Hang On Though

Category: Economics

  • The 250-Year Itch: Why Your Empire Has Maybe Six Months Left

    The 250-Year Itch: Why Your Empire Has Maybe Six Months Left

    There’s this British general named Sir John Glubb who spent his life studying empires. Not just reading about them. Actually living in them. Jordan, Iraq, places where you could still smell the dust of fallen civilizations if you paid attention. In 1976, he wrote an essay called “The Fate of Empires” that nobody wanted to hear then and nobody wants to hear now.

    His conclusion? Every empire lasts about 250 years. Ten generations. Doesn’t matter if they’re Assyrian, Persian, Roman, Arab, Ottoman, Spanish, or British. Doesn’t matter if they worship Zeus, Allah, or the almighty dollar. Same timeline. Same pattern. Same end.

    America declared independence in 1776. Do the math.

    We are 250 years in. Exactly. Not 248, not 252. Exactly 250. If Glubb is right, and 3,000 years of history suggests he is, we’re not approaching the deadline. We’re at it. The alarm isn’t about to go off. It’s ringing right now. We’re just hitting snooze and pretending we’ve got more time.

    Except the thing coming is the total collapse of everything you thought was permanent.

    A Note from the Outpost

    I’m writing this from Norway. Not America. We’re what you’d call an outpost of the American empire. The way Gaul was to Rome. The way India was to Britain. We share some of the lifestyle, some of the prosperity, certainly the Protestant work ethic and the consumer culture. But we’re not the empire itself. We’re satellites. Client states. We benefit when they rise. We get dragged down when they fall.

    This gives us a particular vantage point. We’re close enough to see what’s happening. Far enough away that we’re not completely delusional about it. Americans still think they’re exceptional, that the rules don’t apply to them. From here in Oslo, watching American soft power dissolve in real time, the delusion is obvious.

    Every empire has its outposts. Rome had Gaul, Britannia, Hispania. When Rome fell, those provinces didn’t just keep being Roman. They became something else. Usually something worse. Usually something more chaotic. The infrastructure crumbled. The roads stopped being maintained. The aqueducts fell apart. And the locals who’d gotten used to Roman peace and Roman trade had to figure out how to survive without either.

    That’s us. That’s Norway, Germany, Japan, South Korea, all the developed countries living under the American security umbrella and trading in American dollars. When this goes, we don’t get to keep the parts we liked. We get the aftermath.

    So when I talk about empire collapse, I’m not talking about “us” in the sense of Americans. I’m talking about watching the ship sink from one of the lifeboats that’s still tethered to it.

    The Six Stages of Going to Hell

    Glubb identified six stages every empire goes through. Not five. Not seven. Six. Like clockwork. Like the seasons. Like your hairline.

    Stage One: The Age of Pioneers (Outburst)

    Some small, hungry nation decides it’s done being ignored. Macedon was nothing. Then Philip and Alexander showed up and 36 years later the Persian Empire was a memory. America was thirteen colonies bitching about tea taxes. Then Washington, Jefferson, Franklin. Suddenly the British Empire is getting its ass kicked by farmers.

    Pioneers are lean, mean, and have nothing to lose. They work 16-hour days because the alternative is dying. No welfare state. No safety net. Just dirt, sweat, and the absolute certainty that you build something or you starve.

    Stage Two: The Age of Conquests

    Now you’ve got momentum. You’re not just surviving. You’re winning. You’re taking territory. You’re spreading your system. You’re making other people learn your language and salute your flag.

    This is America from the Louisiana Purchase through World War Two. Manifest destiny, Spanish-American War, kicking ass in two World Wars. Nobody could touch them. They were the biggest, baddest thing on the planet.

    Stage Three: The Age of Commerce

    You’ve conquered enough. Now it’s time to get rich. Trade routes, shipping lanes, currency dominance. The military is still there, but it exists to protect business interests, not expand territory.

    America after World War Two. Bretton Woods. The dollar becomes the world reserve currency. Bases everywhere, but not conquering. Making money. Lots of money. Manufacturing, innovation, patents, intellectual property. They built things and the world bought them.

    From the outposts, this looked good. Norway got Marshall Plan money. We got access to American markets. We got to rebuild after the war using American loans. The empire was generous when it was ascendant. That’s how empires work. They spread the wealth around to keep everyone loyal.

    Stage Four: The Age of Affluence (High Noon)

    This is the peak. Maximum wealth. Maximum power. Maximum confidence. You look around and everything is yours. Your cars are bigger. Your houses are bigger. Your military is bigger. You’re convinced you’re different. You’re special. The rules that applied to all those other empires don’t apply to you.

    America in the 1950s through maybe the 1990s. Post-war boom. Suburbs. Two cars. College degrees. Middle class prosperity. They actually believed their own bullshit. They thought they’d figured out how to make it permanent.

    The outposts got a taste of this too. Norway struck oil in the North Sea. Suddenly we had money. Welfare state, universal healthcare, free education. We thought we’d built something sustainable. But it was all downstream from American hegemony. Our prosperity required their security umbrella, their markets, their currency dominance.

    Stage Five: The Age of Intellect

    Wealth creates universities. Universities create intellectuals. Intellectuals ask questions. Philosophy, science, arts, literature all flourish. This should be good, right? More knowledge, more culture, more sophistication.

    Except here’s the problem: intellectualism replaces action. Debate replaces decision. Theory replaces practice. You’ve got 47 gender studies professors arguing about microaggressions while the bridges your grandparents built are literally crumbling.

    Rome had this phase. The historian and satirist Juvenal, writing around 100-130 CE, captured it perfectly. He watched Roman culture shift from martial virtue to grotesque consumption. His Satires are a sustained scream of rage at what his civilization had become.

    Juvenal described how the Roman government screeched to a halt over a giant fish. Emperor Domitian and his entire executive council devoted hours to debating what to do with an unusually large turbot. Not border defense. Not economic policy. A fish. This, to Juvenal, epitomized late Roman culture: obscene materialism, gluttony as status symbol, complete disconnection from anything that mattered.

    He also noted how the conquered provinces got infected. Initially, provincials from Armenia and other newly acquired territories were disgusted by Roman decadence. But exposure was corrosive. Within a generation, Armenian youth were carrying Roman degeneracy back to their own capital cities, spreading the cultural rot that would eventually hollow out the empire.

    Sound familiar? American cultural exports aren’t just movies and music anymore. They’re exporting gender ideology, therapeutic culture, victim Olympics, all the Stage Five intellectual masturbation that replaces the capacity to actually govern or build or defend.

    Stage Six: The Age of Decadence (Midnight)

    This is the end. Not the dramatic cinematic end. The slow, pathetic, undeniable end.

    Let’s look at three examples separated by a thousand years:

    Baghdad, 10th Century CE:

    Glubb’s description of the Abbasid Caliphate’s decline: “Contemporary historians deeply deplored the degeneracy of the times in which they lived, emphasizing particularly the indifference to religion, the increasing materialism and the laxity of sexual morals. They lamented also the corruption of the officials of the government and the fact that politicians always seemed to amass large fortunes while they were in office.”

    That was written about events from 1,000 years ago. Read it again. It’s indistinguishable from a description of Washington D.C. today.

    Rome, 1st-2nd Century CE:

    Juvenal again. He documented the shift from citizen virtue to mob dependency. By his time, the Roman populace had been reduced to what he called “bread and circuses.” The government distributed free grain and staged elaborate gladiatorial games to keep people politically compliant.

    The people, Juvenal wrote, “curtails its desires, and reveals its anxiety for two things only: bread and circuses.” They’d traded citizenship for consumption. They no longer cared about governance, about the empire, about anything except their next meal and their next entertainment.

    By the late Roman Empire, wealth inequality had exploded. Where patricians in the Roman Republic had 10 or 20 times the wealth of average citizens, late Empire elites possessed up to 200,000 times the wealth of common Romans. The middle collapsed. You were either oligarch or dependent. No in-between.

    Universal Basic Income is the modern bread. Netflix is the modern circus. Same trap. Different era.

