the space of possible civilizations? See where we are now, this fucking nadir, this zenith, this fucking plunge into the abyss? What do adults do? Take responsibility. The intellectualizations at this point are worse than useless, because they waste away the best in us, and we are the best left of all of us, and therefore questions we’re left with aren’t worth talking about for one instant, because if we squander ourselves on that, we’re also throwing our lives away on them, and that has to stop right now, this instant, because we deserve better than Death By Motherfucking Idiots.

Fuck these people. The line to kiss my ass starts way back there, moron. You clean up the mess you made, if you can, I’m not going to save you from shit. Sorry about that. I’m not going to waste one instant of my life anymore trying to save idiots so achingly stupid they took history’s biggest shit all over five millennia of civilization from the bitter, ruinous consequences of their own idiocy anymore, and neither should you. Hey, dummy. You didn’t want a democracy, rights, money, a future, a life, wealth, prosperity? All the nice things that come with science, art, literature, reading books, knowing a fucking thing, truth, reason, beauty, goodness, justice, nobility?

Good job, motherfucker. You’re fucked. Let me step aside so you can enjoy it.

Love,

Umair (and Snowy!)

Hi! How’s everyone? Sorry I haven’t been writing much lately. I’ve been sick. From the light. Some summers are like that. Vampire blues. And maybe the truth is also…

I don’t know what to say. LOL. That’s rare for me. But I suppose the world has changed. And so have I.

I feel like estranged from the times we’re in. They’re alien to me. I watch people around me. And I wonder. Why do they want to waste their lives like this? On this? I’m sure you know what I mean. The narcotic haze of the screen. Me, me, me. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

Van Gogh once said: “art is to console those who are broken by life.” What did he mean by that? Why does it matter? What’s my point? Where am I going with all this? Shit, Umair, where’s the hook! You need to reel them in in the first ten letters! Fuck Van Gogh! Show Me The Money!

I don’t know what to say about the world now. Wait, that’s wrong. I don’t think there is anything worth saying about it, except exactly that. What can you say about…nothing? I look at the times, the world, and now? I feel nothing, anymore, about it. I shrug. I have better things to do with my time, consciousness, energy, than waste it on this. It isn’t appropriate, or healthy, to care about people who don’t care about themselves.

What’s the point of a broken heart? That question goes deeper than you might think. Van Gogh wondered, too. He looked at fields and saw them in a new way. What do you see when you look at the world? Here’s what I do.

What can you say about…the kind of shocking stupidity…absolute cowardice…all-consuming idiocy…we’re surrounded in, by? I’m sure that there are people who can talk about it endlessly. Someone call Ezra Klein or Mehdi Hasan or who have you. It’s a long list, mostly men, and they all have this constant look of outrage slash bewilderment. Wow, as if it’s all such a puzzle. Such good boys.

Me? I wonder: why bother? Are these guys serious? LOL. Don’t they see the world we live in now?

Let me say the quiet part out loud.

People have made their choices. And they’re fucking idiotic ones.

Should the rest of us, the thoughtful, sensible, and kind ones, go on wasting our lives on these hopeless, pathetic idiots? Trying to save them…from themselves? That’s what we’ve been taught to do. But it’s wrong.

And this is the genuinely great moral and intellectual question before us. Not: can we save the world, fix democracy, end war, hunger, etcetera. LOL. We failed at that. That part’s over. Because people are just incomprehensibly stupid, and getting stupider by the microsecond. Now it’s: how much more of us do we waste on people who’ve liquified their brains into gray neural mush, who genuinely like existing in a completely mindless way, whose their hollowed out cortexes only contain tiny needles endlessly automatically dispensing endlessly looping dopamine hits of TikTok, YouTube, demagogues, hate, rage, conspiracies, influencers, AI girlfriends, or whatever dumb fuck shit it is this day, month, year? Have you ever seen a human mind implode into slurry? You’re living in it.

Those of us who have, I don’t know, three functioning brain cells left know how these choices end. Know, not guess, suppose, imagine, or speculate. Guess what, we read a book or two. And yet. There’s the “surprised” Trumpist in that corner, wondering why they’re getting poorer, there’s the angry man-child in that one, whining about how girls don’t like him, as if being a sullen, sulking, misogynist was The World’s Most Powerful Aphrodisiac, LOL, there’s some poor guy over there, blaming everyone under the sun for his own failed life, instead of examining his love for the very monsters who exploit him.

Maybe you want to waste your life on this. Not me. Not anymore.

We’re living in their fantasy. Where do we draw the line and back away?

You know what I have to say about that? Fuck it. I exit. I reject it. Je refuse. I am out, finished, done trying to save these pathetic morons. You live in this tawdry, worthless fantasy, dumb fuck. But don’t ask me to, not anymore, and don’t fucking count on people like me to save you from your own stupidity anymore, either. We shouldn’t.

I prefer a life. Consciousness, truth, beauty, joy, love. I want to live. You die this death by a thousand billionaires, demagogues, stupidities, self-destructions. I am going to live. You’ve chosen death, which is what all this is, in lethally real ways, by the way. Hence, absolutely, with total certainty, fuck the destiny of slavery, self-destruction and stupidity—and then claiming perpetual victimhood over it, and then coming crying to people like us to save you once you see the mess you’ve made, oh no, I want democracy back, I want a future, I want money, don’t let them take it all from me—you’ve chosen. Fuck that loop of ruin.

So…

What is there left to say now? Nothing. Let AI babble what’s left of us. We’re already dead inside. Something in us broke over the last decade or so. Everything in us did. Minds, spirits, souls, intellect, moral horizon, imagination, sociality, decency, the idea that we’re to be anything but obedient little narcissists bowing and scraping before the very systems which diminish and enslave us.

What a fate that is. To become something like a willing slave, an accomplice to your self-destruction, to press the button on your own dehumanization. But people do this every day now, cheering, smiling, giggling, laughing. They don’t know anything else. And let’s face it: as much as we’ve tried, we can’t teach them a damned thing.

Why is that? LOL, who cares. Maybe it’s wrong of me to say that. But for the first time in my life, I myself don’t want to face the answer. We all know the answer, by the way. People are really this weak. They’re really this stupid. It’s surreal, but everything we’ve accomplished in human civilization over millennia, from Aristotle and Plato’s first schools to universities to science to literature—none of it in the end has been able to teach these idiots a thing.

Not one thing. Not…one. I mean that. Not…democracy’s good for you, dummy. Not…the system that exploits you is never going to free you, so try to oppose it. Not…immense concentrations of wealth and power are bad for societies. Not…everyone deserves dignity and resources and respect. Not…there are inviolable rights which are the foundation of the project of civilization, and that project is about fulfilling one’s self, not in narcissistic way, but in an expansive, noble, lasting one.

Fuck, not one of these lessons has sunk in. It’s not just dispiriting when you think about it, it’s also amazing, because before us we appear to be witnessing the death of the human spirit, in all its forms.

What can you say to people who appear to be dead inside in every way? Are they listening? Should you bother? Hey, you scream, listen, you’re…slitting your own fucking throat! That’s not a necklace, it’s a razor blade.

We can. Analyze it, psychoanalyze it, dissect it, justify it, rationalize it, explain it. We can proffer each other, thoughtful people that we are, every kind of rationale under the sun, from economics to childhood trauma to social isolation to emotional and material deprivation and on and on. And you know what? That doesn’t matter anymore, either. Because these aren’t children we’re talking about, and more to the point, it’s not them that we need to focus on anymore.

Oh no, these poor babies, won’t someone cry for them, they’re the world’s real victims. not little children dying when bombs rip them apart. Sorry, I can’t think of people like that anymore. Now I see these fucking morons as accomplices in, to, their own undoing. And I have little to no sympathy for them anymore, because it’s not my place to. Their own self-destruction is both the crime and the punishment. And no, I can’t “respect” that “choice,” as fashionable as it is to parrot therapy-speak and pretend we must respect everyone’s choices for everything. Some choices really are fatally fucking stupid.

So there’s nothing—zero—left to talk about it if you ask me. At least in the way we’re used to speaking about it. How did the world end up here? For fuck’s sake, we all know by now. Can we just cut the bullshit?

Can we stop fucking pretending?

Look at these idiots.

Do you think they’re even capable of forming a complete adult sentence at this point, let alone nurturing democracy or civilization? Where’s the world going next? Kill me with a pleasant, warm cyanide bath, fucking rip my eyes out, Oedipus…Jesus…for the love of…for fuck’s sake, we all know. Just…look at these idiots. These are people who can gush over 25 TikTok influencers, but probably can’t name 25, I don’t know, great minds in history, artists, poets, scientists, heads of state, anybody. Do you think they’re capable of understanding or admitting the gravity of the mistakes they’ve made?

I don’t. So are things going to change? For fuck’s…sake. We all know that one, too.

Look at these fucking idiots. The more we try to teach them, the less they learn.

You know what that makes us? The real fucking idiots. We were taught: no, no, you have to waste your life trying to save the idiots. With art, science, knowledge, reason. Fuck that! Fuck it to bits. It was wrong. Nothing could have been more wrong, in fact.

I for one am not going to be the greater idiot anymore. If these fools want to destroy themselves, hey, by all means, go for it. I’m not going to get in the way anymore. I’m not going to waste another moment of my life trying to stop it all. I’m sorry I wasted so much of it already. My mistake. I wish I’d been more of a cynical, evil, ruthless bastard, because, fuck, look at us decent and thoughtful people, where we’ve all ended up. We’re the ones who got fucked. Admit it, if you have the balls. I know you probably don’t, but this is the only place real change begins for any of us or all of us. Tell me you don’t feel like you wasted your life, too. Go ahead, lie to me.

And for that reason, I now celebrate the dummies fucking themselves over for a change. Let them, cheer them on, applaud them, don’t, don’t try to fucking stop them anymore. It’s the least they deserve. I have nothing left to say about it all for that very reason.

I failed, we failed, all our paradigms failed, and everything we wanted for the world was a stupid joke. That sounds bitter, but it’s not. It’s a relief. Let’s face the fucking truth.

Let’s say the quiet part out loud.

Let’s not overthink it anymore. “The average person” is a total moron. And that’s being kind. Someone basically incapable of understanding, wanting, needing, aspiring to anything more than fuck, eat, kill. That is why they’re so easily seduced, by things as mind-blowingly idiotic as fucking endless scroll algorithms drip-feeding them cheap fantasies of sex-violence-money-power, an infinite loop of pure death drive, and it’s why all the lessons of the last ten millennia have come to nothing, yet again.

What’s the point of a…broken heart? I don’t have anything left to say. Except on that subject.

I was wrong. The bad guys were right. People aren’t worth what we offered them, all these beautiful treasures, civilization, democracy, science, art, literature. Not in my eyes, just objectively speaking. Look at the state of things, LOL. Who did all that? “The average person” did, whoever the fuck that is, which is everybody, nobody, somebody, anybody.

Let it all burn. Pour fuel on the flames. Isn’t it all in flames, anyways? What’s the point of a broken heart? Who gives a fuck about an age this pathetic, stupid, futile, so much so that even calling it tragic assigns it a nobility it doesn’t have? Who should? I don’t anymore. Neither should you.

The bad guys were right. That’s not tragic, and it’s not noble. There’s no art or beauty or even truth in that. There’s just a sense of emptiness. Bad guys are dumb. Smart people tend to be good. And so the tragedy, my friends, is people like us. We have no place in this world now. We are looking for a thing that doesn’t exist. The bad guys were right about the bottomless stupidity of “the average person,” and they were right too, about us, about the futility and even deeper stupidity of trying to be good, decent, and wise, if and when people are only raw appetites of fuck-eat-kill. What is there left to say after that? What’s the point of science, literature, art, etcetera, after that? LOL, is there one? Fuck it, let AI have it, and let the fascists have the rest. Enjoy that future, motherfuckers. I hope you like being poor and enslaved.

If these mighty pillars of civilization all crumble in the face the endless loop of “save the fucking idiots from themselves,” then I for one am finished with that eternal recurrence. Fuck that, you be the one to try and save the fucking idiots from themselves. Good luck wasting your life on that particular endeavor.

The point of a broken heart is to find someone else with one, too. And in that people like us are different. We’re not just looking for broken reflections of ourselves in algorithms, mirrors, likes, fans, followers, we’re not just raw zombie appetites screaming fuck-eat-kill-fuck-eat-kill. We’re not just one endless narcissism imploding into nothing. The edges of a broken heart only fit around, into, with another one. And this is the point of it all, civilization, art, science, literature, life, all of it. Love.

Does anyone fucking remember that? They don’t, because people are really this fucking stupid. So much so that they’ve done this to the world. All of this, and I don’t have to recite the facts for you.

The point of a broken heart is to love, and this is the purpose of the human being, who is lost, alone, afraid, and naked in time, space, and before fate. And yet here we are, watching a world incapable of even trying to lift a finger to live up to this most ancient, simple, and obvious of truths.

So fuck, and I really mean it, fuck to the very last fuck-eat-kill at the final edge of sweet oblivion all of the dumb fuck spiritually bankrupt and intellectually decrepit morons who’ve done this to us, the world, the future, themselves. They’re not worth a second of any of it anymore, my life, yours, civilization, all of it, tout. I’ll be at the cafe, with the ghosts of all the broken hearted. Van Gogh’s whispering. Can you hear him? They’re the only people I talk to anymore.

Love,

Umair (and Snowy!)

PS ———> BONUS SNOWY AND UMAIR PIC!!!!!!!!!!!!

We’re stepping off the edge of an abyss. The world is breaking down catastrophically now. How far back will we go, where will we land? This is how dark ages fall. We fall.

And the more that I think about the present and the future, the more I worry, deeply and seriously, that we are entering one. Let me take you through my fears.

Our social structure is now poised to implode. Within a decade, what’s left of the upper middle class will no longer exist. Its members do not seem nearly worried enough about their impending economic annihilation. It’s increasingly certain that their jobs and professions will be replaced. They will be eviscerated, just as the working class was before them.

But what will that do to the political economy? I’ll come back to that question. For now: imagine a society with no working class, no middle class, and no upper middle class. This was the last group clinging onto what was left of the dream, the last rung on the ladder, of post-war prosperity. Their grip will slip like this. Their careers and professions will be turned to ashes in a supernova. Those who were lucky or fortunate will have enough left to live on for five or ten years. And then what? The jobs aren’t coming back, and neither is the social group.

Now consider the labor market in general, beginning with the young. Today we say the job market is “frozen.” That hides a deeper truth: only one sector is creating jobs, healthcare, which masks destruction in all other fields and industries. Within a decade, AI will be embedded into humanoid robots. And then what will be left? Perhaps you’re beginning to see the scope of my worries, but they’ve only barely just begun.

The young can’t find work today. "Entry-level” jobs don’t seem to exist anymore. And the idea is that this is a temporary blip. But why would it be? Are there any indications that it is? It’s more likely that this generation will be the first to have no rungs left on what used to be a ladder at all. They can’t find jobs now, and as yesterday’s middle and upper middle class professions vanish, they won’t be able to develop into them tomorrow, either. We are beginning to see a story, a theme emerging. A ruthless one, in which the young and the white collar are two sides of the same coin: economic annihilation.

So far, so bleak. But a dark age? Not quite yet. So let me continue my story. What happens, for example, to universities, as young people decide that there’s no point to a degree? We humanists will say, of course, education makes a human being whole, but survival comes first, and if degrees don’t pay, then they are just liabilities. And as generation after generation retreats from education, universities themselves begin to become obsolete institutions.

But as universities die, so goes a pillar of our economies and societies. Research, science, art. Knowledge. And that is the point in my example of the death of the university, which is now beginning.

What are the oldest institutions we have as a civilization? Churches and universities. Let’s leave religion aside. We are now going to witness our oldest institutions begin to die. What will remain of them? If that isn’t a warning of what kind of times are dawning, I don’t know what could be.

As social groups lose their place in society, in our economies, what does that mean? What does it mean, for example, to say that the upper middle class will never exist again, or that young people will go their lifetimes without having stable employment? It means that we are rewinding in time centuries now. Back, easily, to the Victorian age, perhaps, the Dickensian era of Industrial Revolution. But this isn’t revolution—it’s devolution. Perhaps for technology it’s growth, but for the rest?

Entire social groups will find themselves useless. Without a place or a purpose. Without incomes, any path towards them. There will be waves of suicides, probably society-altering ones. People will begin to feel there is no point to their lives, and they won’t be right, but in a sense, they won’t be wrong either. A brutal Darwinian game has begun, and in it, the losers will lose everything. People today still don’t understand what that fully means. The will to live, a place in society, a reason to exist.

Can politics do anything about this? You might point to the possibility of revolution. I don’t think that it exists anymore. The leaders who are to come will make Trump look decent and sane. They will have armies of humanoid robots at their disposal, and they’ll have no compunction about using them to seize whatever resources they’re warring over, much less to quell domestic unrest. And of course as AI is granted personhood, people themselves will cease mattering as political agents, and become mere instruments of authoritarian algorithmic desire.

How many thousand people could a humanoid robot kill in a moment? Now imagine one twenty feet tall. Thirty. It’s OK to think in sci-fi terms out loud, we’re just thinking. How many people would it take to bring just one down? How many would be foolhardy enough to try? And what difference will it make when the judge, jury, and law are all AI, too, anyways? How many years away are we from such a reality?

There is little reason to believe that revolution will happen again for some time to come. And the truth is that people’s instincts towards revolution have been neatly vivisected away. The average person is satisfied with The Algorithm, with TikTok and Instagram, or whatever their variants will be tomorrow, as a release valve for their fears, miseries, and frustrations. There is zero impulse in the masses to seize or claim a better life. Gossip, scandal, outrage, titillation. They’re digitally pacified.

