The Cracks Appear...

The World Beyond The Walls

For about a hundred years, we’ve lived under a facade of “employment” and “corporations.” A system where maybe 70% of jobs provided no real value. They were just there; almost like keeping cattle fed. Everyone was happy with their little money coming in while the big sharks held everything, using the advertising-industrial complex to make us want things only they had. The materialistic ad world pushed that relentlessly. I don’t know the economic, or the social terms for this world, but there’s gotta be something for it.

The money was relatively little, but it was genuinely good. Safe. Reliable. But the ad world made people want more, specifically to trap them deeper into the matrix of chasing meaningless material goods. A self-reinforcing loop: work fake jobs, earn modest wages, spend on manufactured desires, stay dependent.

Then computers came along and didn’t disrupt this system, they amplified it. Digitization created a sandstorm of new fake jobs. Making database entries. Keeping your acounts on a website instead of your books. Filling forms for the government. Updating software. Migrating databases. Maintaining complexity that arguably shouldn’t exist. Making weekly reports of sales. Ensuring none of the computers in your company break often. Replacing them. The world became a different place, but the underlying facade just got thicker. Zero visibility. Us stuck in the middle of the Sahara of it.

The whole concept of full-time jobs if you think about it is just fake. Its not real. 70% of the time we spend employed, we are not working. We are not productively contributing to our employer. So why are we getting paid for these hours. Its never made sense to me, how much money are the sharks at the top making for them to be able to afford paying us to do nothing for 70% of the time? People who watched “day in the lift of a SWE at google” and videos akin to that always loved to hate on the women that create it, but your job is not very different. There’s very very few jobs where actual value is ever created consistently. Most jobs you’re just being paid to be available when actual work comes in. It was insane.

The First Cracks Appear

ChatGPT knocked on the door, back in 2022 or 2023. I still remember my brother looking at me like I was retarded for not knowing about this the day it released. It was pretty impressive, but for the next 2 years we all realised how shit it also was. But 3 or 4 years down, 2026, the vibe is different.

Everything can be done by these systems now. And they’re consuming our water and electricity to do it. Who benefits? A lot of people “benefit” from this new tooling, but how many people benefit from it, in a less cynical manner? Maybe some builders and tinkerers genuinely do. Curious people who’ve wanted to explore, learn or build things but never had the resources or people around them. Thats the only wholesome benefactor of this entire situation. This is at the expense of the pro bono social contract established over the last century. Jobs. Degrees. Education. Corporate structures. All in shambles.

I studied to be an engineer. The capital investment wasn’t huge, maybe seven or eight lakhs (7000-8000$) from my parents. The money isn’t what’s depressing. It’s that the world is going to crumble and I don’t know if anyones really ready for it. I’m at the frontier of this, and even I don’t see whats going to be at the end of this. What about all the other people?

I count myself as a tinkerer. But when it feels like the world is going to end, I have to focus on making as much money as possible before that happens, not tinker around on the cool electronics project I want to fix for my nephew, his RC car, or a cool personal OS dashboard that I can use to limit social media usage, or an amazing analytics dashboard for professional VALORANT players that tells them how ass they are, I can’t.

The BlackPill

I grew up in the early 2000s man. Every kid that lived my life has been pushed into the same things, organically, out of our own habits and interests. These were the things we were good at: pulling random information out of search engines and the internet, tinkering with software, quick tech hacks, finding software or tools for the job, and reading English. What more do we have to offer? I grew up in a fake world that pushed me into these things, and a certain GPU running on electricity and water in a world thats suffering from electricity outages and water shortages does it all better than me.

The white collar is dead. It was barely real to begin with, but it’s just all gone now. So suddenly. The fake world we built, got groomed into for the last 100 years, is just poof. And the world beyond doesnt look any better.

I was on the AI user train from the start. I always knew it was a good tool. But recently, using Opus 4.5 and getting access to the $200 plan, it thrown my brooms out the door. It does every single thing better than me. Right now it’s just a cost factor. It’s subsidized, but yet costly for everyone else. But AI will get cheaper.

What then?

What’s Left

UBI replaces this, maybe. Or people providing actual value. But this isn’t the 1500s. We can’t all sell fruit or cloth garments, in a logistically limited pre-globalization world. Amazon has all the logistics. Everything runs and sells on the internet now, even if you did want to sell something yourself.

What value can you provide anymore? Do we just get good at making pots, or metalwork, growing plants again? How is anyone going to give us something valuable for them (money, bread, anything) in exchange for that when some clanker in a Chinese sweatshop is going to do it 100x better powered by GLM 4.7 INTELLIGENCE REINFORNCED GROUP OF EXPERTS CHAIN OF THOUGHT PRO MAX.

It’s going to make a better a pot, a better spoon than me, grow better fake vegetables, quicker, en masse. What the fuck is left to do?

All we can do is grow our own crops for our own sustenance and have some land of our own to build houses and live life. To be happy, do what we want instead of trying to survive in the fake world that was created for us. Good news, the cost of living of a human is actually really cheap. We don’t need much to survive, we’ve needed a lot to “live”, however ingenuine it was this last century.