    Ottoman Empire, 16th-18th Century:

    After Suleiman the Magnificent died in 1566, the Ottoman Empire entered terminal decline. The sultans stopped governing. They spent their time in harems while viziers and court factions tore the empire apart.

    Selim II, who succeeded Suleiman, was known as “Selim the Sot.” He loved wine. One of his first acts as sultan was to conquer Cyprus specifically to gain access to his favorite Cypriot wines. He was described as ugly and rude, surrounded by a bodyguard of 100 dwarfs in gold cloth carrying tiny scimitars.

    His successor Murat III wasn’t interested in political affairs at all. Meanwhile, corruption consumed the government. Nepotism replaced meritocracy. The once-elite Janissary corps became a political faction that murdered sultans and installed puppets. Local pashas ruled like warlords while the central authority decayed.

    The Ottoman elite assumed their superiority was permanent. They saw no need to adopt European innovations because they believed Ottoman practice was inherently superior. This worked in the 16th century when it was arguably true. By the 18th century, when European powers had industrialized and modernized their militaries, the Ottomans were still operating on assumptions from 200 years prior.

    They became the “Sick Man of Europe.” By the 19th century, they were kept alive only because European powers couldn’t agree on how to divide the corpse.

    The Pattern:

    Decadence doesn’t mean orgies and debauchery, though there’s plenty of that. It means the complete inversion of values. Weakness becomes strength. Discipline becomes oppression. Excellence becomes privilege. Victimhood becomes currency. Consumption replaces production. Feelings replace facts. The system rewards exactly the behaviors that destroy the system.

    You’re living in Stage Six. Right now. Today. Whether you’re American, Norwegian, German, Japanese. We’re all in the same collapsing structure. Some of us are just closer to the exits.

    Ray Dalio’s Math Problem

    If you think Glubb sounds grim, wait until you read Ray Dalio. Guy ran the biggest hedge fund in the world. Made billions predicting patterns other people couldn’t see. In 2021, he wrote “The Changing World Order” after studying 500 years of empire cycles.

    His conclusion? The math doesn’t work. And when the math doesn’t work, nothing else matters.

    Dalio identified three big cycles that determine whether your empire lives or dies:

    The Long-Term Debt Cycle (roughly 100 years)

    Empires rise by being productive. They fall by printing money to cover debts they can’t pay. It’s not complicated. You borrow, you print, your currency becomes worthless, your empire collapses.

    Rome did it. They debased their silver denarii so many times that by the late Empire, coins that were supposed to be silver were 90% copper. Weimar Germany did it. Every single empire that ever fell did it.

    America’s national debt is $34 trillion. That’s more than their entire GDP. They’re not paying that back. They’re not even pretending to pay it back. They’re just printing more money and hoping nobody notices that each dollar is worth less than the last one.

    Dalio’s principle: When central banks print a lot of money, buy stocks, gold, and commodities because their value will rise and the value of paper money will fall.

    Translation: Your dollars are dying. Act accordingly.

    The Internal Order and Disorder Cycle

    Societies oscillate between unity and fragmentation. When things are good, people unite around shared values. When things decline, they splinter into factions that hate each other more than they hate external enemies.

    Check American Twitter. Half the country thinks the other half is literally evil. Not wrong. Not misguided. Evil. Irredeemable. Subhuman. They’re more divided now than any time since the Civil War.

    That’s not hyperbole. That’s data. Political polarization is at historic highs. Trust in institutions is at historic lows. They don’t share a common reality anymore, let alone common values.

    From the outposts, we watch this with morbid fascination. Norway still has relatively high social trust. Our political parties disagree but they’re not calling each other fascists and communists daily. But we’re downstream from American culture. Give it five years. The rot spreads.

    The External Order and Disorder Cycle

    When your empire is strong, you make the rules. When it weakens, someone else does. Right now, China is rising. The dollar’s dominance is slipping. American military is stretched thin. Manufacturing is gone. Infrastructure is third-world.

    They’re not the hegemon anymore. They’re the former hegemon desperately pretending they still run the show while everyone else is quietly preparing for the transition.

    Dalio studied the Dutch Empire (peaked 1600s), British Empire (peaked 1800s), and American Empire (peaked… when, exactly?). Every single one followed the same arc. Rise, peak, decline, fall. The timeline is shockingly consistent.

    The American empire is where Britain was in 1945. Still convinced it’s in charge. Still acting like the empire. But the money, the power, the dominance are already gone. They just haven’t admitted it yet.

    From Norway’s perspective, this is terrifying. When Britain fell, their colonies and client states had to scramble. India got independence and immediately partitioned into three countries with millions dead. Other colonies descended into civil wars that lasted decades.

    What happens to Norway when America can’t maintain NATO? When the dollar isn’t the reserve currency? When our oil exports get priced in yuan instead of dollars? We’ve built our entire welfare state on the assumption of American hegemony. That assumption has an expiration date.

    The Evola Option: Ride the Tiger

    So what do you do when the math says your civilization is finished?

    Julius Evola, Italian philosopher and arguably history’s most hardcore pessimist, wrote “Ride the Tiger” in 1961. His answer is not what you expect.

    Evola believed we’re living in the Kali Yuga, the Hindu concept of the Dark Age. The age of dissolution, where everything traditional, hierarchical, and meaningful collapses into chaos. All the forces previously held in check by higher law and order are now free. And they’re winning.

    His point: You cannot stop it. You cannot reverse it. The current is too strong. If you try to fight modernity head-on, you will be overwhelmed and destroyed.

    So what’s left?

    Ride the tiger.

    The metaphor comes from an Eastern story. When a tiger is in a rage, it will destroy everything in its path. You cannot defeat it. But you can climb on its back, hold on tight, and wait until it exhausts itself. Then, when the chaos has burned itself out, you dismount and walk away intact.

    Applied to civilization: You cannot restore the traditional order. The structures that supported it are gone. Conservative attempts to “go back” are futile. The 1950s aren’t coming back. Neither are the 1850s. Or the 1250s. That world is dead.

    But you can maintain your inner sovereignty while the outer world disintegrates. You can live in modernity without being of modernity. You can engage the chaos without being consumed by it. You preserve the transcendent within while everything external burns.

    Evola’s prescription for the “differentiated man” (his term for someone who hasn’t been homogenized by mass culture):

    1. Maintain inner distance: Don’t identify with the prevailing values. When everyone around you is celebrating decadence, you observe it with detachment. You’re in the system but not of the system.
    2. Discipline without dogma: You don’t retreat to monasteries or compounds. You live in the modern world. You use its tools. But you do so with absolute self-mastery and zero attachment to its outcomes.
    3. Apoliteia: Political disengagement. Not because politics doesn’t matter, but because the political realm in a decadent society is irredeemably corrupt. Voting won’t save you. Neither will activism. The structures are already dead.

    This sounds bleak. It’s supposed to. Evola wasn’t selling hope. He was offering a survival manual for the end times.

    The Clarey Response: Enjoy the Decline

    Aaron Clarey took Evola’s philosophy and made it practical. “Enjoy the Decline” (2013) is what happens when an economist looks at the collapse data and decides: fuck it, might as well have fun.

    His thesis is simple: America is over. The math doesn’t work. The debt is unpayable. The political system is broken. The culture is degenerate. Decline is inevitable.

    Your choice is whether you spend your remaining time miserable about it or whether you adapt and enjoy yourself.

    Clarey’s practical advice:

    1. Minimize your tax burden

    Why work yourself to death funding a system that’s going to collapse anyway? Earn less. Live on less. Give the parasitic government as little as possible. You’re funding your own enslavement. Stop.

    2. Embrace minimalism

    The system wants you to chase the big house, the luxury car, the consumer lifestyle. That’s the trap. That’s what keeps you on the treadmill. Live small. Live cheap. Own nothing you don’t need. Freedom comes from not needing the system.

    3. Work for yourself, not The Man

    Corporate America is a soul-destroying machine designed to extract maximum productivity for minimum pay while making you think you’re building something. You’re not. You’re enriching shareholders while your life evaporates. Get out.

    Build your own thing. Consulting, freelancing, micro-business. Something where you own your time and your income isn’t capped by some middle manager’s decision about your “market rate.”