So. Already we’ve discussed the death of knowledge, the implosion of social structure, and the impossibility of revolution. But where does all this go?

It is going back towards a medieval place. Consider the features of the last dark age. Scholasticism, versus science. Caste societies, instead of free ones. Imperial conquest and royal bloodlines. And of course tribute-based peasant economies ruled over by dynastic inheritance. The belief too, that all this was inevitable and eternal. This is where we appear to be heading.

We have scarcely seen the way wealth will now concentrate. We imagine the world is unequal today. But when five people who are already ultra wealthy control all the wealth the former upper middle class possessed, or entire generations create, then we are in a different league altogether. The world’s first trillionaires and centi-trillionaires will be able to buy entire cities, seas, mountain ranges, have entire neighborhoods of skyscrapers or palaces to themselves. The world will belong to them in ways we have never really seen in history. Today’s mega-yachts will seem like a quaint memory.

This is dynastic wealth on a scale that will fundamentally alter history, perhaps for centuries. It will easily last generations. And there will be no erasing, changing, or stopping it. Technocapital has already made democracy irrelevant. What can change its trajectory now? The world will be divided into a new class of nobles and emperors who control the technocapital that the peasants and serfs merely pay rent for and to. The peasants and serfs, meanwhile, won’t have remotely modern social structures, professions, or lives. What little income they can generate from one another will instantly flow upwards, as it already does, and so the system will perpetuate itself.

The truth is that in this kind of system, money itself has long ago ceased to matter. What will a loaf of bread cost 25 years from now? Do you think it’ll cost less than three, five, or ten times what it does now? The point is that money is already losing any semblance of meaning, and this is precisely what happens when systems turn feudal and imperial. The idea is already disappearing that one “earns” an income—rather, one takes what one can, while one can, whether through financial or technological arbitrage, and damn the rest.

But when money means nothing, we have gone back millennia in economic development. How will nations function then? They won’t, and in all this, of course, the nation-state becomes a broken, dusty relic. It already is. But as technocapital seizes the world’s wealth for itself, of course, social contracts are things which become impossibilities. Nation after nation will default on its debt, rip apart its basic institutions, sell what’s left for pennies, and that will only accelerate the division of people into peasants and lords again.

How long will this dark age last? The longer that I think about all the above, the more worried I get. I don’t see it ending in our lifetimes. I only see it beginning in them.

Everything around us is dying now. For this, I grieve. We are the midnight generation. We grew up during the golden hours of the day, and have lived long enough to see the darkness fall. History will pity us, but it will scorn us, too. For not protecting our young and our world from the depredations to come. What I’ve described to you is the way a civilization dies. I imagine that it’s a lot for some people to take in. I know. That’s why I tried to be gentle.

It doesn’t do to dwell too long on this. But you must prepare now, for the dark age falling.

Love,

Umair (and Snowy!)

The year is 2051. The unemployment rate is 46%. It’s still going up. AI took the first 36%. And then humanoid robots, 10% and climbing. But nobody talks much about that anymore. Why talk about it when “jobs” don’t exist anymore?

They call them the Techfugees. When the shockwave hit, people lost everything. Step by step. Incomes, jobs, careers, livelihoods, professions. Then savings, investments, and finally, homes. And then there was nothing left.

They live in what the early 21st century might have called refugee camps. Stretching for miles and miles. Generations now huddle there together. They’ve lived there for decades now, enough time for tents to have become makeshift buildings, even concrete low rises. The camps popped up in the places where they could. Deserts, mountain towns, along forgotten stretches of coast. Now they ring major cities.

Generation Z was the first. To experience the new reality, the new world. Jobs disappeared. And while pundits and economists said that they’d come back, they didn’t. They were the first generation to experience never having jobs, careers, or professions. Those who went into the trades, too, soon enough found themselves made irrelevant by robots. They were the first to have been made obsolete. Sometimes, they called themselves the Useless.

They’re middle aged now. And they’ve tried to teach their young what the world used to be like before, the glimpse they had of it, thrumming economies, opportunity, a chance at building a life. But theirs are the first children to have grown up in the new world. In the camps. They’ve never known any other life. To speak of “jobs” or “careers” or even “livelihoods” to them is like telling fairy tales of another place and time.

What they hope for, the young, the best and brightest among them, is to join the Chosen. The Chosen are what the people in the camps call the others. The ones who were on the other side of the shining, glorious revolution that laid waste to a world. The lords and barons and their lieutenants and lieges.

They live in shimmering skyscrapers. Not packed in by the hundreds, like in the old world, but many, just by and for themselves. Their families have ten, twenty, thirty floors, a dozen for this child, a dozen for that one. They flit back and forth between immense compounds the size of small cities, palaces on beaches, historic country manors and abbeys, mountaintop chalets (and the whole mountain might belong to them.)

What the young in the camps hope for is to join life on that side. Not as one of the Chosen, because those lines are now set in stone. If you didn’t inherit the right shares, enough money, enough Class-A ownership—you are now forever trapped in time. You will never get out. What you can hope for, though, is to be one of the fleets of servants working for the Chosen.

“Working.” It’s not like work in the before times. It’s more like work in pre-modern times. You are a servant, and what’s expected of you is servitude. You serve, you’re at the beck and call, 24/7. You live in servant’s quarters. You wear livery. You learn the correct greetings, and how to kneel and bow.

But at least you’re paid. A pittance. You must leave your family behind, so you the money back to them. It’s a lifeline, the only one there is. Because this is a buyers’ market, the Chosen having all the money and power, they’ll pay as little as possible. Just being out of the camps is reward enough.

At least here there are possibilities. You can be a butler or a maid. Perhaps even a majordomo, house manager. A jester or comedian of sorts. You can be a performer or an actor or a singer, maybe, if your patron is cultured enough (not many are.) A courtesan perhaps, or one of many in a harem. There are many avenues of servitude, it seems, and the appetites of the Chosen are boundless and endless. Each one might have a thousand servants. Families, tens of thousands. Of course, this isn’t enough—nearly enough—to employ what was once a thriving economy. Just 5%, maybe 10%, of people can aspire to even this. But it’s all that’s left.

In the camps, the fourth generation is now being born in this new world. And to it, this world is the only one there ever was. Middle aged Generation Z’s faced are now weary and lined. They are tired and drained. They’ve seen too much. They were standing on the very fault line that ripped through the earth. And they fell right through it.

There are no revolutions. How could there be? The Techfugees are kept mentally and intellectually imprisoned, more or less, by The Algorithm. The Algorithm feeds them an endless series of demagogues, who stoke their rage, and misdirect it. Today, it’s that camp’s fault, tomorrow, it’s this one’s. The idea that the world could ever be different is a distant memory, too. And the barons and lords even throw them a crumb once in a while—here’s an extra few dollars.

There’s Universal Basic Income, true. $1000 a month doesn’t go very far when a loaf of bread costs $250. Inflation exploded. It had to. The enormous pile of debt finally gave way and cracked. As the shockwave hit, people with no incomes had nothing left to pay in taxes. Bang. Money had to be printed—and after the defaults, interest rates soared, then credit became unavailable, the system shattered—and with all that came a catastrophic surge of inflation.

Prices exploded. Hence, the inflationary waves that began in the 2020s never fully stopped. Harvests are down 30%. Agriculture operates in stops and starts. The robotically manned factories can thrum, but what demand is there left? And since everything is still made of oil, and it’s still fought over by barons and lords, prices continue to rise, rise, rise. As they always do in the camps. The idea of owning, saving, or investing—it’s an alien language now. Survival is all there is. Day to day.

A proper meal. A peaceful day. A worry-free afternoon. A roof over one’s head. These things are luxuries now. Which most people struggle for. They are coveted and fought over. Stability exists, true, but only of an unstable sort. Life in the camps is the same, day after day, but they aren’t pleasant or happy days. A new mafia runs life today, prices rise, barons fire entire fleets of servants, wars break out, the young are sent to the front lines, and all this is life now. Whatever can be scraped together of it now.

The year is 2051.

There’s no such thing as an economy anymore.

Umair (and Snowy!)

See the chart above? Look carefully. Here’s what it says. We’re now in a more lopsided economy than 1929. Rarely have I seen a divergence so stark, so severe—and so calamitous. Between Main Street and Wall Street, or between finance and the real economy. It’s a tale of two parallel universes. And tales like this inevitably end in catastrophe.

If you look at America’s financial markets, aka stock markets, you’d never know anything was wrong. How dismal a shape the real economy’s in. Record highs, day after day—you should take that with a grain of salt, because they’re always record highs. What you should note, and maybe already have is: while the world is unravelling?

Stock markets are blissfully tuning out every form of risk now sweeping across the globe, from macroeconomic disintegration to geopolitical chaos to America’s real economy entering stagflation and worse (and we’ll come to that in a moment.) They’re high on a drug called greed, and like a drug, they’re too hammered by the dopamine rush to notice the parlous state everything is now in. How long can it last?

The real economy, meanwhile, is going from bad to worse. America’s real economy has been doing very, very badly for decades now, hence, the siren song of Trumpism. But now things appear to be entering a grim new phase.

Half of young people are unemployed or underemployed. Entry level jobs have all but vanished. The labor market for everyone else is frozen. If you’re over 50, good luck having a professional career ever again. What jobs have been created have all been in healthcare—every other industry has lost jobs. (Those stats and more are here.)

And the further down the socioeconomic ladder you look, the more people are struggling. The use of debt to pay for basic bills is mounting, as are delinquencies. The bottom half of Americans have nothing to save, and about half of Americans have little to nothing saved for retirement. That’s true down the generations, too—this is a portrait of declining living standards intergenerationally and socioeconomically.

I could go on with statistics, but I think we all know enough of them. Let me connect the dots for a moment.

Welcome to the Trickle Up Economy. What’s happened to America over the last few decades is that wealth, far from “trickling down,” has trickled up. From the very bottom, to the top. And trickle is an understatement. It began as a trickle, but now it’s something more like a gusher.

I think that we all sense this. And I’ve used different names for it myself, extractive economics, predatory capitalism, and so on. The labels aren’t the point—the dynamics are.

The only way that there is a disjuncture this severe, stark, and jarring between finance and the real economy is when wealth trickles up. Is extracted and siphoned upwards. Some time ago, it was estimated that had incomes kept up with productivity gains, Americans would be much, much wealthier. That never happened, precisely because wealth trickled up. And of course that way, the once merely rich became mega rich, super rich, and now imperially rich.

The problem with a trickle up economy isn’t just a moral one, though we should all ask ourselves if such an economy is a good thing.

The problem is this. At some point, there’s nothing left to trickle up. And at that point, the game of musical chairs stops. The house of cards comes crashing down. And at that—bang. Implosion.

in other words, the divergence between finance and the real economy can’t last forever, and it always suddenly corrects itself. The more severe the divergence, the more harsh and brutal the correction, the coming back to reality. Right now? The divergence is as extreme as it’s been in modern history, maybe the most, period.

We call moments like those crashes. They presage depressions. This is what happened in 1929.

Where’s the breaking point? Understand what’s happened in the American economy over the last several decades. Wealth trickled up from the working class to the elite, through mechanisms like offshoring. Then from the lower middle class and middle class, through surreal financial games, like “raiding” pensions.

And now what's left? This machine appears to be coming for what wealth is left for it to extract. Even the recently affluent tech class is about to be consigned to the very same precarity and poverty of the working class. Young people appear to have little chance of a stable or prosperous life at all, precisely because their future wealth has already been siphoned away, through things like “student debt.” The elderly are asked to choose between their homes and their lives. So the few pools of wealth left—the relatively small upper middle class, the young, the elderly—are now being siphoned off, too.

Bang.

Breaking point is hit this way. Somewhere along this road, the system crashes and burns. It’s eaten itself alive. Cannibalized its own limbs and then organs until nothing was left.

This is the problem with Trickle Up Economics. I think most of us who are thoughtful people have long known it, and warned of it, precisely because we didn’t want to see any of this happen.

All this has a meaning. Implications. Any good investment strategy had better be thinking very, very carefully about all the above. Dysfunctional and malfuction. The dangerously delusional divergence between finance and the real economy. Breaking point. The harder and more brutal the greater the divergence. 1929. Implosion. There are always intelligent ways to make money—and foolish ways to lose it. Be careful.

Love,

Umair (and Snowy!)

I. HOW TO THINK ABOUT CIVILIZATION, OR SOMETHINGS AND NOTHINGS

In the last essay, we talked about somethings and nothings. Civilization is made of somethings, like science, art, literature, democracy, truth, peace, consent, and so on. But the world around us is turning into nothings. All these are crumbling, eroding, disintegrating.

These days, people struggle with abstract thinking. I think that my little framework will help you make sense of a troubled age, and how to live in it.

II. DO PEOPLE EXIST ANYMORE? OR, THE WORLD HAS NEVER NEEDED US MORE

When I look at people, I see something that disturbs me. They’re becoming nothings. Nobodies.

I know that this sounds harsh. Let it be. I don’t want to mince words when so much is at stake.

What do I mean by that? Am I just insulting people? Playing a game of moral superiority? Neither. I’m observing the world around me, and sharing with you something I find chilling.

When I say that people are becoming nothing, what I mean is…

I was at the cafe with my lovely wife. She asked: how are you doing? She can see the toll all this takes on me. Trying to be a figure the world neither wants nor needs anymore. I’m useless now, and you will be soon, too, if you’re not already. Don’t cry for me. Cry a guttural scream for us.

I said: I think people are becoming nobodies because they are spending their lives in nothings. She understood instantly what I meant. TikTok, Netflix, the demagoguery, the outrage slash bitching cycle, much, much more. A way of being in the world. We’re different. Sometimes, we’ll still read Sophocles together. Romance. Don’t get me wrong, she loves her internet addiction. But it’s not all there is to her. And I like that. I wonder how people want to exist now.

Do they?

III. HOW I BECAME A USELESS PERSON

The world has no use for us anymore. Scientists, artists, poets, musicians, thinkers, writers, journalists, just decent human beings, not-dumb-shit-internet-fucking-addicts, dreamers, visionaries, builders of things great and small, carpenters of wood and the human soul, add to the list as you see fit.

But we all know the truth.

It has never needed us more.

I’m a useless person now. The world now has no need of people like me, as the above. in my case, intellectuals in an age which only dreams of money, power, violence. To obscene, lurid degrees. I’m useless because I refuse to be a nobody wasting my life becoming nothing. Even now.

I’m a useless person in a world where nothing matters, because to me, there are things that matter, and those things are precisely the somethings that make up the project of human civilization. Democracy and peace and science and literature and art etcetera matter to me intensely.

So much so that I have no use for the algorithm and the model and the system and its breakdown. None. I know that Netflix and Amazon will never “recommend” me anything worth reading, watching, imbibing, thinking over, reflecting on. Ever. The chances that one day, Netflix will tell you to watch Antonioni or Amazon to read Dante are less than zero.

I spend my nights in my futile, terrible acts of resistance against a world not just gone mad, but becoming nothing. I read my old books, and pore over them. I watch my old movies, and study them. And so on. I think. I struggle. I contemplate and reflect and create. Songs, music, essays, articles, doesn’t matter. I am not interested in nothings.

The point isn’t that I’m cool or awesome or perfect. Let us dispense with the narcissistic objection: Mommy, Umair’s being mean to me! Me, me, me. No, dude. The point is about life, people, somethings, and nothings.

People like me and you are becoming useless. I went first, because I lived my life at the edge. You are next. If you are interested in somethings in any way, if you’ve devoted your life to them, as a scientist, artist, thinker, musician, teacher, whatever, doesn’t matter—your days are now numbered. Who cares about anything anymore? Who’s allowed to?

We are useless to the world because people are becoming nothing. What I want you to see is that there’s no way out. If nothing matters because people have decided that numbness is better than life, then all the somethings that have ever been are useless.

If you sense in this a verdict, there is one. I don’t think that people should settle for these dead lives in which they’re becoming nothings and nobodies. I think it’s sad, but not even tragic, because tragedy teaches us something, but there’s nothing to even learn from nothing.

But I still haven’t explained what I mean by that.

IV. NOTHINGS AND NOBODIES, OR WE’RE ALL SUPPOSED TO BE NOBODY NOW

People now are supposed to be nobody. We discussed this last time, but I want to spend a few moments on it.

We live now in technoslavery and end stage capitalism. Those mean precisely what they sound like. The only thing that matters now is money. Money means survival not just in, but from, a world gone haywire, turned brutal, chaotic, and antagonistic.

The idea now that you should develop yourself, become yourself, the truest and highest self in you, is becoming obsolete, antiquated, a relic of a bygone era. That era was the age of modernity, in which the idea of human possibility was the central concern.

Some will object, and point to self-help. But that isn’t what I mean at all. I mean the precise opposite. Amazon will recommend a million junky self-help books. But you can’t help “yourself” out of system failure and civilizational calamity. These are collective failures, plights, and traps.

We’re all supposed to be nobody now, and what I mean by that begins with the example above. You will never be “recommended” anything that genuinely elevates and expands your human potential. Sophocles, Aristotle, Dante, de Beauvoir, Fromm, doesn’t matter, the list of the great minds and spirits in human history is a long one. The point is that this is how we become ourselves. By communing with history in this most beautiful of ways. We read, watch, think, try, fail, and in this way, and only in this way, we grow.

Who are we supposed to be now? Nobodies, doing, enacting, absorbed in, nothings. We’re supposed to be addicts to the numbing agents crackling through the air around us like lightning. They bombard us at light speed. Think of how much time people spend scrolling, clicking, swiping. What are they building, creating, enacting? Nothing. None of it adds up to anything. Who are they becoming? Nobody.

Every last aspect of human interaction is now controlled in this way. Whom we date, marry, fuck, admire, want to be. But the hidden revelation in all this is a terrible secret. We are not to be ourselves anymore.

So are we truly, fully alive in any of this?

V. THE NOTHING PEOPLE

People are becoming clones like this. If everybody is supposed to be nobody, then we are all the same in our nothingness.

And this is several steps beyond what the last great wave of social thinkers imagined. Durkheim famously pioneered the notion of “anomie,” or the numbness of isolation in Darwinian, capitalist societies. Baudrillard took it one step further, with the idea of “simulacra,” or simulations of reality. We are now on a plane beyond all those. Even those great minds didn’t imagine a world where people becoming nobody because they spend their lives in, on, with, for nothing.

Let me make that much more concrete. If the systems and algorithms which we’re now enslaved to wanted us to become scientists, they’d recommend us scientific journal articles and books. If they wanted us to become poets, they’d point us to the works of Basho and Rilke and Dante. If they wanted us to become just fuller human beings, they’d tell us to read Aristotle and Sophocles and know why Socrates drank the hemlock and spend a few moments with Sartre and Brecht.

But of course, they will never do any of that. Not just because it’s not profitable—this isn’t a critical analysis of capitalism, I’ve wasted too much of my life on that—but for a deeper reason. To be a fuller human being is to be emancipated from bondage. And the systems which now fail us are making one last desperate gambit: if they can’t serve us, then they will at least reduce us to nothing, and make nobodies of us.

VI. WHY REBELLION IS IMPOSSIBLE NOW

Why do our systems want us to nobodies, wasting our lives on nothings? When you are dying—and I spent many years like this, so trust me, LOL—what you’ll regret isn’t “God, I wish I’d scrolled more TikTok videos,” it’s that you didn’t commune with humankind’s great minds, and make the most of your life that way, which is the only way.

Our systems want us to be nobodies wasting our lives on nothings for a very simple reason. Nobodies who are nothing can never rebel. They can never change anything, because to change a thing requires being somebody who cares about somethings. If you’re nobody who cares about nothing, you have no capability to rebel, no will, no mind, no spirit, no desire, because, of course, you are made of nothing. What the fuck are you rebelling against when your entire life is click, swipe, scroll? There’s nothing to rebel against, when you’ve decided nothing, anyways.

I spent my life as a consummate rebel. I made my mark by being a rebel intellectually. I challenged economics and finance and social thinking and made my own paradigms and wrote my books. And of course I learned the hard way that there’s a price to be paid for rebellion. It’s fun when you’re young, but what do you do when you’re not? So now I wonder about it all. But…I’m proud of myself.

I wasted my life, but at least I wasted it in my own way. For something. And that way, at least I became the self in me that realized my possibilities.

There are many ways to waste your life. I’m useless now, and that’s because the world thinks of people like you and me as pointless, having been taught that the only thing worth aspiring to is Having All The Money, and the only people worth admiring are crackpots and lunatics and billionaires and rapists and so forth. Me? I’m fucking proud of having wasted my life on better things than that, even if the world decided they didn’t matter.

Because at least I didn’t squander it.

Squandering a life’s different from wasting it. It would have meant: shrugging, and throwing my days away. I travelled the world and fought my battles and wear my scars. My heart is shattered, it’s true. But that is not at all squandering a life. Wasting a life, like I did is: I realized my possibilities, only to find out that they didn’t matter to a world numb in its own becoming-nothing. Squandering it is: motherfucker, I never even tried, and just held my wrists out for the fetters.

VII. IF YOU HIDE FROM LIFE, YOU DIE

Nobodies wasting their lives on nothings can never rebel. It’s as impossible for them as asking a stone to become a river. And that is why we are where we are. We live in an age which is striking not just because civilization is crumbling around us, but because there is the total absence of any form of rebellion against it.

The French guillotined the nobility which starved them. In our age, the guillotine are the jagged pieces of the shattered reflections of us. They slit our wrists. Are you really going to waste your life on a million people who’ve never read a book? This is what people do now, and call it life, but it isn’t.

The moral code of this age is: better you than me, you piece of shit. At least as a nobody becoming nothing I can hide. I’m invisible. This way, they can’t take anything from me. Wrong. This way, they’ve already taken everything from you.

Rebellion is: emancipation towards life, liberation from death. Nobodies becoming nothing are hiding from life itself in this way. The absence of rebellion matters so much for precisely this reason. It’s become something impossible to imagine, conceptualize, much less enact or spark, because we’re all busy becoming techno-clones. And so rebellion’s now as alien to this age of collapse as science was to the Dark Ages. But as it becomes nothing, too, we’ve died anyways. If you hide from life, you die. This is how we’ve forgotten what it is to live fully, to be alive. And in that, the project of civilization is crumbling around us.

I don’t mean to insult those of you who do resist all this deadness. Far from it. I salute you and I’m proud of you. But the impossibility of revolution is perhaps the defining feature of this age. And that is precisely because people would rather be nobodies trapped in nothings than build, create, spark, ignite, tend to, nourish, nurture, fight for, imagine, dream of…

somethings.

VIII. THE EXISTENTIAL CHOICE WE FACE IN THE 21st CENTURY

What’s the point I’m trying to make? Am I just hectoring you? Is this some kind of confession? Not at all. I want you to understand where we are.

The world is now dividing into two. This division is often put into simplistic terms: the rich and the poor, Main St and Wall St, etcetera. None of these will really help you think clearly. The cleavage in the world now is between nobodies enslaved by nothings, and somebodies who still care about somethings.

I’m going to outline three rules.

One. If you’re trapped in the nobody becoming nothing spiral, break it. Recognize it. Listen to your gut.

Two. That emphatically doesn’t just mean a digital detox or what have you. It means choosing a something to care about. Doesn’t matter what it is. Here are mine, music, science, art, money. And yes, money can and should be one.

Three. You’re going to fail at this and that’s totally cool. You can’t fail at being a nobody becoming a nothing. There’s nothing to fail at. This is why people wear the shackles, by the way, because it’s easier that way. The truth? It goes like this. It’s OK to be a useless person in a world that values nothing. It’s noble and brave and wise, in fact. Better that than the alternative, which is becoming a techno-clone, algorithm object 183738182, a nobody person.

You can’t make somethings out of nothings. This is the problem we face as a civilization. If people accept being nobodies becoming nothing, then all is lost. The future depends critically on those of us who reject this choice, and rebel against it.

We aren’t just children of the algorithm and slaves to the model. We’re children of the stars and time. In and through each us unfurls the golden thread of a million million midnights, where lovers whispered and the slumbering dreamt. Of a world worth living in. Not just bondage and futility and emptiness. This is the endeavor of civilization.

This is the fundamental existential choice before us in this age. Who will we be? Nobody people, who are disappearing into nothing? Or those who rebel against this emptiness, this numbness, the all-encompassing nothingness, for somethings, and that way, become fully life again?

The future of everything depends on this choice. Nobodies who only care about nothings is what we are being reduced to. But tomorrow can only come from those of us who, struggling for the beauty of somethings, still ache to be fully alive, not just technoclones made of algorithmic emptiness. I’m going to be the world’s first trillionaire, but I’ve never read a book! Fucking kill me with this brain-dead bullshit.

Everything is made of somethings, not nothings.

Love,

Umair (and Snowy!)

I. THE GOLDEN THREAD UNRAVELLING IN YOUR HANDS…

I’m reluctant to write what I see happening next. The weight on me is too heavy. The pressure feels oceanic. I don’t want to share these thoughts, don’t want, don’t want to…

But there are times when you and I should speak frankly, like old friends. I know that everyone these days wants to know what the future holds. And of course, it’s the job of figures like me to understand it.

Come and sit around the fire with me. We’re going to speak of time and dust. Of the millennia gone by, and the years and decades to come.

I place the golden thread of civilization in your hands. And now you must hold it close. Before it turns to dust.

II. …IS HOW CIVILIZATIONS COLLAPSE

The future will be made of nothing.

When people ask about the future, they don’t understand, see, know how to glimpse, the present. So let us understand where we are now.

Our civilization is beginning to crumble.

America is collapsing. Fascists and theocrats have begun to battle over the world’s resources, choking off its oil supply. Water, air, land, minerals, all these will inevitably be next. There is no paradigm left to follow, and in the absence of one—for geopolitical order, aka democracy, for the global economy, aka trade, for politics, for human relationships, for prosperity—the result will be what it always is. Chaos and implosion. A long spiral into conflict, in which the most aggressive, violent, and brutish will sneer at…

At what? What are they already sneering at? Jeering at? Leering at? The project of human civilization.

Civilization is a set of somethings. Let us call it that to make it crystal clear and put in plain English what it really is. Here, I mean existential somethings. Let’s make that simple, too. Somethings that allow us to exist. As more than just “animals,” and I put that in quotes because animals are far more civilized than human beings in their most primal form. The lions are not out there causing climate change or preaching fascism, after all.

So. Civilization is a set of somethings. What are they? Let’s make a short list. Science. Art. Literature. Knowledge. Democracy. History. Truth. Consent and consensus, peace, the rule of law, nonviolence.

In all these, through all these, we find a sense of equanimity in life. We forge a home in existence. If you doubt me, go ahead and imagine existing without them. What would life feel like? Be? And of course the sense of panic, doom, and despair now beginning to overwhelm us as societies and as a world—they’re exactly what it feels like to no longer have a home in existence, a safe place, a Haven in my language, in Heidegger’s terms, a dwelling place in being itself.

Please understand me. Your future is going to depend on it. Do you want one? Or do you want to throw your life away like so many people around us right now?

The golden thread unravelling in your hands (and mine) is how civilizations collapse.

III. THE FUTURE IS MADE OF NOTHING(S)

Civilization is a set of somethings. When civilizations begin to crumble, as ours is, those somethings become nothings.

Not instantly or overnight. They shatter, erode, disintegrate, unravel, deteriorate, degenerate, atrophy. There are many forms and ways of becoming nothing. But the point I want you to understand, if you really want to see into the future, is this.

The future is already crystal clear.

It is made of nothing.

Let’s take a hard look at the world around us. What does science says we should be doing? Something, anything, about our existential threats, from inequality to illiteracy to insecurity to climate change. We should have a Marshall Plan for all that, at a worldwide scale, to put it mildly. Literature, history, art—all tell us the same thing, unless somehow you missed the point of tragedy. And here we are, doing…

Nothing.

So. It’s very easy to see that in the future, the set of something which define a civilization, in this case, ours, become nothing.

Let’s take another example to make the point clearer, though. Imagine, I don’t know, a more ancient civilization. It was agricultural, and depended on irrigation. The rains were uncertain, and so its priests demanded human sacrifices to placate the gods. They created elaborate calendars to match the uncertainty of the harvest to the bloodlust of the gods. Some will know exactly which ancient civilization I speak of, but it doesn’t matter. The point is that this civilization had its own somethings, too. Crude science, knowledge, religion, technology. And as it fell, all of that became nothing.

Now think about our civilization. Please. Think. I don’t mean: regurgitate what the New York Times or Atlantic are telling you to believe. Just think for yourself. What is left of science in five decades, when today, nobody cares about it in any whatsoever to the point that it makes zero impact on our priorities as a world? How about art? What about knowledge? And so on.

But we are about to explore these domains, and I will begin the one that will frighten many of you the most.

IV. THE FUTURE OF THE ECONOMY

What’s the future of the economy? Again, I’m hesitant to share it with you. But I’ll tell you if you want to know, because time is short already.

The future is made of economic nothings.

What happens in very short order? AI eviscerates what’s left of “jobs.” Jobs become nothing. Don’t imagine that “the trades” will be immune, because in a few years, humanoid robots will be doing physical labor, too. So: the labor market goes from a something to a nothing. It becomes an absence. It ceases to exist.

Please see with me clearly. The way this issue is framed is still cloaked in haze. Pundits speak of 30% or 50% job losses. This is a poor way to understand what happens. In actuality, the labor market ceases to function as one. It becomes something else. It is not a marketplace anymore in any sense whatsoever. In this case, it becomes nothing.

What happens as a consequence of that? People don’t have incomes anymore. As they’re starved of incomes, their wealth ceases to exist, too. As their wealth ceases to exist, the fiscal balance of nations deteriorates swiftly. And in the end, money becomes nothing, too.

In this case, it becomes nothing and everything at once, which is perfectly acceptable in the higher mathematics we’re employing now. The tiny handful of people left with—literally—all the money in “the economy” emerge as its new kings and emperors and dukes. That is why they are trying so desperately to pile up as much of it as they can now, and soon enough, they will try to turn it into hard assets, land, minerals, slaves, and so on.

So: the economy becomes nothing. We can scarcely describe what will be left as “an economy” in the sense we use the word now. What do we call social-scale organizations where half of formerly working age people will never have work, can earn money, have lost all the wealth they might have inherited, and in which nations have no resources even with which to protect or shield them? Is any of that “an economy”? Maybe in some feudal sense of the term, but not really even in that one, because even in those constructs, people were employed, if only as servants and soldiers.

What do we do as economies become nothing? Nothing, because there is nothing to do. That is why this sense of panic is breaking out. There is nothing you can do about something becoming nothing. That’s like saying that you can fight a tsunami with water. It can’t be done. The physics don’t allow it.

Now. What can be done, at least between you and me, before all this happens, or accelerates to a more severe degree, of course, is to make as much money as we can, which is why I started teaching how to do just that.

Sure, there are those who’ll already say things like “AI will create more jobs than it’ll destroy!” LOL. I suggest you chuckle at that and ask them: where? How? Like what, exactly? And even if it does, who’s going to pay for them? With what?

V. THE FUTURE OF SOCIETY AND CULTURE

What happens as economies become nothing? What’s already happening? One of the great accomplishments of civilization was to value knowledge. Knowledge was something to aspire to, invest in, accumulate, and be rewarded for.

But that’s all breaking down now. Knowledge is something of a liability now. Young people are told college is a poor investment. As citizens, it’s something to scorn. As people, it avails us little. Having too much of it is the mark of being a “liberal elite” or maybe something more sinister.

So now let’s think about the future of people, culture, and society. Already, we can see that another crucial civilizational something—knowledge—is on its way to becoming nothing. That’s been happening for a while. People stopped reading books quite some time ago. What do they do now instead?

They…inhabit these strange cultural spaces. Netflix and TikTok. Spaces where they…scroll…endlessly. What are they looking for?

They are looking for nothing. The point of our culture now is to numb us. It is to reduce our intellects and spirits and emotion to zero, to an absence, to nothing. We breathe a sigh of relief when we find some dumb shit Netflix show we can zone out to for ten whole episodes—ten hours of a silent slow suicide, thank you, I can become nothing for a while.

Now. This is something else, and something new. Lowbrow culture has always existed, but its point hasn’t been to turn people into nothing. In his day, Shakespeare’s plays were famously low culture—but they made people laugh, yell, scream, cry. The TV wasteland in its golden age wasn’t about becoming nothing—it was “mindless entertainment,” sure, but the point was to be entertained, by certain social myths, amused, titillated, gripped, what have you.

People are becoming nothing before our very eyes. That is what they are encouraged to be. It is what our culture now exists for, and all it exists for. If I want to find a genuinely life-changing movie, for example, by Antonioni or Truffaut or whomever, doesn’t matter, I can never find one of those on Netflix or Amazon. Let alone, LOL, TikTok. Amazon isn’t going to ever recommend you read Sophocles, it’ll tell you to read some junky bestseller a billion times over again. It is as if the heights of human culture never existed at all. They didn’t just disappear—they never were. And so course people are becoming nothing.

VI. THE FUTURE OF PEOPLE AND RELATIONSHIPS

People are becoming nothing because there is nobody left to be.

Who can I be now? Who should I be now? What’s the point of becoming somebody, anybody, especially, yourself, let alone the highest and truest form of yourself? Should you bother becoming, I don’t know, a doctor-scientist or a great poet or artist in an age where the only that matters is if you become one of five psychotic billionaires who have all the money left in the world?Should you be a mother or a father when your kids will only struggle in strife and despair? Should you be a well-rounded human being, in a time where that’s the most reckless and foolish thing of all?

People are wrestling with these questions, and increasingly, their answer is the same. It’s a chilling one. It’s not worth it. Being somebody, anybody, me, myself, the best in me, etcetera. They are being who they are supposed to be now, according to the algorithm and the model, the fascist and the authoritarian, the crackpot and the fool. Nobody.

And so people are becoming clones, in a sense. Everybody is nobody, because nobody is supposed to be anybody anymore. There is nobody left to be, and that is by design, in a world where only five people can be anybody at all, have any possibility, contain any value. Clones don’t need to have relationships. What would be the point?

One plus one equals zero in this mathematics of nothing. Like any higher mathematics, it contains paradoxes. One plus one also equals infinity, if you’re the one who controls the algorithm and the model—infinite wealth. The algorithm and the model are now the only vessels or containers of possibility left. People are not. They are worthless now, and they’re beginning to sense it, hence, the spreading feeling of panic and ruin.

How does zero add up to infinity? What kind of insane machine performs that calculation?

VII. THE NOTHINGNESS MACHINE

I read a headline yesterday. It said: “Next Einstein, 14 Years old, Hired by Jeff Bezos.” Perhaps you see my point. Einstein probably would have vomited laughing all over himself. He worked at the post office when he made his greatest breakthroughs. There, he didn’t have to pretend that the only thing left to be was a servant.

People are choosing to become nothing because there’s nobody left to be. Take a moment to understand this. It’s a rational choice, in a sense, because the future is made of nothing. And if the future is made of nothing, what’s the point of trying to be something or someone in it? Isn’t that sort of like trying to, I don’t know, use an airplane to take off from the bottom of an ocean?