    4. Don’t marry, don’t have kids (controversial, but he’s being coldly logical)

    Marriage in a feminist, divorce-court, family-law system is financial suicide for men. Kids are expensive. The education system will indoctrinate them. The economy won’t provide them jobs. Why would you bring children into the terminal stage of a dying empire?

    (I’ll note: I have a kid and I’m fighting to protect that relationship. Clarey’s advice doesn’t apply universally. Context matters. But his point stands: don’t make major life commitments that chain you to a sinking ship unless you’re willing to pay that price.)

    5. Enjoy the decline

    Go to the bar. Take the motorcycle trip. Dance. Fuck. Travel. Read. Do all the things you’re supposed to do “later” after you’ve “made it.” Later isn’t coming. “Made it” won’t happen. The system is dying. You get one life. Live it now.

    Bukowski would’ve understood this completely. He spent 40 years working shit jobs, drinking cheap wine, and writing about how everyone is trapped in the same machine. His escape wasn’t grand revolution. It was just refusing to take the trap seriously. Work your shit job. Get drunk. Write your stories. Laugh at the absurdity. Die on your own terms.

    Clarey’s doing the same thing, just with economic data instead of poetry.

    Where We Are on the Clock

    Let’s map where America sits in both frameworks:

    Glubb’s stages:

    • Age of Pioneers: 1776-1820 (they built it)
    • Age of Conquests: 1820-1945 (they expanded it)
    • Age of Commerce: 1945-1990 (they monetized it)
    • Age of Affluence: 1950-2000 (they peaked)
    • Age of Intellect: 1990-2020 (they theorized while it crumbled)
    • Age of Decadence: 2020-? (we’re all watching it die)

    Dalio’s cycles:

    • Long-term debt: Terminal phase. $34 trillion debt, endless printing, inflation rising.
    • Internal disorder: Accelerating. Political violence, institutional collapse, competing realities.
    • External disorder: Active. China rising, dollar dominance fading, military overstretch.

    We’re not “heading toward” collapse. We’re in it. The fact that you still have electricity and Netflix doesn’t change the underlying math. Rome didn’t fall in a day. It decayed over generations while people living through it kept thinking things would stabilize.

    They didn’t.

    What To Actually Do

    You have three options:

    Option 1: Denial (What Most People Choose)

    Keep going to work. Keep voting. Keep believing the system will fix itself. Keep playing by rules that are already dead. Maximize your 401k. Plan for retirement. Act like the future will resemble the past.

    This is the default. This is what the system wants. Compliant, productive consumers who don’t ask questions.

    It will not end well.

    Option 2: Evola (For the Philosophically Inclined)

    Maintain your inner world while the outer world burns. Discipline, detachment, transcendence. You’re in the chaos but not of the chaos. You observe the decline with the calm of someone who knows the cycle is inevitable and your job is to preserve whatever can be preserved within yourself.

    This requires serious mental discipline. Most people aren’t wired for it. But if you are, it’s the way to maintain sanity and dignity while everything else collapses.

    Option 3: Clarey (For the Practically Minded)

    Minimize your exposure to the dying system. Reduce expenses. Become self-employed. Pay as little tax as legally possible. Own your time. Enjoy your life. Let the empire die around you while you extract as much personal happiness as possible from the remaining time.

    This is the most accessible option for normal people. You don’t need to be a philosopher. You just need to do the math and act accordingly.

    The Real Question

    The empires die. That’s non-negotiable. 250 years, give or take. Glubb studied 11 of them. Dalio studied five centuries. The pattern holds.

    The real question isn’t whether America falls. It’s whether you fall with it.

    You can spend the next 20 years grinding away in a cubicle, saving for a retirement that probably won’t happen, playing a game where the rules are rigged against you, believing that your hard work will be rewarded by a system that’s already dead.

    Or you can look at the math, accept the reality, and decide that your one finite life is more valuable than loyalty to a civilization that peaked before you were born.

    Glubb, Dalio, Evola, and Clarey all arrive at the same place from different angles: The party is over. The lights are coming on. The bill is coming due. You can sit there pretending tomorrow will look like yesterday, or you can walk out the door while you still can.

    The tiger is already raging. The question is whether you climb on or get trampled.

    Personally? I’m buying gold, building skills, minimizing overhead, and planning to be insufferably smug when everyone who called me a pessimist realizes I was just early.

    Because here’s the thing about empire collapse: the people who see it coming and prepare accordingly end up fine. Sometimes better than fine. They’re the ones who understand that the chaos is temporary but the skills and assets you build are portable.

    The people who don’t see it coming, or worse, who see it and ignore it? They’re the ones standing in bread lines wondering how it all went to shit.

    We’re 250 years in. Exactly on schedule. Maybe we’ve got 10 years left. Maybe we’re already in freefall and just haven’t hit the ground yet.

    Doesn’t matter. The math is the math. The pattern is the pattern. The empire dies.

    Your move is deciding what you do with that information.

    Bukowski would’ve raised a glass, written a poem about it, and fucked someone inappropriate. Clarey would’ve calculated his tax savings and booked a flight somewhere warm. Evola would’ve maintained his inner sovereignty while watching it burn.

    Me? I’m doing all three.

    The boats are burning anyway. Might as well enjoy the warmth.

  • Nothing Lasts, Nothing Matters, and Your Wallet is Empty: A Love Story

    Nothing Lasts, Nothing Matters, and Your Wallet is Empty: A Love Story

    I watched a man at the coffee shop yesterday spend four minutes deciding between two identical t-shirts on his phone. Both cost $8.99. Both looked like they’d survive maybe three washes before becoming shop rags. He bought both. Then spent another six minutes scrolling through his Instagram feed, double-tapping pictures of other people’s identical t-shirts.

    This is America. This is also Norway, Germany, Japan, and everywhere else the lights stay on past 9 PM. We’ve built a civilization where a grown man can agonize over disposable cotton for longer than he’d spend thinking about his retirement, his health, or whether his kid can read at grade level.

    And here’s the thing that’ll keep you up at night if you let it: this is exactly what the system needs him to do.

    The Shallowness Machine

    There’s an 85-minute documentary on YouTube by Lewis Waller (Then & Now) called “Our Consumer Society” that lays out something most people feel but can’t articulate. The philosophers Jean Baudrillard and Fredric Jameson spent decades analyzing what they called the “depthlessness” of modern culture. Not deep versus shallow like “Marvel movies are shallow and Dostoevsky is deep.” No—they meant something more fundamental. They meant we’ve lost the ability to engage with anything beyond its surface because the surface is all that gets manufactured anymore.

    David Harvey, another academic who actually understands how money works, nailed the economic mechanism: flexible accumulation. That’s the fancy term for “your t-shirt was designed in California, the buttons made in Vietnam, the fabric woven in Bangladesh, assembled in Honduras, shipped through Singapore, and sold to you by a company headquartered in tax-free Delaware while the actual humans involved never see each other and get paid whenever the algorithm decides they’ve produced enough today.”

    The result? Nothing has depth because nothing CAN have depth. By the time the t-shirt exists, the world has moved on. New season, new color, new fit. The old one isn’t “out of style”—it never had a style to be out of. It was always just today’s disposable content, and today ended six hours ago.

    Jameson called this “schizophrenic culture.” Jump from thing to thing, place to place, never settling long enough to actually understand anything. Just surfaces. Images. Vibes. And then it’s gone and here’s the next one.

    The Bukowski Lesson

    Charles Bukowski spent decades working at the post office, drinking cheap wine, and writing about the absurdity of American life in the 20th century. He wasn’t a philosopher. He was just a guy who noticed that most people spend their lives doing shit they hate to buy shit they don’t need to impress people they don’t like.

    He’d walk into a bar at 2 PM on a Tuesday and there’d be the same guys, drinking the same drinks, complaining about the same women and the same bosses and the same bills. And he’d realize: these guys are living the same day over and over, except every iteration they’re a little older and a little broker and a little more certain this is just how it is.