The next Einstein is out there. So is the next Sophocles, the next Galileo, the next…but in a world where something is becoming nothing, what chance will they have?

The tragedy before us is one of possibility turned to ashes.

What was once a civilization now is just a Nothingness Machine. It takes somethings, and turns them into nothings. Science, art, literature, economies, people, a planet. It turns everything into nothing.

And the only point of human existence left, we’re told, is to get rich by becoming skilled in using the Nothingness Machine to cash out a jackpot every time the wheel is spun.

I feel a sense of grief about that. Not because it’s so corrupt and disgusting and awful. But because it’s true. Only a few things matter now, and chief among them is money.

VII. THE TASK OF CIVILIZED PEOPLE IN TIMES LIKE THESE

So. The future is made of nothing. What was a civilization is now simply a set of technologies, machines, for turning somethings, science, democracy, art, truth, reason, peace, consent, life, into nothings, and “making money” along the way.

There are those who’ll misread this as nihilism. It’s the precise opposite. A reminder of the value of humanism, in all the ways above, economic, social, cultural, individual, collective. A warning against the consequences of the Nothingness Machine. (And it’s a hint to make as much money as you can now, before collapse hardens into its most severe forms, too.)

Where does that leave us? At least those of us who abjure all this is as repellent and horrific and nightmarish?

It leaves us with the obligation to create and tend to and nourish and nurture and mend and heal and cherish and treasure and defend and replenish somethings. Newer and better somethings, if we’re lucky. Now we are going to have to take the somethings we care most about, and safeguard them, to whatever extent we can. For some of us, that’ll be science, for others, democracy, for others, their community. For some, art, for some, knowledge. And so on.

Now we are guardians and caretakers of an extinct species.

Us.

The people history will say were once known, for just a brief moment, as having had a beautiful, peaceful, and prosperous civilization.

Hey, motherfuckers, I cry back to history, from the end of this futile page. At least there were those of us who tried. That’s more than I can say for the fascists, the flunkies, and the fools.

Love,

Umair (and Snowy!)

I. OUR MODELS OF LIFE ARE NOW BROKEN

We’re not living in the world we once were anymore. All the old models and pathways have broken down around us. Ladders have become snakes and chutes. The old rules—work hard, get ahead, have a nice, stable life—will only get you burned.

The world we’re living in now is a destabilized one. What that means in practice is that it requires a very different approach to living in it. In a stable world, you can do what’s expected of you, and the results will be predictable. In this one, though, that equation’s fundamentally and irreparably broken.

Not just for people, by the way. For businesses, institutions, and even countries. We all have to renegotiate our relationship with the world. Only not many of us are doing it.

I’m going to teach you how.

II. LIVING IN AN UNSTABLE WORLD IS ABOUT TAKING RISKS

Living in an unstable world is about taking risks. It couldn’t be more different from living in a stable world. There, institutions took risks on people’s behalf. Now, as they crumble, they’re failing at that task. People end up weighed down by risks shifted onto them. And as that happens, people end up paralyzed.

When I look around, I see a kind of tsunami of paralysis. People are afraid, bewildered, and lost. They don’t know what to do anymore. That’s understandable. Here’s the secret.

Taking risks. Now. Let me shade it in so that you understand it. It isn’t any of the following: gambling, speculation, stepping off the nearest cliff, impulsivity, grandiosity, narcissism, etcetera.

Risk is taking a chance, an informed one, on possibility.

III. THE (DYING) ART OF HUMAN POSSIBILITY

You are human possibility. That is what you are, in essence.

And the reason that people feel so glum, upset, angry, depressed, and stressed these days is that their possibilities are constantly thwarted. Thwarted is a word with a distinct meaning: I was expecting a certain set of results, but I was frustrated. Blocked. Not just: they came undone, randomly. But I met an insurmountable obstacle, a form of active resistance.

When you’re climbing a mountain, you might not succeed for all kinds of reasons. You didn’t have the strength, you ran out of supplies, there was an emergency back home. But to be thwarted implies an active obstacle. Not just the mountain itself, but maybe the wind, snow, rain, rocks. Something stood in your way that turned all your plans to dust.

People’s human possibility is being thwarted. You can see that now in every aspect of life. Starting families. Career progression. Choosing where to live. Buying homes. Creating and building wealth. Thwarted, thwarted, thwarted. That doesn’t always mean: none of it happens, but it does mean: you only got so far up the mountain.

IV. WHAT’S THWARTING US

So: we are now living in a world which thwarts our possibilities. What is the active obstacle doing that, if it isn’t the mountain itself. In this analogy, the mountain is just life. But the forces thwarting us aren’t passive.

They are the institutions and systems failing around us. Think of all the young people who were told to study computer science, so they’d have stable, well-paid technology careers—LOL, poor things. Or think of all the ways that people’s financial advisors are letting them down. Or how it’s become unaffordable for younger people to buy homes—the list is a long, long one.

Our failing institutions are thwarting us. And so we cannot merely rely on them anymore. That might seem opaque, so let me clarify it.

How did we used to rely on our institutions? Institutions are: economies, companies, banks, governments, social systems, etcetera. And we used to rely on them in a very simple way. We were told there was a “map” to use to climb the mountain of life, and along the way, institutions would become our levers and ropes and paths.

But now, they lead us nowhere, really, except the abyss. Does that make a little more sense? Let me make it even clearer. To rely on failing institutions means that you’re using yesterday’s mental map. It looks like this. Education, job, career, family, wealth, retirement, etcetera.

All of that’s now broken down. Not just some of it. Think of how relationships between men and women themselves are now the subject of intense disappointment. Or think of how friendship itself is breaking down. So in all these ways, our old “maps” of life, which became our mental models of it, are now leading us in circles.

V. ORIENTING YOURSELF TOWARDS FULFILLMENT (AGAIN)

We aren’t climbing the mountain anymore. We’re tumbling off it. That means: increasingly, we’re not living fulfilling lives. So much so, that if you ask young people, they’ll look at you sardonically. Fulfillment? What are you thinking? I’m just trying to survive, and I can’t even figure out how to do that.

But fulfillment remains the question of a lifetime. It isn’t just this wretched thing called survival mode, unless you want to end up feeling you’ve barely lived at all.

People now have two choices before them, two roads, to very different destinations. Employ the old mental map, and live a stunted life, in which your possibilities are thwarted, and you’re never fulfilled. Or…aim for fulfillment still, which just means: I realized my possibilities. I made them real.

None of us do all of that. We all fail, and that’s necessary. I often tell you how I rose to the top, made a fortune, lost it all, and had to find my way back. This is part of realization, too. No journey is ever straight to the summit in life—not one. Here, the mountain analogy fails, because we’re never just climbing a mountain.

Now you must orient yourself again. Because the world has destabilized, shifted under our feet, and so the old maps, now broken, don’t lead anywhere much anymore.

VI. THE TWO ROADS BEFORE YOU NOW

I want you to see the two roads clearly.

Settling. We used to call this road “mediocrity.” Today, it’s something more agonized, a life of bewilderment, loss, and confusion. In a world spinning out of control, you never figure out who you are, your place in it, much less how to master it.

Fulfillment. You realize your higher possibilities, and you accept, too, that failing miserably is part of the struggle, the fun, the absurdity, the beauty. In, through, all that, not despite it, you genuinely become a person, in the most mature form, capable of love, strength, courage, wisdom.

Every day, every action, every word, thought, image—you are making a choice. Orient yourself. And the feeling of being lost and confused and bewildered will begin to recede. I promise. Close your eyes. Let it happen.

Now that I’ve laid out the roads for you, we’re going to redesign the map.

VII. HOW TO TAKE CONTROL OF YOUR LIFE

To lead a fulfilled life now, you can’t just live in the old world anymore. We all know this, on some level, but very, very few of us act like it. And this is where we must take risks.

How do you take risks? What the hell is Umair talking about? Why won’t he just give me the secret already? Alright, here it is.

Let’s break life down into just three elements. There are more, and you can cut it finer, but for now, we’ll keep it simple. Financial, relational, and professional.

In all these domains, people are not taking enough risks to lead fulfilling lives.

Let’s begin with finance. Most people leave it up to their financial advisors, who do a pretty mediocre job for them. They take few risks, and the ones they do are taken badly, too. Just leave your money in the stock market! Don’t worry, everything will be fine! Come now, I’ve already taught you how to do better than all this (just read the archives.)

Now let’s talk about professional life. Over the next decade, the labor market will disintegrate. Jobs will no longer exist, much less careers. What will be left is an “unbundled” set of markets, and people will compete for tasks and project and so forth—largely because of the impact of AI, and then humanoid robots.

Here, too, people aren’t taking enough risk. I have many, many friends who’ve done well, and have nice lives being managers in corporations. They also know they’re one tiny step away from not just being fired, but from their entire professional lives going up in smoke, because AI will do it better, faster, and cheaper. They should be taking risks now. Not waiting until then. Whether it’s starting their own businesses, consultancies, projects, developing not just new skills, but new roles and ideas for positions (because that’s what corporations will be looking for, they’re as confused as the rest of us.)

Now let’s talk about relationships. People aren’t taking enough risk here, either. It’s comfortable and convenient to say, if you’re young, I don’t want to be in a relationship. It’s fashionable and trendy. It’s also a cop out. Believe me when I tell you that when you’re middle aged, you’re going to wonder where all the time went, and the loneliness will hit you like an icepick to the soul. Contemplating the last twenty or thirty years of your life alone isn’t a pleasant prospect. Nobody should be giving up on their lives like this, because of course, being loved and loving is the most fundamental human need of all, and we’re lying about that to ourselves, in this age where lying become’s a way of life.

Let’s talk a little bit more about relationships. I know plenty of men who are baffled, dispirited, and bewildered about how to even approach relationships, women, love. But they’re not taking enough risk, and I don’t mean: approaching women in bars. I mean being brave enough to learn about it all, try things out, develop themselves. I’m the guy that turns my friends lives’ around, and I have to do it dragging them kicking and screaming. Just getting my newly divorced friend to stop wearing goddamned nylon puffer vests was like asking him to step foot on the beaches of Normandy. See what I mean by taking risk?

I could go on, but perhaps you get my drift a little bit. And I know my examples are a little bit…trivial, maybe. Smarmy, in some ways. But I want you to take the bull by the horns. Not sit around debating it and wallowing in it, which is where culture is these days, an endless cycle of bitching about how terrible everything is, opting out of it, being fatalistic, and then wondering: why don’t things ever get better?

VIII. MY MAP IS NOT A MAP

The new map I’ve given you says something like this. Break life down into its fundamental components. Examine yours closely. And my bet is that you’ll see that you’re not taking risks. This is what the feeling of being paralyzed and confused means.

The new map says: in every element of life, take more risks. Again, risk doesn’t mean “do something stupid, and hope for the best.” It means something much deeper, and more beautiful.

Here are my possibilities. I am going to try and realize them. I am going to try to build wealth, I am going to design my career and profession and livelihood, I am going to have these kinds of relationships, or my existing relationships will develop more like this.

Now you’re beginning to take control.

In this broken, unravelling world, one thing is still yours. Your life.

I know that many people feel trapped. There are days when even I do, and as my mother says to me, sometimes, “you’ve lived life your way!” We’re thwarted. That much is undeniable. But that does not mean we are trapped.

Now we aren’t just climbing the same old mountain the same way anymore. We are making different choices. Maybe we’re saying: I’m going to go explore the canyons instead. I’m going to see where the river ends at the sea. I’m going to climb that mountain, all the way over there.

My map is not a map at all. It’s a way for you to create your own.

Love,

Umair (and Snowy)

I. HOW IT HAPPENS

Here’s how it happens.

In March, inflation spiked, thanks to Trump’s ill-fated war on Iran. Gas prices jumped over 20%. You’re already feeling the pain at the pump. Already it’s expected to hit 3.3% this year.

Much worse is to come, because higher gas prices mean higher prices for everything, since our civilization is still dependent on fossil fuels for all its basics, from agriculture to aviation to construction.

Meanwhile, wages rose just 0.8% for the first three months of the year. That’s about 3.2% annually, if they don’t continue slowing, which they likely will, because the labor market’s frozen.

Put those two numbers together. 3.3% inflation, and that’s right now. 3.2% wage growth. See what’s happening? In real terms, people’s incomes are now shrinking.

II. REAL INCOMES ARE NOW SHRINKING

The US stock market is an exquisitely tuned machine, and I don’t mean that in a good way. All that matters to it is this quarter’s numbers.

The US economy is an exquisitely tuned machine, and I don’t mean that in a good way, either. It depends critically on consumption, rising, forever.

Those two Magic Numbers are linked. If consumption rises, the stock market keeps continuing its gravity defying rise.

But if it doesn’t? Then all hell tends to break loose. The US stock market is brutal, punishing, and merciless. Missing the numbers led, recently, to Nike shares dropping 15% in a single day, for example.

Now imagine what’s going to happen as consumption hits a wall.

Can people keep on spending…forever? At the astronomical rates Americans do? Cross the border into Canada, and consumption’s a fraction of what it is in America. Americans like to consume, and that’s OK. If they can afford it.

But when real incomes begin to shrink, they can’t.

III. THE X-SHAPED ECONOMY

Are you beginning to see where this is going? These two trend lines are crossing in fatal ways. Prices rising and incomes not keeping pace. It’s a topic of everyday discussion of course, called the “affordability crisis.”

But at some point, this becomes the greatest stock market crash in history. If and when American consumption finally hits a wall, and Americans pull back—because all that disposable income they used to have is being eaten by inflation, higher prices for gas, food, etcetera, then…bang. Watch out below.

To put that another way, the stock market right now is valuing the American economy as if it could take another hit like Covid, and just keep on trucking. Can it? That seems to me to be a pipe dream.

Imagine that gas prices continue to rise for the next three months. What happens then?

You could call all this the X-shaped economy, if you like. It’s as fatal as it sounds.

IV. HOW THE NEXT CRASH HAPPENS

What happens then looks like this. The next quarter’s earnings for American corporations flatline. They “miss expectations.” There goes the stock market.

Right now, interestingly, earnings for corporations are rising. That’s because despite it all, the financial pressure and strain they’re under, American households keep spending. But a new wave of inflation triggered by the greatest energy crisis in modern history will kill that like Hannibal Lecter.

Let’s try now connecting those dots in another way.

The greatest energy crisis in modern history is probably going to cause the greatest stock market crash in modern history, too.

At least if things continue this way. We’re discussing risk here. Not certainties. Right now, what you should be aware of is that the risk of all the above is severe.

V. MANIAS, FRENZIES, DELUSIONS, AND BRITTLE SYSTEMS

Nearly every wise financial mind agrees that the American stock market is seriously overvalued right now. From Warren Buffett onwards. They’re all watching what’s becoming a mania for dip buying and meme-stock frenzies and raising an eyebrow. They’ve been there before.

There’s a reason they’re warning you, and so am I.

We should never, ever see stock markets doing what they’re doing now, which is ignoring every single kind of risk there is. It’s almost comical by now how much and how many risks the markets have decided just don’t matter. Macroeconomic risk, energy risk, inflationary risk, political risk, climate risk—it’s a long list.

Risk builds up in systems. Until they snap. Stock markets are brittle systems. They are poised perpetually on the edge.

And in moments like these, all it takes is a match.

VI. THE BIG PICTURE

That’s all only the small picture, by the way. Let’s imagine that the Strait of Hormuz reopens tomorrow, and the oil begins to flow. Does that change the calculus above?

Only if you imagine that during the rest of Trump’s term, there isn’t going to be a stock market crash. Only if you imagine that this reality-defying dance can go on and on. Only if you imagine that Americans can keep spending at the furious rates they have been, as if the “affordability crisis” can just keep getting worse and worse, and money will magically appear for them at ever growing rates, permanently.

None of that seems to sound anything like remotely reasonable to me.

Or you could consider the simple fact that every new cycle produces a crash, and we have yet to have one in this particular wave of AI, cloud computing, the latest gewgaws “tech” is throwing at us.

Then there’s the invisible myth that America can have the foundations of prosperity ripped away—science, truth, knowledge, education, democracy—and continue to generate record-breaking wealth. How many wealthy fascist societies has the world seen? That’s a topic for another post, though: the fatal macroeconomics of American collapse.

So what should you do about it? This isn’t financial advice. What you should understand about all this is that the typical finance industry doesn’t ever discuss this stuff because it’s sort of like McDonald’s telling you what’s really in chicken McNuggets. You should think it over for yourself and make some choices, about your own wealth and life.

PS By the way, this doesn’t mean I’m saying run for the hills, or that I’m a “perma-bear,” subscribers will know precisely my position on global stocks and it’s hardly a bearish one. I’m not a bull and I’m not a bear, those are childish terms, I just believe in making money. Subscribers, you’ll have my latest portfolio soon.

Love,

Umair (and Snowy)

I. TIMES AS TERRIBLE AS THESE

I find myself wondering these days. What it means to be a man. To be a person. In times as terrible as these.

I spent the day in a lovely sunlit square today. Children played and families gathered. Mothers laughed and fathers smiled. And the thought of the world we live in now was kept distant, as it should be, from the little ones.

In the times we live in, a civilization itself is dying before our very eyes. But to put it just that way is far too gentle, meaningless. Our eyes have been sewn shut, so we barely even see the death of a thing greater than us. Our hands break and shatter something, a pillar, a foundation, and we laugh in glee. All this is what technology, hopelessness, predatory capitalism does to us.

After the square, I went to a cafe. Young people sat there on laptops, staring into their screens. The cafe was full of posters and paraphernalia about a better world. Can you change a world—scratch that. The world has changed. But in the wrong ways, all of them.

II. THE RUINS OF A THING ONCE CALLED A WORLD

It was a pleasant day of thinking. A perfect spring day. We drove to the cliffs, and looked out at the ocean. I pulled my lovely wife close. How beautiful, she said. An old couple sat beside us, having lunch. Cute dog, the man said. I smiled.

And I wondered what it meant to be a man, to be a person, in times like these. The sea was silent. The sun glimmered on the waves, as it had a million days just like this one. I never stop wondering, these days.

We are standing now in the ruins of a thing once called a world. Technology has seduced our children, and made them its slaves. The most ancient and noble project of all, democracy, lies in tatters, unravelled and shredded. The lurid faces of billionaires scarcely look human anymore. The things called our economies are ceasing to function properly. Knowledge, truth, reason, and justice are no longer ideals to aspire to. They are most contemptible things of all.

And I wonder as I stare at the sea, from the cliffs, on a perfect afternoon. Have I wasted my life on these things?

III. DO YOU FEEL AS LONELY AS I DO?

The answer is as obvious to me as it is to you. These things have no place in a world like this anymore. Now the world belongs to the most violent, vicious, stupid, and crude among us. Smash that subscribe button! I’ll sink your supertanker before you sink mine! All your oil, water, land, belongs to me.

And so the question changes. What does it mean to be a person in times as terrible as these? For starters, it means you wasted your fucking life, LOL, on nothings like science, art, beauty, goodness, decency, all of which are liabilities. Of course, “being a person” in this sense I’m equating with the conception that personhood is a thing we develop and become through the exercise of our higher and nobler faculties.

Do you feel as lonely as I do? Do you ache the way I do in your loneliness?

IV. BEING THE PEOPLE WE ARE ISN’T WORKING ANYMORE

After the ocean and the cliffs, we went to the beautiful campus of a great university, lined with old trees. And on a little street, where time had stopped, my lovely wife exclaimed a little sound of delight. A bookstore.

But not just any kind. Not one full of new books, but old ones. The kind that, for people like us, is a wonderland, a treasure trove. Can I-? she asked. I nodded. I’ll watch the dog.

She came back out, half an hour later, smiling and aglow. A bag full of old books clutched in her hand. Look at this one! And this one! Philosophy, poetry, art, more.

How electric. How alive. I savored the moment. Because the truth is that in the dead, dead, dead world we live in now—how many moments are left like this? There, on the little street where time had stopped, we stood and communed with the ghosts of great minds past. They whispered through the linden trees.

Who do you commune with at amazon dot com? LOL, that’s a coarse way to make the point.

What does it mean to be a man, a person, in a world as terrible as this?

Maybe we are just left with the moments where truth and beauty and goodness still flow through us, like a shining thread, to history, civilization, to the things which matter. In that moment, and only in that moment, I felt my loneliness ease. Just…for an instant.

Maybe I just need more books.

Maybe I need to fucking kill myself, and become someone else who can live in a world like this, because this me…can’t. Laugh, fucking laugh, goddamit, because we’re all thinking this these days.

Aren’t we? Don’t lie anymore. Nobody else can hear you. Not even me. Admit it. Being the people we are isn’t working anymore.

V. WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A PERSON IN A WORLD AS TERRIBLE AS THIS

Then it was late at night. I stood on the street, sneaking a cigarette and a late night coffee. Snowy sat down. Dad, aren’t you tired yet? The city spun by me. Lover on a moped laughed as they sped by. Cute dog! I smiled.

And I felt the terrible loneliness again. What does it mean, what does it mean, what does it mean? To be a person in a world like this?

I have been teaching you…just a glimmer…of the dark arts lately. Chief among them, money. Those of you who’ve followed Havens have done well. For those of you who are wondering, Havens is now just going to be here, for simplicity’s sake. In this little essay, we won’t dwell on how to make money. As I often say, that part’s easy. The larger question is what concerns us.

To be a person in a world like this means, for people like us, becoming different. Those of us who are not brutes, idiots, savages, fools, simpletons, and if you want to imagine that I’m being insulting, by all means, do so. I can’t mince words about where I feel the world is now. Should any of us? Do you see intelligence or reason or decency in abundance anywhere much?

The question then becomes: do we become terrible people to exist in a terrible world? How much do we harden ourselves? Inure ourselves? Make ourselves indifferent? When I hug my wife, and look at the ocean, what do I see? Just waves? The supernova of despair and hopelessness sweeping our world? Which is fair? Where do I stop seeing? Do I tear my eyes out like Oedipus? Shall I ask for them to be torn out for me?

I don’t write about what I see anymore. What would be the point? It frightens and confuses people to know what will happen next. And the world is in enough pain. So I muse, gently, as softly as I can, instead, here with you. We’re old friends. But there is a method to my madness. There must always be. I am always trying to guide you.

A world as terrible as this demands that we renegotiate our relationship with it. Not so that we give up on moments of beauty and truth like the above. But so that we can preserve them.

VI. THE DARK ARTS OF PERSONHOOD

The dark arts of being a person exist, too. Above, I used the example of making money. I don’t talk about it too much with you because it changes people. Unless they are very, very careful with it. As do all the dark arts, manipulation, persuasion, exploitation, and so forth.

These are very real. You can see in our world that those who excel at them are the ones who win, and the rest lose, and this is how our world works. It is not just zero sum, but negative sum. That means: we’re all losing. Democracy, justice, peace, knowledge, these are grave losses for all of us. The stock market has forgotten that they’re where prosperity truly come from, and in time, we will make a great deal of money from that too.

But that is a dark art. And like me, you must carefully strike not a balance between the darkness and the light—that is the wrong way to think about it entirely.

You must learn the dark arts in times like these.

But only so that they free you. Never so that they master you, and never so that they enslave anyone else. Those are the conditions. Anything else is what Mephistopheles offered Faust. The darkness, not kept in its place, will consume you. But how is darkness to be contained? Only by, with, through, light. And so in this, knowledge, truth, reason, justice—if you are going to practice the dark arts, as you must learn to, in times like these—must be your guides.

VII. HOW TO BE A PERSON IN A TERRIBLE, TERRIBLE WORLD

We can say something like this. Now the time has come to learn the dark arts of being a person for the sake of self-preservation. You’ve already begun learning from me, for example, how to make money—but for what reason? My wife jokes at me, scornfully, in the way that wives do. You’re teaching people too much. She looks at me like I’m a fool. I laugh.

The point isn’t the money, I say. Then what is? She frowns, and rolls her eyes. My fucking useless intellectual husband.

The point is to teach you how to be a person in a world like this one. Being ignorant of the dark arts of being a person will leave you utterly defenseless in times like these. And that is more than I can stand, personally. I think it’s more than anyone should be able to stand.

In another life, I would have been a teacher. But I only had this one. And in this one, I made my fortune, got ill, lost it all, met my wife, and so on. It’s a long, funny, and interesting stories.

As I stood on the beautiful, leafy campus, I thought something like this. Even if I’d been here, a teacher, what good would all my knowledge have been in a world like this one? Would it have helped anyone orient themselves, navigate these poisonous waters, find their ways through the labyrinths of treachery, hate, folly, and rage we’re abandoned in now? I was skeptical.

First, before this kind of knowledge, which is beautiful and wise, don’t misunderstand me, a person in times like these must have a different kind. An acquaintance with the dark arts. What good is it to teach you in some abstract way what an economy is if you’ll never make any money? What good is the scientific method to you if your life is at the mercy of crackpots who don’t believe in it? I could go on.

VIII. WHO ARE YOU WHEN MIDNIGHT FALLS?

The cliffs and the ocean. The library. The bookstore. It was a wonderful, electrifying day. And at the end of it, I found myself back where I always am.

In the darkness. Swathing me like a newborn. I only feel like myself at night. I only feel right then. One of my favorite songs goes like that.

All my life, I've lived in two worlds. It’s something that’s different about me. I’m at home in a cafe or a bookstore, like I was in a boardroom. But I’m just as much at home at 3AM on a streetcorner, in a city, at night. And life at night is different. It breathes and murmurs differently. Here, we’re not the people we were during the daytime. Our animal selves prowl. Words matters less than looks. Here, when the sun has gone down, the truth of you is revealed.

You can’t go on being the same person you were when midnight is falling all around you.

Being the people we were taught to be isn’t working anymore.

I think the time has come to teach you a little bit about the darkness.

Love,

Umair (and Snowy!)

Look at the world with me. What do you see in people?

I see people feeling like giving up. Surrendering, throwing their hands up, in the teeth of an unravelling world. What’s the point, they seem to be asking, of even trying?

They’re giving up on every aspect of life. On relationships. It’s become a cultural trend by now, women giving up on men, men acting like children. Giving up on careers and professions, as stable jobs become things of a bygone era. Giving up on the future, shrugging while democracy and modernity are ripped away from them. Giving up on freedom itself, human agency, letting the algorithm make all their choices for them.

People are acquiescing, succumbing, capitulating. To the failed systems that have failed them. And they feel like failures. Humiliated, undone, hopeless. But to be failed is not to have failed.

I understand the feeling of wanting to give up. I’ve failed so many times, it’s comical by now. What's the point of trying, when…? When the most vicious and barbaric seem to get ahead to the point of becoming trillionaires? When our systems reward incompetence, irresponsilbity, malfeasance, with eye-popping sums? When life itself seems like a perpetual struggle, and working hard and playing by the rules gets you less than nowhere? What’s the…point?

What’s going on here is this. We talked recently about brutalism. Predatory systems have demoralized and dispirited people to the point that they’re bewildered, lost, and disoriented. Nothing seems to matter anymore, we say, which means: being a good and decent person counts for nothing anymore. And so up has become down. It’s hard to understand what a life is or should be anymore.

Giving up is not the answer. It never is, but I feel like maybe it’s worth saying again. Emphatically.

The answer is to take control of your life. In every aspect of it. And orient yourself again anew. I know that the world is spinning on the wrong axis these days, that everything seems unfair, stupid, cruel, and perverse. It is. And for that very reason, it’s all the more crucial to take control of your life.

Let me make that more concrete. Now you must not just withstand but build. This is the central question of a time like this. Build wealth. Knowledge. Wisdom. Relationships. Love, truth, a sense of purpose. Equanimity. Poise. Choices. Plans. A sense of strength comes from all this. This is what taking control of your life is.

It isn’t anymore just sort of fumbling your way through an age of collapse, and hoping for the best. It isn’t doomscrolling, doomtrading, letting the algorithm decide your life for you, or just sort of choosing the numbing agent du jour. Now you must build, for a future that is more uncertain and risky by the day.

I used to warn you that we’re hitting a turning point in history. And here we are, at it. Shock after shock is now hitting us, like thunderbolts. An energy crisis, which will become stagflation, jobs disappearing, global order breaking down, macroeconomies disintegrating. It’s an endless list. The world has made the wrong choices, and that’s why you feel so disoriented. It’s why so many feel like giving up.

Now take control. I know that the above is a little bit…vague. That’s OK. It’s there to help you get your spark back. That happens deep in the unconscious. It’s not about overthinking it. But feeling it.

When we give up, what do lose? Our spark. That thing that feels tiny, but is the river of love flowing through us. Love for life, for being, for each other, for our brief time here on this earth.

That spark is going from us, and without it, what do we have to give to each other? That is how a world ends up taking, descending into the abyss like ours is.

Take control of your life. Don’t give up. Nurture your spark. Let its fire and heat and light guide you through this darkness. It is all that can. Let it come back to life, and you will too. This is the truest test of times like these.

Love,

Umair (and Snowy)

If you’re perplexed and unsettled by the state of the world these days, here’s a concept for you. Brutalism.

We’re living now in a new age of brutalism. A golden age of it, in fact. It’s the thread now linking geopolitics, politics, finance, economics, and life itself.

And if you’re feeling low, it’s because you’re being brutalized. I’ll come back to that.

I’ve borrowed this term from architecture. If you don’t know it, think of monolithic, monumental, gigantic grey buildings, rendered in stark concrete. Brutalism as an architectural movement was about function over form. And so it is in our world today.

Let’s think about geopolitics. There, America’s imposing its new vision of order on the world. Might makes…if not right…then just “the way it’s going to be.” The Strait of Hormuz is blockaded, twice over. The world is plunging headlong into the greatest energy shock ever. Trump’s playing golf. This is brutalism in its raw essence. I decide, you pay the price. My fist shatters all.

Then there’s economics and finance. Here, too, you can see brutalism at work. The stock market roars through it all. Unthinking, unblinking. What could possibly go wrong? 1929 beckons. Should a stock market be booming through the greatest period of global disintegration in modern history? Never mind. Don’t ask the question. Brutalism is about cheering on the ugly, senselessly.

Brutalism’s coarse, thoughtless, obscene. Can you see it at work online? There, what used to be sort of random conversations with strangers is now an incredibly disturbing place and space. Threats, harassment, deepfakes, god knows what else. Express a relatively mild opinion, and all hell breaks loose. Brutalism at work again, this time, culturally, and here, it’s become a new touchstone of how human interactions should work. To the ugliest, to the loudest, to the most insulting, the most petty yet aggrieved, the eternal victim, belongs all of culture itself.

I can even see brutalism at work in human aesthetics. The faces of the super rich are barely recognizable as human anymore. What are they trying to achieve? What’s all the filler and surgery for? It’s as if they’re building an armor against the very brutalist world they’ve constructed. Maybe I go too far, or maybe you see what I do.

It’s often said that this is a nihilistic age. I don’t think it is, at least not in such a simplistic sense.

We now live in a world where brutalism is the meta-philosophy underpinning and connecting our world. Brutalism is the ur-thing. The Alpha and Omega. It’s what links fascism, predatory capitalism, dehumanization, technology, politics, the breakdown of global order, the way our economies are being reshaped as instruments of the ultra-rich, the weird, chilling sense of righteousness that the most predatory have.

Brutalism’s inscribed into the anti-ethos that’s shattering everything around us, that the strong should triumph over the weak, and what strength is is the very ability to ruthlessly dominate, crush, humiliate, take, and conquer. In this way, brutalism is a form of raw physicalism, like a gut punch.

It brooks no time for niceties like cooperation, consent, reason, truth, meaning, a higher purpose. It is about raw power, expressed in its most elemental, abusive, demented form. I’ll bomb you, starve you, impoverish you, break you, bend you to my will, and it’ll be your fault that you suffered for not obeying sooner.

(If you want, think with me for a moment about some architectural principles of brutalism. “Massing.” Pretty easy to see that one at work in geopolitics, finance, economics—think of the way, even, that institutions have bowed down. You amass power, and use it to crush. “Repetition.” I don’t need to dwell on that, do I? We all know who repeats himself endless on social media. How about “crudity”? Again, pretty obvious to see.)

But brutalism as a philosophy by which to run a country, society, or a world is also the antithesis of the idea of civilization. Modernity. And that now almost quaint word, democracy. And of course a world that’s run on brutalist principles is hardly going to be a stable, prosperous, or happy place.

I think we’re all being brutalized these days, and we don’t quite know it. Know how to say it. We understand it on an intuitive level, we feel it, but it’s another thing to verbalize it and understand it. The point of brutalism is exactly this. To brutalize. There is no purpose to it except power, of precisely this kind.

And unfortunately, too few understand this. The stock market cheering on brutalism will soon enough find that it too is just another structure to be turned to rubble when it’s no longer indispensable. Think of all the institutions that said they’d stand up bravely in times like these—and how many did. The theme is always the same: the wrecking ball of brutalism is aimed at everything and everyone. There is no shelter from it, and certainly not cowardice and appeasement.

Understand where you are. Where we are. Locate yourself in this nightmare. And maybe then you will be able to find your way out. Brutalism is here to stay. The question for countries, societies, and governments is the same as it is for people: what will you be able to build that can withstand it?

Love,

Umair (and Snowy)

Just looking at the stock market these days is enough to make you frown, bite your nails, and scream into the nearest pillow. There it is, violently juddering up and down, like a plane about to…

Meanwhile, have you noticed that everyone’s interested in it, too, your grandma, uncle, long lost friends? Suddenly, everyone wants to be Warren Buffett.

What’s happening looks like this. Here we are, the world wracked by so many multiple levels of crisis it’s almost comical if it weren’t catastrophic. The biggest energy crisis in modern history, the global order unravelling, an era of macroeconomic stagflation, I could go on.

And the stock market just keeps on trying to…hit record highs…just…desperately…cling on for dear life. It’s like a climber trying to keep on scaling a sheer cliff edge, while storms rage, rocks fall, and the snow howls. Because he knows that…watch out below…there’s nothing but gravity between him and the ground.

The market shouldn’t be so torridly trying to hit a new high, in the teeth of an age and a world like this. We all know it’s not just irrational, it’s dangerous. The climber should probably just…gently and slowly back down off the cliff.

So what’s really going on here? People are joining in manias and hysterias. They’re meme-stock bandwagoneering, manically buying every dip, jumping nervously from this position to that one, grabbing for pennies in front of the proverbial bulldozer.

They’re doomtrading.

You know what doomscrolling is. You sit there and sort of let the endless scroll numb you to bits, while your panic slowly builds. Doomtrading’s sort of like that. It’s done out of panic and fear and despair and horror and confusion and nihilism.

Bubbles are built of greed, but this feels different. It doesn’t feel so much like people are motivated by greed, but by its opposite, in financial terms, which is fear. The fear of all of it. What life’s become. How will I retire, take care of my kids, pay off the house, just…have a vaguely normal life? My income isn’t keeping up with expenses.. I’m afraid to admit that I’m getting a little terrified.