    But here’s where Bukowski gets interesting: he never thought he was better than them. He was right there at the bar, same stool, same drink. The difference was he looked at it straight. No bullshit. No “I’m working hard for my dreams” or “this is temporary until my ship comes in.” Just: “I’m trading my hours for dollars so I can drink them away because the alternative is thinking about trading my hours for dollars.”

    That honesty is extinct now.

    We’ve replaced it with: “I’m building my personal brand.” “I’m investing in experiences.” “I’m focusing on self-care.” “I’m living my best life.”

    All of which are just prettier ways to say: “I’m spending money I don’t have on things that don’t last because the pain of not spending is worse than the pain of being broke.”

    The Attention Economy Acceleration

    Here’s where it gets ugly.

    The old consumer trap worked like this: You work 40 hours, get paid, see advertisement for product, buy product, product breaks or goes out of style, repeat. Simple. Predictable. Soul-crushing but at least comprehensible.

    The new consumer trap works like this: You work 40 hours, get paid, spend 30 hours scrolling platforms that monetize your attention, see 8,000 micro-advertisements disguised as content, develop parasocial relationships with people you’ll never meet, subscribe to their OnlyFans/Patreon/Premium/Exclusive Content, watch them live lives you can’t afford, buy products they shill, those products arrive and immediately feel empty, scroll more to fill the emptiness, repeat forever until death.

    The product isn’t even the product anymore. The product is the feeling you get from the 4.5 seconds between clicking “buy” and the dopamine crash when you remember you just spent $89 on supplements from an influencer who might be CGI.

    Sophie Rain makes $43 million a year on OnlyFans. That’s real money. But here’s the mathematical horror: she’s extracting that from tens of thousands of men who are paying $5, $10, $50 a month for parasocial intimacy they’ll never consummate.

    Let’s do the ugly math: Average OnlyFans subscriber spends $45/month. Let’s say he makes $50,000 a year. Take-home after tax: maybe $37,000. $45/month = $540/year. That’s 1.4% of his takehome going to… what, exactly? Digital intimacy? The feeling of connection? Access to a woman who doesn’t know his name?

    Now multiply that by the streaming services ($180/year), the gaming subscriptions ($180/year), the delivery apps ($600/year), the impulse Amazon purchases ($2,000/year). We’re at $3,500 annually—almost 10% of take-home—spent on nothing that lasts, nothing that builds, nothing that exists tomorrow.

    Bukowski would’ve called it “paying for the privilege of feeling less alone while becoming more isolated.”

    Baudrillard would’ve called it “the consumption of signs divorced from authentic need.”

    I call it the exact mechanism by which the system keeps you compliant.

    The Fracturing of Everything

    David Harvey’s “flexible accumulation” isn’t just about t-shirts. It’s about everything.

    Your job? Fractured into tasks, outsourced to contractors, gig-ified into hourly chunks, benefits stripped, pensions killed, security eliminated. You’re not an employee. You’re a flexible accumulation of labor hours.

    Your relationships? Fractured into swipes, messages, hookups, situationships, “it’s complicated,” ghosting, breadcrumbing, and three years later you’re still single and your ex is married to someone they met in a coffee shop without an app.

    Your attention? Fractured into 8-second TikToks, 280-character hot takes, 30-second Reels, infinite scroll, algorithmic feed, no beginning, no end, just middle forever.

    Your sense of self? Fractured into personal brand, professional persona, online avatar, dating profile, LinkedIn optimization, Instagram aesthetic, “authentic self,” and underneath it all you can’t remember who you actually are when no one’s watching.

    Nothing lasts because nothing is built to last because the economy requires constant replacement.

    Harvey figured out that consumer goods companies need you to keep buying. But they hit a problem: How do you get people to replace things that still work? Answer: Stop making things that work. Fast fashion isn’t a bug, it’s the feature. Your $8.99 t-shirt is designed to fall apart after 12 washes because wash 13 is when you buy another one.

    But it’s deeper than planned obsolescence. It’s planned meaninglessness.

    The t-shirt never meant anything. It’s not “your favorite shirt.” It’s not “the shirt you were wearing when X happened.” It’s just shirt #47 in a continuous stream of identical shirts that you’ll own for 4 months and forget immediately.

    Same with your subscriptions. Same with your content. Same with your relationships. Nothing lasts long enough to mean anything.

    The OnlyFans Layer: Commodifying the Last Uncommodified Thing

    For thousands of years, human connection was the one thing you couldn’t buy. You could buy sex—prostitution’s the oldest profession. You could buy companionship—courtesans existed in every civilization. But you couldn’t buy the feeling of being wanted by someone specific.

    Until now.

    OnlyFans and its ecosystem don’t sell sex. Pornography is free. They sell personalized attention. They sell the girlfriend experience without the girlfriend. They sell intimacy without the risk. They sell connection without the inconvenience of an actual human with needs and opinions and bad days.

    And it works. $7.22 billion in 2024. Growing 9.1% year-over-year.

    But here’s the thing that makes it perfect slavery: the subscribers think they’re choosing this.

    Nobody’s forcing them to spend $45/month on parasocial relationships. They’re doing it voluntarily. They prefer it to:

    • Actual dating (requires vulnerability, rejection risk, time investment)
    • Actual relationships (requires compromise, communication, showing up)
    • Actual sex (requires connection, physical presence, emotional availability)

    The OnlyFans subscription is the ultimate shallow consumption. It’s so shallow it doesn’t even pretend to have depth. You know she doesn’t know you. She knows you don’t know her. The platform knows you both know it’s transactional. And yet you pay. And she performs. And the platform extracts 20%.

    Baudrillard called this “hyperreality”—when the simulation becomes preferable to reality. When the menu tastes better than the meal. When the image is more desirable than the thing itself.

    Jameson called it the “weakening of historicity”—when nothing has a past or future, only an eternal present of consumption.

    I call it the logical endpoint of a system that commodifies everything, including the parts of being human that used to be uncomodifiable.

    Your Time Is Your Life, and You’re Selling It for Shit

    Aaron Clarey built his whole philosophy on one principle: everything is time. When you buy something, you’re not spending dollars—you’re spending the hours of your life you traded for those dollars.

    That $8.99 t-shirt? At $20/hour after tax, that’s 27 minutes of your life. The t-shirt lasts three months. You’ll wear it maybe 15 times. You spent 27 minutes of your life for 15 wearings of disposable cotton. Math it out: 1.8 minutes of your life per wearing.

    Now do that for everything you own. Your subscriptions, your impulse purchases, your “I deserve this” treats, your “just this once” splurges. Add it up. How many hours of your life are stored in shit you’ll never use again?

    Bukowski knew this. He drank because at least when you’re drunk, you’re not counting the hours. But the math doesn’t stop just because you’re not watching.

    You have roughly 4,000 weeks if you’re lucky. 80 years. Most people spend 40 of those years working. That’s 2,000 weeks—half your life—trading time for money. And then they take that money and trade it back for things that don’t last.

    You’re born. You go to school for 16 years (free labor for the education system). You work for 40 years (selling your time to employers). You retire for 20 years (if you saved enough). You die. In between, you consume. You buy. You subscribe. You scroll. You accumulate. You discard. And nothing—nothing—lasts.

    The t-shirt doesn’t last. The subscription doesn’t last. The dopamine hit from the purchase doesn’t last. The feeling of having enough doesn’t last. And you don’t last either.

    The Producer Inversion Nobody Talks About

    Here’s where it all comes together.

    In a producer-based economy, wealth flows toward you. You build something, provide something, create something. Value moves in your direction.

    In a consumer-based economy, wealth flows away from you. You buy things, subscribe to things, consume things. Value moves away from you.

    The genius of modern capitalism is convincing you that consuming is producing.

    You’re not just buying a t-shirt—you’re “supporting small businesses.” You’re not just scrolling OnlyFans—you’re “empowering sex workers.” You’re not just binging Netflix—you’re “engaging with important narratives.” You’re not just impulse shopping—you’re “practicing self-care.”

    Every consumer behavior has been rebranded as productive activity. The vocabulary has shifted to hide the transaction. You’re not a consumer anymore—you’re a “community member,” a “supporter,” a “fan,” an “early adopter.”