The world is going to hell. Nothing makes sense anymore. I worked hard and played by the rules, and meanwhile, complete bastards and morons took over everything and ruined what was left. The ladders became chutes, and one minor misstep turned into falling into the abyss.

What can I do about it all? I have to do something. I know.

I can…doomtrade.

In America, the stock market’s the last functional safety net. And I think that we’re seeing people do something paradoxical and a little perverse. Which is doomtrading out of fear and panic. But is it going to help?

I think we can all sense a crash is on the way. And I think what’s going on here is that people are trading frantically and desperately to try and gain whatever they can before this One Last Thing, the stock market’s decade long golden age, goes to hell too, just like everything else.

It’s not a great idea to doom…anything…scroll…trade…brood…dwell. A lot of people are going to end up burned this way. Investing wisely is about patience, calmness, and a solid thesis grounded in economic fundamentals. But I understand the impulse to doomtrade.

Still, I think it’s wise to grasp: these are the kinds of precise moments that bubbles tend to hit their peaks. When greed turns to fear. Things really are going to hell. They’re going to get much, much worse before they get better. What doomtrading says is what we fall feel: wealth is going to mean a great deal as the world around us unravels. It’s all that’s going to stand between us, and collapse. The sentiment’s correct. But lasting wealth isn’t built—or kept—this way alone.

Love,

Umair (and Snowy)

I. HOW LONG CAN IT LAST?

How long can it last? The world is in crisis. Much of it, caused by America’s President. And yet the US economy is “booming.” Is it?

I think it’s a house of cards.

The US economy today is often called “K-shaped,” meaning that there’s a class of people who are doing well, and a class that aren’t. So far, so predatory capitalism. It’s a pretty…simplistic…metaphor. It has no dynamics, no interactions, no inner structure at all. That’s why I think it’s lacking.

This frame hides a number of crucial—and catastrophic—realities.

A much better metaphor is a house of cards. How we see social realities matters, if we want to understand—and be able to predict—them.

Let me explain.

II. THE CRUCIAL WEAKNESS OF THE US ECONOMY, OR, MONEY MONEY MONEY

The US economy has an Achilles Heel. A critical weakness.

It’s 70% consumption. That means that it’s exquisitely sensitive to changes in consumption, which is how much people spend (versus invest, and we’ll come to the investment part shortly.)

This is unique, different, and a true point of critical weakness. It’s unique in the world. No other economy on the globe consumes at such a high rate. It’s different from the rest of the wealthy world, too, which is much more sensitive to changes in government investment, because of the expansive social contracts in Europe and Canada.

And it’s a true critical weakness in the sense that a small, unforeseen change can wreak absolute havoc. It can cause failure cascades.

Like those in 2008, where banks failed, or in 2003, where the dot com bubble crashed, or during the pandemic, where the economy went haywire.

So: the US economy depends critically on consumption, which is also why the news about it is always about how much other people spend, and that’s deeply weird if you’ve ever lived overseas. And if that number falls, even a little bit, then the economy can go south, fast, hard, and deep, unlike almost anywhere else in the world, too.

III. THE THREE MAGIC NUMBERS IN THE ECONOMY

What is an economy? Let’s think of it as a set of markets. Stock markets. Bond markets. Currency markets. The labor market. And so on. There are more, but those will do for now.

What happens when this Magic Number, consumption, begins to falter, even just a little bit, in America? One almost elementary consequence is that the stock market falls. The bond market weakens, too. So does the currency. And of course, eventually, labor markets do too, meaning that unemployment begins to rise, which is easy to understand if people are buying and spending less.

Now we’re going to begin discussing the house of cards metaphor a little.

America, like I said, is unlike any other economy. Not just because everything depends on Magic Number One, consumption. But also because that Magic Number determines Magic Number Two, the stock market. Magic Number Three, by the way, is GDP, which depends on the first two.

The stock market in America is everything. People obsess over it unlike anywhere else in the world. Europeans and Canadians by and large have no idea what their stock markets are doing, and that’s because they don’t have to care: they don’t have these miserable things called 401Ks. Investment and retirement’s taken care of for them.

But in America, Magic Number One, consumption, determines Magic Number Two, the stock market, or people’s 401Ks, savings, etcetera, which is everything.

The stock market in America is everything in a literal sense. Europeans and Canadians have expansive social contracts, like I said, from retirement to healthcare to childcare. In America, you work, and your money’s put into the stock market more or less automatically.

The stock market is the only safety net there is. It has taken the place of every single functional system in working countries. That’s why Americans obsess over it, and they’re right to, they have to. No money, you die.

Now think again of the link between Magic Number One, consumption, and Magic Number Two, the stock market. See how America’s always on edge about the economy?

That’s because the economy is always on the edge. It’s on a perpetual knife edge. A tiny move in the wrong direction can have life-wrecking consequences.

Even for “rich” Americans.

V. THE CLASS STRUCTURE OF AMERICAN WEALTH

Now let’s picture the house of cards.

The K shape metaphor says: richer Americans are doing well. And it implies that they’ll continue to do well. We imagine the branches or legs of the K having their own momentum, separating, bifurcating.

But is that true?

“Richer” Americans these days have grown wealthy largely due to a single industry: tech. It’s provided a route to the upper middle class, what’s left of it, through astronomical salaries and stock market gains. So much so that Americans now make 3-4 times what their counterparts do in the rest of the rich world. Does that sound sustainable to you? I digress a little bit.

My wife and I were in Seattle recently. I was astounded by the level of wealth a little bit. Nice shops, restaurants, cafes, with astronomical prices, tiny houses that cost a fortune. So I did a little research, and learned something I didn’t know before. Seattle has the largest number of tech workers in the country. Hence, all this newfound wealth.

“Tech,” we’ve discussed recently, is misnomer. It’s really advertising, and mail order. They’re responsible for a very, very large portion of this K shape. And the story goes like this. This class of richer Americans will just keep spending, spending, spending.

So there’s an idea that “the wealthy can just keep spending…forever.” But will they? Can they? Maybe if their money came from the heavens above, certainly. But the wrinkle in this very earthly tale is that their money is coming from below, because they are in the business of mass advertising. Global, in fact, and the world economy is emphatically not doing well. However you look at it, their wealth comes from the rungs of the ladder below them.

Once you understand that this is a story of advertising, then things become much clearer. To advertise, you need people in mass, society-scale, markets to buy stuff. Who can. If they don’t, then of course, there’s little reason to advertise.

So while it’s true that these richer Americans may want to keep spending, the point is that they’re employed in and by an industry which depends on advertising to everyone else. Not just them. This is how the US economy really works right now, and has for a decade plus.

See what I mean by house of cards a little bit?

VI. THE HOUSE OF CARDS

Now let’s put it all together.

This new class of techno-wealthy, and here I don’t mean Musk and Bezos, but your average tech worker pulling a quarter of a million plus, is working in an industry—advertising—that’s premised on selling ever more stuff to the people below them in the economic ladder.

That is where their wealth is really coming from.

And they’re one step away from catastrophe, too, make no mistake. One lost job, one missed paycheck. This level of wealth doesn’t insulate you much at all from the brutal realities of American financial life—that comes with having tens or hundreds of millions. At this level of wealth, family, groceries, and housing are still very much an ongoing basic issue of household financial management.

To put it another way, this level of the house of cards is fragile. It’s not on solid ground. It depends critically on the one beneath it.

Now think of the other stratum beneath them on the economic ladder. How are they doing? The ones being advertised to?

Not very well at all. They’re under immense strain. They are struggling to make ends meet, and we see it in every statistic there is, from bad debt, to rising credit card delinquencies, to car payments, to savings rates, to levels of distress, and so on.

Magic Number One, Two, Three. See how much risk they’re at? Of…

VII. WHAT HAPPENS TO A HOUSE OF CARDS?

What happens in a house of cards?

The bottom falls out.

The bottom layer suddenly gives way, and the rest of the thing collapses as if it were nothing at all. A breeze blowing the wrong way undoes it.

This is where the economy really is.

And I think that the “K shape” metaphor hides this. Prevents us from really seeing it or understanding it well.

If we think about it clearly, a house of cards is a clearer pattern for us. It has internal structure, dynamics, logic, the elements are related, and there is a pattern to it at the macro scale. It isn’t just “some cards are doing well, and others aren’t.”

None of the levels of such a house are safe, on solid ground, secure.

Let me continue my little explanation.

Remember Magic Numbers One and Two? Consumption and the stock market?

What happens if the bottom begins to give way, and the people at the bottom stratum stop spending at what are now rates they can barely, if at all, afford? The rung above them feels the pain instantly, and in multiple ways. Their jobs, created by advertising, are at sudden risk (and I won’t even get into AI for now.) And so is their wealth, which is tied up in the stock market, and locked into stock options of the very “tech” meaning ad companies they work for. They face a triple whammy.

So there are feedback effects here, which make the edifice a house of cards: unstable by its very nature.

All this is why Americans are under so much financial stress and pressure, too, no matter what rung of the economic ladder they’re at. Everything is poised to fall apart, perpetually and constantly. Precisely because nothing is on solid ground.

Every rung of the economic ladder above is sitting above one that’s precarious and unstable and shaky, and so the economy just stays unstable the further you go up, perhaps even more so. This is why you see the interesting and morbid effect of couples making a quarter to a half a million dollars a year jointly, which is an amount the entire rest of the world would be flabbergasted by, and who still “feel poor.”

If you make it to the very top, which is to say, you made hundreds of millions, or dozens maybe, you can jump off the whole damned thing, buy a yacht, and sail away. But until then? You’re still trapped in it all.

VIII. A HOUSE OF CARDS IN AN EARTHQUAKE ZONE

Now think of all the shocks heading our way as a world. Trump started a foolish war that’s causing an energy crisis that’s going to cause a massive inflationary wave. The economy worldwide is stagnating. People are getting sick of tech and it’s weird man-child obsession with controlling their lives in puerile ways. Climate change. Fascism. Etcetera. AI, ripping away all those jobs from this tech meaning advertising class, and replacing them with idiot sales bots.

Any one of those alone would be enough to cause the house of cards to teeter and sway in the wind. But all of them together?

I think of the US economy as a house of cards standing on an earthquake zone. Was that a rumble I just heard?

I’d be very, very careful about where you invest your wealth these days. Wise investment isn’t about catching the breeze. It’s about foundations, resting on solid ground.

Love,

Umair (and Snowy!)

I. THE YEAR THINGS BEGAN TO IMPLODE

You can feel it in everything around you. Headlines. People. Events. The fatalism, nihilism, nothingness, deafening silence. The crumbling. The unravelling. The fascists, authoritarians, psychopaths. The wars, violence, conflict.

The flame of human consciousness dimming. This is the shadow of Thanatos, the death impulse, his wings covering the globe.

Our civilization is beginning to die.

II. WHAT IT MEANS FOR OUR CIVILIZATION TO DIE

LOL…these are the kinds of words that get me in trouble. Let’s dissect the nature of the problem.

To people like me, and you, that is to say, thoughtful, it’s self-evident that our civilization is beginning to die. We can see it in the unravelling of everything that we think of as civilization.

Science. Democracy. Peace. Justice. Truth. Reason. The fatalism that these noblest of aspirations even matter anymore. It took human beings five millennia to develop these greatest of breakthroughs.

Now we have “tech.” Go ahead and chuckle. The age we live in, I often say, is…

Our civilization is beginning to die. Everything that we think of as civilized is being demolished around us. Can we say that out loud? Aren’t we all thinking it? Even, LOL, Trump? Is it still “alarmism” and “hyperbole” to talk about this yet?

I don’t know, guys. Should we even bother?

III. THERE WAS AN OCEAN HERE ONCE, OR, THE RECEDING OF HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS

People like you and me are now anachronisms. We are out of time. The world is now going backwards. But we are still where we were, which is forwards. So we are like voyagers stranded in a place that used to be an ocean, but is now a desert. And we are sitting here trying to tell people that there was an ocean here once. Are they capable of understanding what we’re saying?

Tell me if you think the following three statements are true, even halfway.

1. The average person does not think our civilization is dying.

2. The average person doesn’t care if our civilization is dying.

3. The average person doesn’t know how to think about whether or not our civilization is dying.

That’s why I gave you a simple enough way to understand it. Civilization is the sum, union, set, transcendent figure, of these institutions or accomplishments, a way of cohering, a project undertaken together. Now we are not going anywhere together but nowhere at all.

Consciousness is many things. It is love, it is unity, it is universal truth, at its highest. At its lowest, it’s just perception, understanding, crude awareness. We are failing catastrophically at all these things, even the lowest.

The average person has no consciousness of this whatsoever. And that is because the flame of human consciousness is dimming. It has dimmed so far in many people that it barely flickers at all. That isn’t an insult. Is it? Maybe it is. Maybe it deserves to be. We’ll come back to that.

It’s easy to observe that many people around us have scant consciousness now. They appear to be unaware of much at all. History, futurity, what might have been. Who they are, who they should be, why their lives suddenly seem so futile and miserable and frightening. That their moral concerns are limited to themselves, and in the narrowest senses. Please me, desire me, like me, want me, fuck me, seduce me. That is because they have been enslaved by the algorithm and the model. Every choice they imagine they’re making is in fact made for them, social, psychological, cultural, relational, economic.

The expansion of human consciousness is breaking down everywhere around us now. In this consciousness itself is now ill, sick, malade, as we say in French, a word with no good English translation, “made bad,” which implies an absence and a cause both.

Hey, should we ask ChatGPT what it “thinks”? Kill me, I’m already making an UmairGPT. These are the depths to which we’ve all sunk. Sorry, UmAIr.

IV. THE BROKEN DIALECTIC OF CIVILIZATION

The trouble begins here. For many people now, “civilization” is precisely the absence of any or all of the following things:

—Democracy
—Peace
—Justice
—Truth
—Reason
—Knowledge
—Decency

As with so many things in our age, the very meaning of the thing to be understood has itself been not just perverted, but inverted. Perverted is to be lopsided, a misshapen caricature. But this inversion of the fundamental ideas inside things is a hallmark of our age. We still don’t have a good word for it, and not even Orwell himself could scale these intellectual heights.

The point though is that for many people “civilization” has come to mean the precise opposite of what it is. So: education is bad, science doesn’t exist, truth has no veracity, reason is to be mocked, knowledge is to be denied, and decency is weakness.

I don’t need to point out that this movement, this social current, this way of thinking, is ascendant. It is not a battle or a contest. We have already lost. Too many people think of “civilization” as something practically medieval for modernity to have much hold on our world anymore.

And of course that is because you can hear now from billionaires everyday who tell kids that science is a no-no, don’t get an education, democracy is bad for you, knowledge is worthless, and decency is obscene. They’re joined in this by a chorus of demagogues.

So. Let us try to summarize what “civilization” means to many people. It appears to mean a thing where authoritarianism prevails over democracy, where truth is given from the top down, rendering science and art both meaningless, where peace and justice are liabilities, and therefore, decency between people is something laughable.

This I’ve called a “broken dialectic.” Dialectic just means: a thing and its opposite. In classical ways of thinking, thesis and antithesis yielded synthesis. But here we have a breakdown. Civilization and anti-civilization aren’t going to yield a synthesis. They’re yielding less than zero already.

Let me put that in a simpler way. There aren’t “two sides” here, and this isn’t a “debate.” Civilization, in the way we think of it today, and should think of it, in the way the Athenians thought of it, in the way Sophocles wrote of it, means something. And yet here we are. Both-sidesing civilization itself. Chuckle with me.

V. POWER NOW WANTS THE ABSENCE OF CIVILIZATION

We live in a relativistic time, and this is a great sin of the left. The left will always say that two ways of thinking about a thing, which are diametrically opposed, are both “valid.”

But are they?

Can we say that civilization and anti-civilization are both “valid” ways of thinking about the subject or idea?

Of course not.

If I say to you that “civilization” is a thing without science, democracy, art, literature, freedom, truth, justice, peace, and so on, what am I really saying, and what discussion are we really having?

It’s true that may be “a” civilization. But it would be, LOL, a contradiction in terms. An “uncivilized” one, at least in terms of modernity. It’d be something, like I said, earlier, medieval, imbued with the spirit of the Dark Ages, a thing which hadn’t yet discovered liberation after liberation, political, economic, social, cultural, empirical.

Powers now wants the absence of civilization, at least in any thoughtful sense of the word. All forms of power: political, technological, financial, cultural. And it is conditioning people to want it too.

VI. LET THEM EAT TECHNOSLAVERY

Power wants the absence of civilization now. And it is conditioning people to want it too.

So let’s think about “civilization” in a still more sophisticated, yet even simpler, way.

“Civilization” is, as the word, implies, a process. It is dynamic, not just static. It suggests a certain motion and momentum. It’s clear subtext is if not a goal, then at least an orientation, note the ending of both words.

So when we say that “civilization” is a value-free idea, we are incorrect. The value inherent in the idea of civilization is precisely that of progress. Otherwise we might as well just say kingdom, empire, or realm. It would be incorrect, by the way, to say that every civilization before ours was “uncivilized” for precisely the same reason.

Our civilization is dying now in the sense that we no longer make progress towards shared goals of any kind. And what’s fatal about our trajectory is that nobody seems to care. Because power wants that, and more than that, power wants them not to care.

And to this, the average person has happily acceded. Let them eat Netflix, the algorithm, technoslavery, and nobody gives the faintest fuck about civilization.

VII. THE LAST TABOO, OR WHY NOBODY CARES THAT NOBODY CARES ABOUT ANYTHING ANYMORE

So. Nobody much cares about the fact that this is the year our civilization began to die in disturbing and critical ways, because that is what power wants them to want. It is manufacturing fatalism, not just consent now. But fatalism to what? Civilization as we think of it beginning to end also means this average dumb shit of a person doesn’t exactly have a rosy future, after all.