    But the math doesn’t lie: Wealth is flowing AWAY from you. Your bank account gets smaller. Their bank account gets bigger. You traded hours of your life for something that won’t exist in six months.

    The platform wins (20% cut of every transaction). The creator wins (if they’re top 1%). You lose. And you’ll do it again tomorrow because the alternative is facing how little time you have left.

    The Norway Problem: High-Trust Societies Collapse Faster

    Scandinavian countries are fascinating case studies because they’ve built high-trust, high-welfare societies that, in theory, should be immune to predatory capitalism. Strong safety nets. Good education. Gender equality. Low corruption.

    And yet: Norway’s fertility rate is 1.41. Median household debt-to-income is 150%. Labor force participation for men 18-35 is declining. OnlyFans usage is through the roof.

    Why? Because when you remove the traditional incentives for building (provide for family, accumulate for old age, work hard to avoid poverty), you also remove the motivation to resist consumption.

    If the state provides a minimum comfortable existence, why work 60 hours building a business? If women don’t need male providers economically, why develop provider capabilities? If OnlyFans offers top-of-market income for the top 1% of attractive women, why pursue education or career?

    The safety net creates the conditions for perfect consumer slavery by eliminating the fear that once prevented overconsumption. You can’t fall too far. So you spend. And scroll. And subscribe. And consume. And the days blur together, and nothing lasts, and nothing matters, and your wallet is empty, but hey, at least you’ve got universal healthcare.

    Bukowski would’ve seen it immediately: Give a man security and he’ll trade it for novelty. Give him comfort, and he’ll spend it on distraction. Give him everything he needs, and he’ll waste it on everything he doesn’t.

    The Shallow End Where We All Drown

    Baudrillard and Jameson were trying to warn us: A culture without depth can’t sustain itself. When everything is surface-level, when nothing connects to anything else, when history doesn’t matter and the future is just more of today, you get collapse.

    Not a dramatic collapse. Not revolution or apocalypse. Just slow decay. The infrastructure built in the 1960s is crumbling because nobody’s building anymore. Fertility rates below replacement because nobody’s forming families. Innovation is slowing because attention extraction is more profitable than research. Communities are dissolving because parasocial relationships are easier than real ones.

    You wake up one day and realize: The world your parents knew is gone. The world your children will inherit is worse. And in between, you spent 40 years buying t-shirts and subscribing to content and scrolling feeds, and none of it—none of it—mattered.

    That’s the shallowness machine. That’s flexible accumulation. That’s consumer culture in its final form.

    And the worst part? It was all voluntary. Nobody forced you. You chose this. Every day. Every purchase. Every subscription. Every scroll.

    You’re the man at the coffee shop spending four minutes choosing between identical shirts, and you can’t remember when you stopped choosing things that mattered.

    The Way Out (That You Won’t Take)

    Here’s what you do: Stop buying shit. Stop subscribing to parasocial relationships. Stop scrolling platforms that commodify your attention. Build something. Produce something. Own your time.

    Start a business. Learn a skill. Create value. Become a producer instead of a consumer. Spend your money on assets that generate income instead of liabilities that generate dopamine.

    It’s not complicated. Clarey laid it out in 400 pages. It’s just math. It’s just opportunity cost. It’s just recognizing that your time is finite and every hour spent on consumption is an hour not spent on production.

    But you won’t do it.

    You’ll read this article, feel a moment of recognition, maybe a flash of guilt or anger or existential dread, and then you’ll click over to Instagram or Reddit or Twitter and scroll for 45 minutes and forget this existed.

    Because the system isn’t designed to be escaped. It’s designed to be inescapable. And the beautiful horror of it is: you built your own cage and locked yourself inside and threw away the key and called it freedom.

    Bukowski knew. He spent his life drunk and broke and honest about it. At least he never pretended the cage was a penthouse.

    But you? You’re in the same cage, and you decorated it with string lights and framed prints of inspirational quotes and called it “making the best of it.”

    And every month, you pay rent on the cage. And every day, you scroll through pictures of other people’s cages. And every year, you wonder why you feel empty despite having everything you were told to want.

    Nothing lasts. Not the t-shirt, not the subscription, not the dopamine, not the youth, not the time.

    Your wallet is empty.

    And the machine keeps running.

    Welcome to consumer society. Your order has been shipped.

  • They Don’t Make Them Like They Used To (And It’s Not Just Nostalgia)

    They Don’t Make Them Like They Used To (And It’s Not Just Nostalgia)

    I know what you’re thinking. “Things were better in the old days” is the oldest complaint in human history. Every generation says it. Socrates probably said it. Your grandfather definitely said it.

    So let me get this out of the way up front: nostalgia bias is real. Psychologists call it rosy retrospection — a well-documented cognitive tendency to remember the past as better than it was. We forget the bad stuff, polish up the good stuff, and end up comparing a curated highlight reel of 1995 against the unedited reality of today. I know this. I’ve read the research. I’m aware that my brain is doing this.

    And I still think something is measurably wrong.

    Not with everything. Not in some grand civilizational collapse. But in a specific, observable, increasingly irritating way that touches almost every consumer interaction I have. The products are worse. The people selling them know less. And the systems designed to help you when things go wrong are engineered — deliberately, I’d argue — to make you give up before you reach a human being.

    Let me walk you through it.

    The kid in the electronics store

    A few weeks ago I walked through a shopping mall about half an hour before closing time. Most of the stores were quiet. And in almost every one, the same scene: young employees sitting behind counters, staring into their phones.

    I’m not about to do the boomer rant about kids and their screens. But this observation triggered a memory — or maybe a realization — about something that’s changed fundamentally in retail.

    Before smartphones, when a shop was empty and the evening was slow, employees had nothing to do. Nothing except look around the store. Read the product brochures stacked on the counter. Pick up a speaker, a camera, a jacket, and actually handle it. Boredom forced engagement with the inventory. You absorbed product knowledge by osmosis, simply because there was nothing else to absorb.

    That mechanism is gone.

    I’ve tested this more times than I’d like to admit. I’ll spend ten minutes on my phone researching a product — a speaker system, a pair of headphones, a piece of kitchen equipment — and then walk into the store to buy it. When I ask the employee a basic question about the product they’re selling, I already know more than they do. Every single time. Not because I’m some kind of expert, but because the bar has dropped through the floor.

    This isn’t just my perception. Retail training hours have been in decline for years. The shift from specialty stores — where the guy selling you a hi-fi system had been an audiophile for twenty years — to generic big-box chains staffed by whoever applied last Tuesday has created an entire generation of retail workers who are paid minimum wage to stand near products they’ve never used, for a company that invested nothing in teaching them about what they sell.

    The transaction used to include knowledge transfer. You went to the store partly because the person there could tell you something you didn’t know. That value proposition is dead. Now the store is just a warehouse with lights, and the employee is a checkout obstacle between you and the exit.

    The washing machine that lasted thirty years

    My parents had a washing machine that ran for over twenty years. Their fridge lasted even longer. Damn, they still have a freezer that’s almost as old as me, when I think about it. These aren’t exceptional stories — ask anyone over fifty, and they’ll tell you the same.

    Now look at the data. A widely cited figure from the National Association of Home Builders puts the average lifespan of a modern washing machine at about ten years. Refrigerators fare slightly better at thirteen. The machines your parents bought in the 1990s routinely doubled those figures.

    Part of this is survivorship bias — you remember the ones that lasted, not the ones that broke. Fair enough. But the trend in appliance durability is backed by repair industry data, consumer reports, and the simple observation that appliance companies now make more money from extended warranties and repair services than they do from building things that work.

    Clothing tells the same story. The fast fashion model — Zara, H&M, Shein — has produced a race to the bottom in fabric weight, stitching quality, and garment lifespan. A cotton t-shirt from 1995 had measurably more fabric per square meter than one from 2024. The stitching was tighter. The dye held longer. You can argue that it also cost more in real terms, and that’s true. But the point isn’t that cheap things are cheap. The point is that the baseline has shifted downward across the entire market, and even mid-range products now feel disposable in a way they didn’t a generation ago.