Nobody is supposed to care that nobody cares that civilization is beginning to die. If I write about it, my friends groan. My lovely wife says: why bother. Even I think: LOL, are you a fucking idiot, Umair, not this again.

Because now norms have set in. We’re supposed to be…content…with the end of everything decent and interesting and thoughtful and sane. Just let it fade away and not make too much of a fuss. We’re supposed to gush over the scenery while the ship sinks and pretend.

And most of us aren’t even pretending anymore. Because nobody’s supposed to care that nobody cares, nobody is allowed to, encouraged to, will much admit to, has time to, care.

We’re just math now, did you know? And because we are…

A taboo has been carefully constructed for us. Nobody is supposed to care that nobody cares about anything fucking real anymore. That anybody much thinks, learns, grows, matures, uses their mind, tends to their responsibilities, takes the world and themselves seriously. We’re all just atoms of indifference now. You Do You! I’ll Do Me! Then…who the fuck is doing civilization? This taboo is what power wants. Fatal indifference is what we have become. And in it, we’ve surrendered being in the world in mature, adult, and healthy ways.

We’re just mathematics of the crudest kind. I’m one, and you’re one, and we add and subtract. Like, heart, follow. Smash that subscribe button! Do we interact, intersect, form a union, become a transcendent number? Nope. And so…

Caring about civilization—are you kidding me? What the fuck, isn’t there another Amazon Prime movie to watch? Hey, I heard so-and-so just made a rock album! Wow! Ever noticed how none of this idiotic shit is about anything that matters anymore? So we accept the taboo. Nobody cares that nobody cares. Fuck civilization. Just give me technoslavery. But one way to think about civilization is: I care that you care. This is the job of people like us, by the way, artists, musicians, intellectuals, writers, journalists, scientists, teachers, just normal decent people, etcetera.

Americans might struggle with the way I’ve put it. “And nobody cares.” That’s because when they read, or think, they tend to do so narcissistically. I care, they’ll think, therefore, the proposition’s invalid. But of course this isn’t the way I mean it, or a correct way to think, at all.

It’s true that there are those of us who care. Care very much indeed. The little town I grew up in outside Washington DC is full of thoughtful and learned people discussing this every evening, deeply troubled by it. But it’s also a place with one of the highest education rates in the world.

When I say that “nobody cares,” it’s not a quantitive statement meant to be interpreted individualistically. I care, therefore, I exist. Wrong. You may care, 10/10, but that makes you (and I) very much the exception(s). It’s hardly a topic of discussion or import or weight. Except when a demagogue or billionaire says it, and they mean it in the inverted sense.

So we’re speaking in qualitative and collective senses, which is a European way to think. In French, we say “tout le monde” to mean everyone, which doesn’t literally mean every single person in Paris or the world, but just a current, atmosphere, sensibility.

VIII. THE ABDICATION OF EXISTENTIAL RESPONSIBILITY

…and nobody cares.

Do they?

Isn’t it true, what I said at the beginning?

The average person is more interested in whatever dumb shit is on Netflix, whatever AI garbage Spotify will serve up to them, whatever influencers YouTube et al are going to smack them in the face with, than anything remotely real. True. Worthy.

Anything that shapes or impacts their lives.

And this part is a condemnation and a jeremiad. Because in this, we see an abdication of responsibility. It is every person’s responsibility to learn, to be moral, to try to reason, to use their intellects, to infer what is best for them, and for everyone. This is adulthood’s hallmark. It’s never easily attained.

Do you see people doing that anymore? I don’t. I see technoslaves and algorithm zombies. I see people so defeated and broken inside that to remind them is their responsibility will immediately be to told that I’m asking too much from them. But I’m not the one asking.

IX. THIS IS THE YEAR OUR CIVILIZATION BEGAN TO DIE, AND…

So here we are. Our civilization is dying. This is the year it began to, in serious, grave, and irreversible ways. And nobody cares. We’re just sort of…resigned…drained…exhausted…weary.

You can be clever and say, but Umair, it really began to die that year, that day, that month. That’s fine. We are intelligent people. We don’t nitpick. We think synthetically.

Where does that leave people like us? People who a) can’t accept the inversion of civilization as something emptied of science, democracy, literature, music, art, truth, reason, justice, peace, and b) also can’t be fucking stupid and pathetic enough to just shrug and Netflix away our lives, because we take our responsibilities a little bit seriously, since we’re adults?

It leaves us in a great deal of pain. We’re anachronisms now. The world has no use for us. It is only counting down the days to its own self-destruction now, by way of pretending that Everything’s Fine, Dude!

And I think it also leaves us with a task.

Which is to remind people of what civilization is and means. Just that much. Not even defend it, or champion it. Just set the definition of the damned thing straight. After that, the responsibility is theirs, not ours. No, “civilization” isn’t just the Dark Ages falling again while technoslavery throws Netflix and Spotify at you, you poor hopeless moron. No, this isn’t a “debate” with “two sides.” There is a there here. Maybe that way the “nobody cares” part begins to…change. Can it? Will it?

I don’t know. What I do know is this. Perhaps if we do that much, we can at least stop them, in a small way, from becoming the wretched, pathetic, embarrassing things they’ve become. And in that, perhaps, we will recover some small semblance of the dignity an age like this has stolen from us, too.

Love,

Umair (and Snowy!)

I. THE RITUAL

There’s a scene that unfolds before me day after day at the cafe. A ritual, with careful steps. And yet these days, it’s so badly broken that I can predict how it’s going to turn out the moment it begins.

The Date.

The Woman arrives first. Almost always. And she’s trying. It’s a curious turn of phrase, which we’ll examine in a moment, but first let’s discuss what it means. The girl, woman, lady, and by this I mean the ritual of The Date cuts across generations, is making an effort.

She’s put on a nice dress. Wearing carefully chosen shoes. Make-up, tastefully done. A little bit of lipstick, just so, some eyeshadow.

And she’s shining with excitement. As she should be. This is the evening, night, afternoon, that her life might suddenly change.

She orders a glass of wine, a coffee, a tea. And pretends, impatiently, to wait patiently.

And then the Man arrives, and it all goes to hell.

II. THE BROKEN ARCHETYPES OF DESIRE

There I am, sitting at a table nearby, precisely the same “in real life” as online me. The cool intellectual. Smoking a cigarette and just…thinking. Not trying to overhear anything, not eavesdropping. I can’t help but notice, still.

The very first thing that happens is…that the briefest look of dismay crosses Girl-Woman-Lady’s face. Her eyes veil over. Sometimes, there’s a grimace. It only lasts a nanosecond. She goes back to trying.

But in these social rituals, first impressions count. And The Man is already…done. She knows it. I know it. Anyone looking knows it. The only one that doesn’t know it yet is him. Finished, unless he can redeem himself.

Why? Because the goddamned guy showed up just emanating…radiating…like a thermonuclear supernova…pure man-child energy.

He looks like a baby. Sometimes, my lovely wife is with me. She’s a nice person, OK, not always, but mostly. And lately? She’ll let out a kind of yelp-slash-giggle. In the beginning, I’d frown. Puzzled. Now, I completely get what she’s sort of horrified by.

The Girl Woman Lady is there, trying. She’s already made an effort. In our capitalist argot, she’s “invested” in this ritual of a “marketplace” for “mating”already. She’s tried to look pretty, attractive, to just…you know…not emanate the vibe that she’s a goddamned little baby.

Meanwhile, the Man has showed up apparently as a Boy Child Savage. He’s wearing some combination of the following. A nylon vest of some kind (men! NEVER WEAR THIS ON A DATE. Are you idiots?) Some kind of T-shirt or maybe a weirdly ill fitting shirt underneath, that looks like it hasn’t been ironed since 1994. And if not the awful sneaker-loafers that men these days wear, then just…pretty terrible shoes, like sneakers (MEN! never wear sneakers on a date! Are you idiots?).

He’s unkempt, and not in a good way. No, he hasn’t been in the forest chopping goddamn cords of wood. No, he isn’t disheveled from just giving a concert to adoring fans. He just hasn’t….bothered very much. Please understand me, because while this sounds superficial so far, it’s anything but. Understand this isn’t about looking a certain way. It’s about kinds of presence, ways of being in the world, how you inhabit yourself.

The Man is emanating Boy Child energy. You can smell it in the air, see it a mile off, intuit it from a glance. This is not really a man who is one yet.

There is nothing that kills the female libido faster than what just happened. Oh my god, I wanted to spend time with a man, just a man, and who arrived was a Boy Child in the shape of one. Do I have to be this guy’s Mom Mommy Mother Nurse Maid?

Nobody wants to be your mommy, guys. Not even your mom, most of the time. Do you even know how many times my wife tells me this? And I’m like the veritable prototype of Not a Man Child. Men: this is how insanely lethal the goddamned stakes are of Being the Wrong Archetype are for your love life.

See this colossal mismatch in Archetypes already? Eternal Boy Child meets Girl Woman Lady? How do you think this is going to turn out?

We’re going to talk about that, and it’s going to suck.

Stay with me, because…

This is where things get funny.

III. WHEN EROS TURNS INTO “SOS”

And I know what’s gonna happen next, because it’s happened so many times by now. It happens so predictably, and so often, that by now, my wife rolls her eyes when we leave to have coffee together.

(This is the good scenario, by the way. The bad ones? A “MAGA coded” guy shows up, wearing fascism lite stuff, and by the way, Ralph Lauren Branding Team, you might wanna think about this. She shudders and leaves. A guy who looks suspiciously like a wannabe manfluencer shows up, and she tries to hide under her glass of wine.)

The Girl Woman Lady is already disappointed. But suddenly, she brightens up. Decides to give the Child Boy Savage another chance. Maybe there’s a Man hidden in there, somewhere. Maybe I just need to let the stone reveal the statue, and chip away at it a little bit.

She asks him a question. And he makes this ritual of The Date, which is already going off the rails, into the trainwreck that’s by now becoming a cultural touchstone. He just…gives some kind of inane, half-mumbled reply. She’s sort of lost.

And then he tries to recover the Ritual. By talking about a) his job b) how much money he makes c) sports d) some status symbol he aspires to, like a Rolex collection or e) something else incredibly boring and completely fatal to the libido.

Now comes the part I sort of dread but also chuckle at. The Girl Woman Lady starts looking around. And she looks at me. Remember, I look like the one guy who doesn’t ever need to be part of this Ritual. I’m wearing my obligatory leather jacket because the sunlight can kill me, I’m having a cigarette, and I have a tiny white dog with me. I’m weirdly safe.

Her eyes begin to…sort of…plead with me. Rescue me! Dude! Do something! Alright, if you can’t help me, then help him. You look like the kind of guy who’s interesting and fun and cool and smart and thoughtful and has had a life. Jesus! Just…fucking…be this guy’s wingman slash big bro slash cool friend already! Tell him what to say! I’m trying to give him a chance! Jesus! What the fuck is wrong with men these days!

Now. Forgive me for writing all that in such excruciating detail. It’s funny and it makes my wife groan because it’s true. I could tell him what to say, and I wish I could, too, to do my part to just sort of play my role in putting the world right today. Hey, I’m happy to be your cool big bro. But of course, I can’t.

The Ritual is the Ritual, and by now, it’s reaching its conclusion.

The Girl Woman Lady makes her excuses. The Eternal Boy Child looks deflated and bewildered and disappointed. Angry, even. He doesn’t get what just happened to him. I sort of raise an eyebrow and look wryly at Snowy or my wife.

You know how many successful dates I’ve seen in a year of watching The Ritual unfold before me almost every single night? One.

And do you know how many times I’ve seen the plea in the eyes of Eros?

IV. MEN, WOMEN, AND PLACES IN BEING

So what should the Eternal Boy Child Savage say? Look, this isn’t dating advice. But it’s what you probably want to know, which is fair enough. The answer is: it’s a lot less complicated than you think. The short version is: it’s not about what you say at all. It never is.

It’s about…

What’s going wrong between men and women? What really happens when the ritual of The Date goes so wrong as it does above? A lot more than you think.

Women are closer to being than men. And all the macho bullshit of every culture that has ever existed is only there to mask this fact.

Freud famously theorized Penis Envy, which was also the name of one of our teenage bands. He was wrong, though, as was his larger general principle of reducing Eros to a mere sex drive.

What is going wrong in this ritual of The Date Turning Into a Trainwreck, so often and so fast and so much that by now “heterofatalism” is a trendy social more, is Eros itself.

It’s more accurate to say that men have Womb Envy than to say that women have Penis Envy. Yes, I really mean that. Let me explain what I mean. Women, like I said, are closer to being than men. They are braver and tougher and right at the edge of life and death, just by virtue of existence.

Women risk life and death in the act of pregnancy. It is natural and inevitable for (most of) them. Women bleed. The stuff of life pours out of them. I’m close to the edge of being, in a way, too: my blood turns to dust. This place in existence, the edge, is real. You suffer there, you exist in a totally different way, and women do this every month, for much of their lives, when they bear children, when they reckon with creation itself.

Men have to make wars to get to this place of the edge of existence. For women? It just happens. It’s where they are. Go ahead and chuckle, it’s only funny because I’m not kidding. Why do men love making wars, anyways? Have you ever wondered? Now you know. Womb envy. They need to prove how tough and brave they are. Women don’t.

We don’t think of women this way. But we should. The macho bullshit going back eons in history is precisely a way to repress this most basic set of facts about existence. Men are not at the edge of life and death just by being alive. Women are, very much so. Over and over again.

Their “facticity,” or their raw facts of existence, the way life feels, is, to them, if you like, in this way, is utterly different to those of men. Just living can kill them, bleed them, wound them, end them, finish them. Like I said, men have to make war on each other to draw blood and be at death’s edge in order to then be lauded as this “tough and brave,” which for women, is just existing in the first place.

So men have spent millennia repressing and denying this elemental and unchangeable truth, in almost comically absurd ways, when you think about it, as a way to redress the cosmic scales and elevate their own place in existence, hence, the birth of the macho, from the Spartans right down to today’s internet manosphere dorks. It’s war! I’ll make you bleed! Dude, I’m already bleeding, hand me a pad and give me a fucking break.

This is why in our oldest myths, creation herself is female. The God-made-the-universe-in-seven-days mythos is derived from the Babylonian myth, which predates it, and parallels it almost exactly. The difference is that the primordial being in the older myth, Tiamat, was female, and she was the raw stuff of creation, a turbulent, roaring ocean, “salt water and chaos.”

So. Men and women are different in their Eros. They are not the same, and one of the myths of our age is that they’re the same people, just in different bodies. I don’t think that’s remotely true, because the facticity of our raw existences as men and women is so radically different.

What the fuck does all that have to with dating?

Everything, actually.

V. WHAT DESIRE (REALLY) IS

What is a “man” in relation to a “woman”? I put that in quotes not to relativize genders, but to reinforce the point that we’re talking now about our deepest, primordial ways of being. Eros.

What is it that makes us desire each other?

Women, existentially, are closer to the edge than men are. Just by virtue of being women. They can die through the consequences of the act of love. Many do, in fact.

What does that mean a man should be, if he wants to genuinely “attract” a woman, a word I don’t like, so let’s restate it, be able to draw her into a place of being-in-the-world-together? What does that mean a “real man” is?

Is it just someone who represses the facticities I’ve spoken about above? And says: no, Girl Woman Lady, you’re the weak one, and I’m the macho one? And just goes on trying to play out this patriarchal fantasy? Or is it…the opposite…a gentle soul, a pushover sort, the Nice Guy? Of course, it’s neither.

Our models of manhood now are deeply muddled. They’re idiotic, many of them, offensive, plenty of them, and ludicrous, almost all of them. Is a man what the manosphere thinks he is? Trump? Your AI boyfriend? What the fuck is a man?

Let’s cut through the bullshit, then we’ll come back to talking about all this with some depth and rigor and beauty and truth again.

Eros, like all things in our unconscious, is symbolic. It’s not rational or logical. It operates both beneath and below but also beyond, above, through these lower levels of mentation. That is why the ritual of The Date goes so badly wrong. When the Girl Woman Lady arrives, and then the Eternal Boy Child shows up, instead of The Man, and she grimaces, it’s because the poor guy showed up in all the wrong forms symbolically.

A trainwreck in Archetypes just occurred. And it’s not a superficial one.

(Am I saying, hey guys, act like psychotic billionaires? Of course not. They also behave like fucking children, too, by the way, they’re the biggest Boy Children of all, Boy Children with fantasies of omnipotence, Oedipal complexes in hoodies written all over them in Greek tragedy which our entire civilization is now suffering. I want to kill daddy. But I digress.)

The point is the symbolic, or what “money and power” symbolize. So now let’s put two and two together. Women are closer to the edge of life and death than men are, just by existing. They are looking for a symbolic sacrifice from men. The consequences of love for women are mortal, infinite, existential. And until a man can show that they are for him, too, Eros misses its mark. This is where men become men, or stay boy children.

Archetypes must fit together. Just as individuals “integrate” towards a whole, so do lovers. Lovers only form a unity when Archetypes fit. And today, they don’t anymore between men and women.

Make me whole. Make me one.

But let me tell you the mystery and the secret. Logic doesn’t work here anymore. A higher mathematics hold.

I am whole in my incompleteness. I am one.

You are whole in your incompleteness. You are one.

We can only be whole and one together in this way.

One plus one equals one, which also equals infinity.

If you understand this, you will never misunderstand desire again.

Our hunger to be one never moves one inch. It’s immovable because it’s the deepest thing in us. With each other, with the cosmos, with being itself. The transcendent mathematics of unity.

This is what desire is.