    Tools are another case study. Craftsman, once the gold standard of American hand tools, moved manufacturing overseas and watched quality decline in lockstep. Stanley, DeWalt, the whole lot — the tools your grandfather left you in the garage still work better than the ones on the shelf at the hardware store.

    I’m not romanticizing the past. Plenty of things are genuinely better now — electronics are faster, cars are safer, medical care is miraculous compared to the 1980s. But durable goods, the physical objects you use every day, have gotten measurably worse. The question is why.

    The answer, as usual, is incentives. A washing machine that lasts thirty years is a terrible business model. One that lasts eight years and requires a service call at year five is a revenue stream. This isn’t a conspiracy theory — it’s publicly stated corporate strategy. It has a name. Planned obsolescence. And it’s a topic worth its own article, which I’ll get to.

    The phone tree from hell

    If the product breaks and you want help, good luck.

    Customer service has undergone a transformation in the last decade that would be impressive if it weren’t so infuriating. The goal is no longer to help you. The goal is to make you go away.

    Call any large company — your telecom provider, your bank, an airline — and you’ll enter a phone tree designed by someone who actively hates you. Press 1 for this. Press 3 for that. Describe your problem to a robot that doesn’t understand you. Get transferred. Describe it again. Get disconnected. Start over.

    This has gotten dramatically worse with the introduction of AI chatbots. Companies have figured out that if they put an AI between you and a human, a significant percentage of customers will give up before they ever reach a person. The chatbot doesn’t need to solve your problem. It just needs to absorb your frustration until you stop trying.

    Research backs this up. Studies consistently show that consumers overwhelmingly prefer human agents over AI for anything beyond the most basic queries. But companies don’t care about your preference — they care about their cost per interaction. Every call you abandon is money saved.

    Some companies have gone further, implementing what UX researchers call dark patterns — interface designs specifically intended to make it difficult to cancel a subscription, reach a human, or file a complaint. The “contact us” page that leads to an FAQ. The chatbot that loops you back to the same three unhelpful options. The phone number that doesn’t exist on the website and has to be found through Google.

    This is not incompetence. This is strategy. And it works precisely because most people don’t have the time or energy to fight through it.

    The airport, the software, the bridge

    The consumer-facing problems are annoying. The institutional ones are scarier.

    In early 2023, a cluster of serious runway incursions at U.S. airports got bad enough that the FAA issued a Safety Call to Action. The most serious near-misses — Category A and B, where aircraft nearly collided — rose sharply over the preceding years. An inspector general’s audit found that the FAA had implemented only five of its own twenty-four safety recommendations by late 2024. The good news: the numbers dropped in 2024. The concerning news: the problem was driven heavily by understaffed control towers, and the staffing issue hasn’t been fixed.

    Software updates that make things worse have become so common there’s a running joke about it in tech circles. Every major platform — Windows, iOS, whatever your bank is running — has shipped updates that broke features that worked fine before. The instinct to “move fast and break things” has migrated from Silicon Valley startups to institutions where breaking things has consequences.

    The American Society of Civil Engineers gives U.S. infrastructure a C grade — the highest in the report card’s twenty-seven-year history, but still a C, with nine out of eighteen categories in the D range and a projected $3.7 trillion investment gap.

    None of this is apocalyptic. Planes still fly. Bridges mostly stand. Software mostly works. But the margin for error feels thinner, and the people responsible for maintaining it feel less capable, or at least less supported, than they used to be.

    So what’s actually happening?

    Here’s my honest assessment, stripped of both nostalgia and doomerism.

    Some things are genuinely worse. Product durability has declined, and the incentives driving that decline are structural, not accidental. Retail expertise has evaporated as companies cut training budgets and rely on high-turnover, low-wage staff. Customer service has been deliberately degraded to reduce costs.

    Some things are perception. We notice failures more because we’re exposed to more information. A runway near-miss in 1985 might never have made the news. Today it trends on Twitter within hours. Our sense of institutional competence may partly reflect the fact that we now see every crack in the facade, not that the facade has more cracks.

    And some things are the predictable result of optimizing for the wrong metrics. Companies optimize for quarterly earnings, not product lifespan. Airlines optimize for on-time departures, not safety margins. Software companies optimize for feature count, not stability. When you measure the wrong thing, you get more of the wrong thing.

    The competence crisis, to the extent it’s real, is not about individuals being stupider than they used to be. It’s about systems that have systematically devalued competence — in hiring, in training, in product design, in customer interaction — because competence is expensive and most consumers will tolerate its absence until something breaks badly enough to make the news.

    The uncomfortable takeaway

    I don’t have a neat solution. I’m not going to tell you to “vote with your wallet” or “support local businesses” or any of that bumper-sticker advice.

    But I will say this: recognizing the pattern changes how you move through the world. When you understand that the phone tree is designed to make you quit, you stop blaming yourself for getting frustrated and start treating it as a system to be gamed. When you understand that the kid in the electronics store doesn’t know anything, you do your own research before you walk in. When you understand that the washing machine is built to fail, you buy the one with the best repair track record, not the one with the best marketing.

    The world isn’t falling apart. But it is being optimized in ways that don’t serve you. And the sooner you stop being surprised by that, the sooner you can start making decisions that actually work in your favor.

  • Fixing Things That Aren’t Broken: The Economy of Useless Solutions

    Fixing Things That Aren’t Broken: The Economy of Useless Solutions

    A friend of mine lives in a block of flats in Oslo. Normal building. Normal entrance. For years, there was a panel of doorbells next to the front door — one button per apartment, each with a name label. You found the name, pressed the button, the door buzzed open. The whole interaction took about three seconds. It worked perfectly. It had worked perfectly for decades.

    Then someone replaced it with a QR code.

    Now, to ring my friend’s doorbell, I take out my phone, open the camera, scan the QR code, wait for a webpage to load, scroll through a list of residents to find his name, tap it, and wait for the system to connect. On a good day this takes maybe thirty seconds. On a bad day — poor signal, slow page load, wrong browser — it takes a minute or more.

    For me, a young-ish man who’s reasonably comfortable with technology, it’s an annoyance. For the eighty-year-old woman who lives on the third floor, I imagine it’s closer to a hostage situation.

    Somebody sold this system to the building’s board. Somebody made a pitch about modernization, digital infrastructure, maybe even security. Somebody got paid. An economic transaction occurred. GDP went up by the value of that transaction.

    And the end result is that entering the building is now ten times harder than it was before.

    This is what I’ve started calling fake economic activity. Solutions that generate revenue without generating value. Products and regulations that create the appearance of progress while making the user’s life measurably worse. And once you start noticing it, you see it everywhere.

    Frédéric Bastiat saw this coming in 1850

    The French economist Frédéric Bastiat published a parable in 1850 called “The Broken Window.” A shopkeeper’s son breaks a pane of glass. The onlookers console the shopkeeper by pointing out that the glazier will now have work. Money will flow, and the economy will benefit. Bastiat’s point was that this reasoning is insane. The money spent replacing the window can’t be spent on something new. The economy didn’t gain a window; it lost whatever the shopkeeper would have bought instead.

    The broken window fallacy is one of the most important ideas in economics, and it describes exactly what’s happening with half the “innovations” being sold to us today. The QR code doorbell didn’t add value to the building. It replaced something that worked with something that doesn’t work as well. But it generated economic activity — a sale, an installation, a subscription fee, maybe ongoing maintenance. By the crude metric of GDP, this counts as growth. By the metric of “does the building work better than it did before,” it’s a net negative.

    This distinction between economic activity and actual value creation, is one that mainstream economics is remarkably bad at making. GDP measures movement, not direction. It counts the ambulance ride to the hospital the same as the gym membership that keeps you out of one.

    The paper straw that dissolves in your drink

    Let’s talk about straws.

    In 2019, the EU banned single-use plastic straws under its Single-Use Plastics Directive. The intention was good. Plastic waste is a real problem, particularly in oceans. Nobody with a brain disputes that.

    But here’s what actually happened.

    Restaurants and bars replaced plastic straws with paper ones. Paper straws cost more to produce. They require different machinery to manufacture. They dissolve in your drink after about ten minutes. They taste like wet cardboard. Every single person who has used a paper straw knows this. It is perhaps the most universally loathed consumer product of the 2020s.