VI. BECOMING AN INTERESTING PERSON

What the fuck…Jesus, someone make Umair stop! I will soon. But we still need to answer the question.

What does the Man need to sacrifice to become one? To become one. Key words. To become one, as in, the one, a unity, with himself, that he can offer at last to the Woman.

A man only becomes a man when the Boy Child in him dies. Is killed. Is dead and buried with honor and gratitude. His presence may remain, it’s true. But that’s all. Now someone new has emerged, which is The Man. It’s true this also happens for The Woman, but here we’re talking about men. This process is called “integration” in Jungian psychology, which is what we’ve been talking about. The Boy can live within the Man, but the Man is more and greater than the Boy.

Let me give you my own example to make it clear. When I wrote my first books, when I helped run one of the world’s biggest companies, when I keynoted some of the world’s biggest conferences, when I did all these big and wonderful things…interestingly, I was still a boy.

None of these things made me a man. So it’s not what a lot of guys think, the accomplishments or the money or the accolades. Sorry, completely wrong.

I became a man only after I went to the underworld and found my way back. After I got sick, learned I had a weird condition where the light could kill me, spend years in pain, then lost everything, all the money I’d made, my career, all of it, then failed three, four, five times in a row at trying again. In that sacrifice, and only in that—and it was fucking agony—did I even start to become a…man.

A prince is just a Boy Child wearing a little crown. Slaying the dragon is when the journey of manhood begins. Do you see the point I’m making? I’m not sort of saying that “you have to be hazed,” and I’m not boasting. We’re just talking. What's interesting is what the women in my life say. You were a boy then, you looked like a boy, you acted like a boy. They laugh about it. All of them, friends, my lovely wife, my mom, my sisters, everyone.

This sounds…radical…almost manosphere-ish…pretty bad…actually…fuck, did I get it wrong? I don’t mean it the way you think, so let me try again.A man becomes a man when his concerns rise above the fucking trivial, and reach the existential and the universal. In Jungian terms, we say: a person’s grown, they’ve integrated their fears, anxieties, concerns, anger, disappointment, failures, shortcomings, even hatred. And man, was I angry in some of those days when life was just tearing me down and pulling me apart.

In plainer English, we call this “becoming an interesting person.”

VII. BECOMING YOURSELF, OR, THE PRIMAL SACRIFICE

The best dating advice used to be: just be yourself. There’s one big problem with that these days, though, which is: men aren’t anyone anymore.

Men need to offer Women oneness, beginning with themselves. And they’re not doing that, which is why we have this constant complaint that men aren’t men anymore.

Too many of them, anyways. They’re all trying to pretend to be the same person, which is some insane combination of American Psycho by way of Elon Musk met a looksmaxxer on the way to Covert Resentment Against Everyone City, or, I Spend Too Much Time Online Guy. Too Much Time Online Guy is the same person, a billion times over. The same anxieties, fears, hungers, and wearing the same boy child outfits, emanating that energy, too.

Too Much Time Online kills you. It kills your soul, mind, body, intellect, all of it. And this where men are becoming…nobody at all.

Let’s revise yesterday’s dating advice for today. Just Develop Yourself. Become your…self.

Be an interesting, cool, funny, thoughtful, smart, intelligent, warm, charming, normally abnormal person. In whatever way you like. Me? I’m still the teenage goth I always was. That’ll do. Read a book, for fuck’s sake, instead of Reddit. Don’t have a fucking favorite, I don’t know, pundit, have a favorite artist, poet, thinker, and no, fucking Seneca doesn’t count, because nobody wants to hear how Stoic you are on a date.

Have a life. A bold and daring and intrepid one. That doesn’t mean you have to be goddamned Errol Flynn, playing Blackbeard the Pirate, but it does mean that you tried stuff, you failed at stuff, you gave it your all, you went to the very edge of existence and came back from the dead. This is what makes women swoon. And it’s not a matter of “making” them. It’s just a matter of becoming a man.

Becoming a man is hard. You have to suffer, to reach the edge of existence, to let the boy child go. A man isn’t just a jokester or a trickster or a cute little cherub. There’s something else in him that has finally had the courage to go to deeper, darker depths. The deepest ones of all. Down to giving it all, losing it all, and that is when you, in that heat and test and fire, finally begin to become yourself. And by the way, in this way, becoming a man is a choice. A difficult and dangerous and hard one.

Women’s facticity is different, remember? They’ve been at the edge their whole lives. That’s why they’re not looking for boy children to be mommies to. They’re looking for equals, in an existential sense. Eros, erotic love, in relationships of this kind can only be between equals. One plus one equals one or infinity, remember? But for men to be that, they have to become equals, they have to try.

They have to slay a dragon and risk it all.

They must make a primal existential sacrifice.

Themselves.

VIII. YOU EITHER HAVE IT OR YOU DON’T

There’s a strange thing about masculinity.

You either have it or you don’t. Real masculinity never shouts about it, does it? And yet.

We know it the instant we see it, feel it, sense it. And we can see through its caricatures so easily, too. (I know, I know, there are going to all kinds of people who object. But should they? Is Trump a real man in this sense, or just playing at being one?)

Why is that? Because like all things existential, it either is, or isn’t. There is no in between. Either one is a man, or one is not. And this is precisely the point of what I’m trying to teach you, that there’s a threshold at which one becomes a man, a point of sacrifice and a surrender. (Hence, the “manhood rituals” of so many cultures and civilizations.)

For women, I think you should understand by now, this threshold, this turning point, comes naturally. It’s involuntary. It happens whether they like it or not. A girl becomes a woman existentially even if she doesn’t want to. But a boy does not become a man until and unless he wants to. These are such radically different ways of being that they are in fact opposites.

(By the way, I’m emphatically not saying that you can’t be whatever gender you want. Sure you can. In fact, if you read the above closely, that’s exactly what I’m saying.)

And this is the precise point at which manhood itself is breaking down now. Men aren’t crossing this threshold. They’re staying trapped in an eternal boyhood. But of course Eros there is possible only in a very different way—Mother/Son, Caretaker/Child, etcetera—than between equals.

A man is just a person who says: I became a man by sacrificing the boy child. He is still here, and I keep him close to me. But he is gone, in the sense of who I exist as now. I have been to the edge of existence. Only one of us returned. I am not him. I am as tough and brave as you now. I know what life and death are. I have risked it all for something, and I know what it means to stand at the edge of the abyss of mortality, fragility, and nothingness.

Not in the way of acting tough, or throwing your weight around, or bragging about how you killed people or what have you. Please understand I don’t mean macho bullshit at all. I mean: in this act of becoming an interesting and full person, you sacrificed the boy child willingly. You didn’t stay trapped in infantile bullshit, in plainer English, but risked deep and essential parts of you to exist in the world in a more powerful way.

Now you have shown you have power over yourself. In an existential way. And you exist with responsibility, self-respect, and dignity. No, you can’t prove this with Rolexes and money and muscles, by the way.

You either have it or you don’t.

When you do, everyone knows, without a word having to be said. Remember the plea in the eyes of Eros?

IX. THE ORIGIN OF EROS

This is wayyyyy too much for a little essay. LOL, sorry about that. Let me try to sum some of it up.

I think that men are the primordially weak ones. They have the privilege not to have to risk everything just by living. Women don’t. That is precisely why men are the ones who must show that they are strong. And have had to throughout history. If they were the strong ones, we’d all know, and they’d never have had to show it at all. Hence, war, violence, empire, patriarchy, etcetera.

We all know that women admire strength in men, but this is really why, and it’s not just physical, about muscles or brawn. If it was, LOL, guys like me, who’ve never had a muscle in their lives, would never have had a chance, by the way.

This is what real masculinity is. Existential strength, we might call it. It’s a quiet thing. Real men don’t have to say a word. We all just know.

And it is strength in this existential sense that makes Eros flow.

Because it balances the scales at last. Women look for strength in this deep way because then a loving relationship can happen. Then two people are on the same plane, if you like, in being. Women these days put this eternal truth like this: hey, wow, I don’t need to be his Mommy Mom Nurse Maid. What that really means is: here is someone who can walk with me where I am, which is closer to the edge of life and death.

It’s the primal sacrifice of the Boy Child that makes mature Eros possible. It always has been. Men today have forgotten that.

The Woman is pushed to the very brink of self sacrifice without a choice. And so The Man must choose to sacrifice if he is to become one, and the sacrifice must be himself. The Woman is bound to the power the Man needs, over life, just as the origin myths say. But the Man must develop the power the Woman needs, which is over death. And together these become freedom.

Eros is about oneness. It’s primordial. Remember our transcendent mathematics? One plus one equals one equals infinity. Love is always an act of symbolic and transcendent sacrifices. Between Father, Mother, Child, Husband, Wife. But in the beginning, between Man and Woman. Women are women, but men are not always men. They must choose, and that choice requires sacrifice. Of themselves.

You can’t be both. Either you get to be the Boy Child, or the Man. And becoming the Man is precisely surrendering the Boy Child. This is the first step in the slaying of the dragon. In the transformation of the soul towards its truest self.

That is why when a Boy Child shows up on the ritual of The Date, the Girl Woman Lady is so instinctively disappointed. It’s—literally—the last thing she’s looking for. She’s looking for what we’re all looking for, which is oneness, primordial union, but to offer it, men must first have it within themselves.

One plus one equals one equals infinity.

This is the origin of Eros.

Love,

Umair (and Snowy!)

I. THE MAGNIFICENT FIVE AND A HALF

There’s a myth in finance, economics, and business. That things change. They don’t.

Right now, the US economy is powered almost single-handedly by “tech.” The American stock market certainly is.

But “tech” is a misnomer, which is why I put it in quotes. At least if you want to understand the economy. Here’s how “tech” really works, and what it is.

The “Magnificent 7” is made of Google, Meta (aka Facebook), Apple, Nvidia, Amazon, Microsoft, and Tesla. Let’s drop Tesla, because it’s a has-been of a company. Microsoft is sort of hanging in there, trying to constantly play catch up. That leaves us with a Magnificent five and a half.

III. WHAT BUSINESS IS “TECH” REALLY IN?

What business are the Magnificent five and a half really in? The answer is going to surprise you, and maybe even make you chuckle.

Google and Meta are in the advertising business.

Amazon is a mail order company.

Apple is something interesting, which is a luxury company masquerading as a “tech” company. That’s why Apple commands a premium, by the way. Feel your iPhone or MacBook. Doesn’t feel much like junky “tech,” does it? It feels (and behaves) more like a nice watch or car or suit or what have you. I’ll write more about this. For now, let’s leave Apple on one side.

That leaves us with Nvidia, who makes the chips that power AI.

IV. WELCOME BACK TO THE 19TH CENTURY

So. The US economy, and its stock markets, are powered almost single-handedly by “tech.” But tech is…surprisingly…old school.

The majority of the Magnificent Five and a Half are in…businesses that’ve existed forever. Amazon’s the new Sears, more or less. Google and Meta, meanwhile, are just in the advertising business.

There’s nothing new under the sun when it comes to finance, economics, and business.

I’m emphasizing this to demystify what’s going on. All of this is surprisingly…almost...19th century. The economy is powered by a) two big advertising companies and b) a gigantic mail order behemoth (and a handful of companies who make the infrastructure for this to work.)

Now. If you doubt me, consider for a second how much of a mail-order Sears Amazon really is. Less so, in fact, than Sears. Sears claim to fame was that it’d vet what you’d get. But on Amazon, you can scroll for hours, we’ve all done it, sort of biting your nails, wondering if you’re going to get garbage, crap, a fake, or something that, out of a bad date, looks “nothing like the pictures.”

The business models are as old as time (the Mad Men sold advertising, too.)

Google’s business is about 80% advertising, and Meta’s is about 99% advertising. Amazon, meanwhile, makes about 75% of what it does from it’s gigantic “marketplace,” in various ways.

It’s just mail order and advertising.

IV. WHERE SUPERNORMAL PROFITS COME FROM

Why am I teaching you all this? So that you understand the reality behind the spin and the hype, number one, and number two, so that you understand how to think about what’s supposed to happen next.

That is that AI is supposed to catapult these incredibly profitable companies profits to the moon. Will it?

What’s different about mail order and advertising today, what makes these companies more profitable than Sears and the Mad Men, is that they’ve automated parts of it.

And that automation hasn’t always been good. Amazon is like the world’s shittiest bazaar. Google and Meta ads, meanwhile, have all the charm of a tech bro trying to propose marriage to you. Still, despite that, automation has done what it does, which is create supernormal profit margins for them.

So: it’s just mail order and advertising, with automation behind it, to jack up the profits. (And, beneath that, a healthy dose of what are called network effects, meaning, these giants have created monopolistic marketplaces for advertising and mail order stuff.)

V. THE DREAM OF A NEW BUSINESS MODEL, OR NORMAL PEOPLE DREAM OF LOVE, BUT TECH BROS DREAM OF $$MONEY

Enter AI. How is AI going to change all this?

The dream is that…there’s going to be a new business model.

Nobody’s “figured it out” yet, which is Silicon Valley code for “it doesn’t work very well so far.” It’s sort of important to note how money-obsessed this culture, this thing, really is. Normal people don’t spend their lives dreaming of business models. They dream about love, life, happiness. And for that reason good businesses aren’t just about money.

Let me try to explain.

Google makes about $3 per month per user. From advertising. That adds up to the billions it earns over the course of the year.

Did that number just make you shudder? Maybe you know what I’m about to say next.

The dream is that AI will become a “business line” itself. And it’ll do that because people will pay for it. They’ll pay, according to Silicon Valley, something like $30 a month for it. That’s sort of what it has to make to be profitable, given the tremendous investments in it. We can’t say for certain, because the companies are cagey about the numbers, but rest assured, those numbers are not in the single digits.

So. Google currently makes $3 per month per user from advertising. The AI dream is to make $30 per month or so per person.

That’s ten times what Google makes from its existing business model.

Meta’s situation is even crazier. Its revenue per user, $5-6, is even higher than Google’s, even though, LOL, it’s a terrible, soulless sort of experience.

And yet that’s still not even remotely close to the notion of charging people double digits for some sort of AI subscription.

Are you beginning to see the problem here?

VI. HOW BUSINESSES (REALLY) WORK

“Tech” has business models that work very, very well. They do that for a reason. They’re simple, and they’re old. They’re time honored and battle tested, stretching back through the centuries, because they solve problems in relatively efficient ways, while providing profitability.

But to make the AI dream work, “tech” is going to have turn it into a new business model, and charge people for it, forever. And it’s true that many “will pay for it.” No doubt about that. That’s not the point. The point is that that is a very, very different business. In its entirety.

You don’t pay Google or Meta for much of anything right now. You pay Amazon begrudgingly a very, very small amount, for the absolutely awful, just dismal, horrible service it barely provides. To say that Amazon offers “quality control” is like saying Donald Trump talks a lot.

Getting people to accept a new business model is hard. How hard? Nike failed at it. So did most of the car companies, not once, but over and over again, for decades. So did most of healthcare. Etcetera.

A new business model depends crucially on having a brand people genuinely trust, respect, and admire. This is the Number One Thing in business, in fact. A brand is the most valuable any successful business has. Always.

Does “tech” have people’s trust and respect?

VII. THE PROBLEM WITH A VERY SUCCESSFUL BUSINESS MODEL IS…THAT IT IS ONE

But even that’s not the real problem

The real problem is this. AI is going to eat these companies existing business models alive.

This is an old problem in b-school lingo: cannibalism.

Let’s think about it.

There you are, and me too. We type something into Google, and now we get “AI results.” But guess what? The AI results aren’t as profitable as the regular ones, because Google hasn’t figured out how to put ads into them. It will, but even then, the economic problem remains very simple: if AI works, then the ads become more efficient, meaning that you have to hit people with less of them to sell something. See what I mean by “cannibalism”?

The same is true for Amazon. Let’s say that AI can tell you, hey, don’t buy this whatever, it sucks, it’s terrible, it looks nothing like the pictures, the seller will never give you your money back, the whole thing will just be a hassle, buy this one instead, or maybe try not buying any of them at all, and try this thing, that’ll do all three of the things you want at once. See what I mean again? And again, this is economics at work, which is that the uncertainty of buying some piece of crap at Amazon goes down, and so far, that uncertainty works very, very much to Amazon’s favor.

So even if AI is “embedded” into the existing models, the outlook is…dubious.

Can you make advertising and mail order more efficient using AI? Sure you can. But right now, these supernormal profits are coming precisely from inefficiency. From the fact that you have to buy a thousand crappy text ads, or pay a dozen grinning influencers, or order three of the same thing just to get one that doesn’t suck.

So: efficiency is the enemy, in many ways, of business models. It’s good for the economy, that’s true, but it drives down profits.

VIII. THE FUTURE OF THE ECONOMY

Where does that leave us? I just wanted to share some thoughts with you. About the economy, finance, business, and what really happens underneath the hood of it all.

I think that the case of AI is dubious. Not because it’s socially creepy or culturally toxic or just plain theft, which it is. But even the hard-nosed business case for it.

Eventually, I think that Wall Street and so on are going to have sit down, think this all through clearly, do some simple math, and see through the hype. Let me try and do that for you now.

The US economy is powered by advertising and mail order. LOL, it’s funny when you think about it that way. It’s not stuff that’s really…rocket science…quantum physics…to begin with…which is why…applying AI to it…isn’t likely to yield as much as people think.

How much more efficient can you make a pretty dumb, already very automated thing?

And that’s also why, by the way, if AI takes the massive number of jobs it’s already beginning to, the economy is hypersensitive to the catastrophic consequences: advertising and mail order depend on people spending money.

Think about all that. Let me know what conclusions you reach.

Love,

Umair (and Snowy!)