    And the environmental benefit? Straws represent approximately 0.03% of ocean plastic waste by mass. Even if you eliminated every straw on earth, you would barely register a change in the actual problem. Meanwhile, a 2023 Belgian study tested 39 straw brands and found that 90% of paper straws contained PFAS — “forever chemicals” — including PFOA, which has been globally banned since 2020. The stainless steel straws? Zero PFAS detected.

    So the “green” replacement for plastic straws is a product that performs worse, costs more, contains banned toxic chemicals, and addresses a fraction of a percent of the problem it claims to solve. But it generated enormous economic activity — new manufacturing, new supply chains, new regulations, new compliance costs — and made everyone involved feel like they were Doing Something.

    The cap that won’t let go

    If you’ve bought a bottle of water or juice in Europe recently, you’ve encountered the tethered cap. Since July 2024, EU regulations require that plastic bottle caps remain attached to the container. The idea is that loose caps get lost, end up in landfills or oceans, and don’t get recycled with the bottle.

    Again, the intention isn’t crazy. Bottle caps are a common litter item. But the execution reveals the same pattern.

    In Germany, where the regulation was rolled out, ninety-seven percent of plastic bottles were already being recycled, and over ninety-one percent were returned with their caps attached. The problem the regulation targets barely existed in countries with functioning deposit systems. A German MEP formally questioned the regulation’s logic in a parliamentary submission, calling it “illogical.”

    Meanwhile, a consumer study by the German Institute for Standardization found that children, elderly people, and people with physical disabilities had serious difficulty opening the new caps. Some couldn’t open them at all. Others experienced spills and minor injuries. The cap that was supposed to help the environment now prevents a portion of the population from drinking their water without assistance.

    But somebody manufactured those caps. Somebody retooled the bottling lines. Somebody ran the compliance process. Economic activity was generated. Boxes were checked.

    The app that replaced the parking meter

    This pattern extends far beyond environmental regulation.

    In cities across Europe, simple parking meters have been replaced by apps. To park your car, you now need to download an app, create an account, enter your license plate, select a zone, enter payment details, and start a session. When you return, you need to remember to stop the session or you keep getting charged.

    The parking meter required coins. You put them in, you got time. A child could do it. The app requires a smartphone, a data connection, an account, and the patience of a monk.

    For the city, the app is cheaper to maintain than physical meters. For the app company, it’s a revenue stream. For the user, it’s yet another account, yet another password, yet another piece of friction added to a task that used to take fifteen seconds.

    The same logic has colonized laundromats (apps to start washers), restaurants (QR codes to order), hotels (apps to unlock rooms), and even some public bathrooms (QR codes to enter). In each case, a simple physical interaction — push a button, turn a handle, hand over cash — has been replaced by a digital one that requires more steps, more time, and more dependence on a device that might be dead, out of signal, or running the wrong operating system.

    The justification is always efficiency. But efficient for whom? Not for you. For the company that no longer has to maintain the physical thing, hire the person, or process the cash. The efficiency gain is entirely on their side. The friction is entirely on yours.

    David Graeber’s ghost is nodding

    The late anthropologist David Graeber wrote about a related phenomenon in his 2018 book Bullshit Jobs. His argument was that a huge portion of modern employment consists of roles that even the people doing them believe are pointless — administrators administrating administrators, compliance officers ensuring compliance with compliance requirements, consultants consulting on the need for consultants.

    Graeber’s specific numbers are debatable. A YouGov poll found thirty-seven percent of British workers thought their job made no meaningful contribution. Other studies put the figure much lower. But the qualitative observation lands hard: a lot of economic activity exists not because it produces anything useful, but because it employs people and generates transactions.

    The QR code doorbell is the product-design equivalent of a bullshit job. It exists not because anyone needed it, but because someone could sell it. The paper straw exists not because it solves the ocean plastic problem, but because it’s a visible, marketable response to a problem that requires invisible, structural solutions nobody wants to pay for.

    What GDP doesn’t measure

    Here’s the thing that bothers me most about all of this.

    We measure economic health primarily through GDP — the total value of goods and services produced. By this measure, replacing every functional doorbell in Norway with a QR code system would be a net positive for the economy. So would breaking every window in Oslo and replacing them. So would making every product slightly worse so people have to buy replacements more often.

    GDP doesn’t measure whether life got better. It measures whether money moved. And when your primary metric rewards movement regardless of direction, you get exactly what we have now: an economy that generates enormous activity while making the everyday experience of being a consumer subtly, persistently worse.

    This isn’t a left-wing argument or a right-wing argument. It’s an observation about what happens when you optimize for the wrong thing. And it connects to a deeper question about what the economy is actually for.

    Is it for producing the numbers that make quarterly reports look good? Or is it for making the experience of daily life — buying things, entering buildings, parking cars, drinking through straws — actually work?

    How to think about this

    I’m not a Luddite. I love technology. I’m building my own server infrastructure at home. I think automation and AI will make certain things genuinely better.

    But I’ve started applying a simple test to every “innovation” I encounter: is this better for me, or is it better for the company selling it to me? If the answer is only the latter, it’s not innovation. It’s extraction dressed up as progress.

    The doorbell worked. The parking meter worked. The plastic straw worked. The bottle cap worked. Replacing them generated economic activity, created the impression of forward motion, and made someone money.

    None of it made my life better. Most of it made my life slightly, persistently worse.

    And the most dishonest part? They keep telling me it’s for my benefit.

  • The Green Leaf Next to the Lie: How Corporations Sold You Their Conscience

    The Green Leaf Next to the Lie: How Corporations Sold You Their Conscience

    Let me be clear about something before I start. Climate change is real. It’s caused by human activity. The science is settled, and I’m not interested in debating it.

    What I am interested in debating is the absolute circus of corporate environmental theater that has sprung up around it — the green leaves, the carbon calculators, the “eco-friendly” receipts, the electric delivery vans proudly announced on your package tracking app while the same package has been driven around your county for three days because nobody could be bothered to ring the doorbell.

    Because here’s the thing: if you accept that climate change is a serious problem — and I do — then you should be furious about how much of the response is performative nonsense designed to make companies look good rather than actually reduce emissions.

    The carbon footprint was invented by an oil company

    Most people think “carbon footprint” is a scientific concept, developed by climate researchers to help individuals understand their impact on the planet. It isn’t.

    The term was popularized by BP in 2004. Yes, British Petroleum, the company responsible for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, through a $250 million advertising campaign designed by Ogilvy & Mather. BP launched an online carbon footprint calculator and ran ads asking Londoners, “What’s your carbon footprint?” Nearly 300,000 people used the calculator in its first year.

    It was a masterpiece of misdirection. The world’s second-largest non-state oil company managed to reframe the climate conversation from “what should fossil fuel corporations do about their emissions” to “what should you, personally, do about yours.” Instead of talking about the 71% of global industrial emissions that come from just 100 companies, we started talking about whether you should drive less or eat fewer burgers.

    Geoffrey Supran, director of the Climate Accountability Lab at the University of Miami, has documented how this playbook was borrowed directly from the tobacco industry — the same strategy of shifting blame from producers to consumers that Big Tobacco used when they started talking about “personal choice” instead of addiction.

    It worked beautifully. Twenty years later, millions of people feel genuine guilt about their personal carbon footprint while the companies that produce the overwhelming majority of emissions continue to operate with minimal accountability.

    What actually moves the needle (hint: not your receipt)

    Since we’re being honest, let’s talk about what actually matters.

    A 2017 study by Wynes and Nicholas, published in Environmental Research Letters, analyzed 148 scenarios across 39 sources to determine which individual actions have the greatest impact on emissions. The results are striking — and they have almost nothing to do with the things corporations tell you to do.

    The four highest-impact individual actions are: having one fewer child (saves roughly 58.6 tonnes of CO2 equivalent per year in developed countries), living car-free (2.4 tonnes), avoiding one transatlantic flight per year (1.6 tonnes), and eating plant-based (0.8 tonnes).

    Compare that to what gets promoted. Recycling saves about 0.2 tonnes. Switching lightbulbs saves even less. When the researchers looked at Canadian high school textbooks, they found that only 4% of recommendations mentioned the high-impact actions. The rest was dominated by recycling, turning off lights, and other feel-good gestures that are between four and eight times less effective than the things nobody wants to talk about.

    This is the gap between what works and what sells. Telling consumers to recycle is comfortable. It doesn’t threaten business models. It doesn’t require systemic change. And it allows companies to position themselves as environmental allies while doing essentially nothing.

    The delivery van that saves the planet (while visiting your building three times)

    Here’s a story from my actual life that captures this perfectly.

    I order supplements from iHerb occasionally. The package comes through FedEx, who attempt delivery during the day when I’m at work. The driver calls me, I don’t answer in time, and the package goes back to the depot. FedEx then hands the package to Posten, the Norwegian postal service. Posten also wants to deliver to my door. Their driver calls too — rings for maybe five seconds, and if I don’t pick up immediately, they leave without even trying the doorbell. This has happened multiple times, with the package physically outside my door on more than one occasion.

    After two or three failed attempts, the package ends up at a pickup point, and I collect it the next day.

    Throughout this entire saga — a small box being driven around the greater Oslo area for days — the Posten app cheerfully informs me that my delivery is “being delivered by an electric vehicle,” complete with a little green leaf icon.

    A green leaf. On a package that has been on four separate vehicle trips across the county because nobody could coordinate a delivery. The environmental cost of those trips — the electricity, the road wear, the human labor, the second and third attempts — vastly exceeds whatever was saved by using an EV instead of a diesel van for any single leg.

    But the green leaf is there. And that’s what counts, apparently.

    The five-centimeter receipt that saves the planet

    Last time I ordered at Burger King, the self-service screen gave me a choice at checkout. I could get a full receipt or a “short receipt” that just showed the order number. The short receipt option had a green leaf next to it.

    A green leaf. For choosing a piece of thermal paper that’s five centimeters long instead of fifteen.

    I stood there for a moment, genuinely marveling at the audacity. This is a fast food chain that produces millions of meals a day, sources beef from industrial agriculture, ships ingredients across continents, runs thousands of locations with commercial kitchens and refrigeration units — and their visible environmental initiative is letting me feel good about the length of my receipt.

    The carbon footprint of one Burger King restaurant running for one hour dwarfs every receipt that location will print in a year. But the receipt has a leaf on it. And the leaf makes you think Burger King cares.

    That’s greenwashing. Not in the abstract, not in some corporate strategy document — right there, on the screen, while you’re ordering a Whopper.

    Recycling is mostly a lie

    If you’re still religiously sorting your plastics, I have bad news.

    Greenpeace’s 2022 report found that only about 5% of U.S. household plastic waste was actually recycled, down from a peak of just under 10% in 2014. No type of plastic packaging meets the threshold for being considered genuinely recyclable. Even the two most recycled plastics, PET #1 bottles and HDPE #2 jugs, had reprocessing rates of roughly 21% and 10% respectively. Everything else — yogurt tubs, coffee cups, takeout containers, plastics #3 through #7 — is effectively not recycled at all. It goes to landfill or incineration.

    The recycling symbol on your plastic container, the little chasing arrows with the number in the middle, does not mean the item is recyclable. It’s a resin identification code that the plastics industry lobbied to get placed on products specifically because consumers would confuse it with a recycling symbol. It worked. People see the arrows, feel virtuous, toss it in the blue bin, and never think about it again.

    Meanwhile, the actual material gets shipped to a sorting facility, where most of it is deemed non-recyclable and sent to a landfill anyway. The system exists not to recycle plastic, but to make you believe plastic is being recycled. That way, you don’t ask harder questions about why we’re producing 51 million tons of the stuff per year.

    Carbon offsets: paying someone to pretend

    When corporations do claim to take direct climate action, the preferred mechanism is carbon offsets — paying for projects (usually tree planting or forest conservation) that supposedly absorb the equivalent of the company’s emissions. On paper, it sounds reasonable. In practice, it’s largely fiction.

    A nine-month investigation by The Guardian, Die Zeit, and SourceMaterial in 2023 examined two-thirds of the rainforest carbon offset projects certified by Verra, the organization that certifies about three-quarters of all carbon credits on the planet. Their conclusion: more than 94% of the credits were “phantom credits” with no real climate benefit. The baseline deforestation threats had been overstated by about 400% on average. Companies like Shell, Gucci, Salesforce, and easyJet had all purchased these credits. Verra’s CEO resigned.

    So when an airline offers you the option to “offset” your flight for an extra few dollars, what you’re mostly buying is the psychological comfort of having done something — not an actual reduction in atmospheric carbon. The flight still happened. The emissions still occurred. The money went to a project that probably wasn’t going to cut down those trees anyway.

    The pledges that don’t add up

    The 2024 Corporate Climate Responsibility Monitor assessed 51 major multinationals responsible for about 15% of global emissions. The findings were damning. The average company pledged to reduce only about 30% of its value-chain emissions by 2030 — well short of the 43% the IPCC says is needed to stay within 1.5°C of warming. Several major companies committed to addressing only 5-20% of their total footprint.

    Yet most of these companies had been validated by the Science Based Targets initiative as “1.5°C-aligned.” The certification exists. The actual emission reductions don’t.

    When the European Commission examined 150 corporate environmental claims across industries, more than half were found to be vague, misleading, or unfounded. Forty percent were entirely unsubstantiated. This is not a fringe finding — this is the European Commission saying that the majority of green marketing claims are, to use the technical term, nonsense.

    So what do you do?

    I’m not going to tell you to stop caring about the environment. I care about the environment. I think the planet is warming, I think humans caused it, and I think it matters.

    But I’ve stopped participating in the theater.

    I don’t sort my plastics with religious devotion anymore, because I know most of it isn’t getting recycled. I don’t feel guilty about my personal carbon footprint, because the concept was invented by an oil company to make me feel guilty instead of holding them accountable. I don’t pay for carbon offsets, because the evidence says they mostly don’t work. And I don’t feel warm inside when Burger King shows me a green leaf on a receipt, because I can do basic arithmetic.

    The next time a corporation shows you a green leaf, ask yourself one question: What are they doing?

    Not what are you doing. Not whether you remembered your reusable bag. Not whether your receipt is five centimeters or fifteen. What are they doing, the company that produces the product, ships the product, packages the product, and generates more emissions before lunch on a Monday than you will in a year of living?

    Because that’s the trick. The leaf isn’t there to save the planet. The leaf is there so you look at yourself instead of looking at them. It’s a magician’s misdirection — watch the hand with the green leaf while the other hand keeps pumping carbon into the atmosphere at an industrial scale.

    One hundred companies produce 71% of global industrial emissions. They know this. They have known it for decades. And their response has been to spend millions convincing you that the problem is your straw, your receipt, your car, your diet.

    Don’t fall for it. The planet doesn’t need you to feel guilty. It needs the people who broke it to stop pretending a leaf on a screen is a fix.

    The leaf on the screen is not for the planet. It’s for you — to make you feel like someone’s handling it, so you don’t ask who’s actually responsible.

    Nobody’s handling it. And the leaf is the proof.

    Sources:

    BP carbon footprint campaign: Geoffrey Supran, Climate Accountability Lab, University of Miami; Ogilvy & Mather campaign documentation, 2004.

    100 companies / 71% of emissions: CDP Carbon Majors Report, 2017.

    High-impact individual actions: Wynes & Nicholas, “The climate mitigation gap,” Environmental Research Letters, 2017.

    Plastic recycling rates: Greenpeace, Circular Claims Fall Flat Again, 2022.

    PFAS in paper straws: Thimo Groffen et al., Food Additives and Contaminants, 2023.

    Carbon offset investigation: The Guardian, Die Zeit, SourceMaterial, January 2023.

    Corporate climate pledges: NewClimate Institute & Carbon Market Watch, Corporate Climate Responsibility Monitor, 2024.

    EU greenwashing sweeps: European Commission environmental claims assessment, 2014 & 2020.