"There was a moment maybe a year ago where I was standing in the grocery store in the soup aisle doing some financial calculus in my head over whether I could afford lentils and toilet paper. And I just thought to myself, this isn't life. This is a slow motion hostage situation.
Then I got home and I opened Instagram and some tech bro was talking about leveraging your time to increase your value. And I'm thinking, dude, I just leveraged my dignity for some off-brand beans. So wealth inequality isn't just about billionaires hoarding yachts. It's about that weird sinking feeling that somehow despite everything you've done right, you're still losing and everyone else is quietly pretending they're not. But in truth, they are.
Now, this is the part where I tell you you're not exactly crazy. The system is. And to be fair, we're all a little crazy, right? But I still maintain that's ultimately due to the dysfunctional system we're born and raised in. The thing nobody wants to say out loud is that while we do have some responsibility for our predicament, of course, whatever that may be, the more prevalent reality is that we're living in a society that's designed to extract as much energy and time and self-worth out of us as humanly possible, while providing just enough serotonin to keep us from throwing a Molotov cocktail at a Wells Fargo.
Wealth inequality is more than a gap at this point. It's a giant chasm and it's getting bigger by the minute. It's a structural divide where one side builds empires and the other side builds anxiety disorders. And it's not really about how much money you make. It's about how wealth is accumulated, compounded, and hoarded over generations, while the rest of us live in a constant state of low-level panic trying to keep up with the lifestyle that was algorithmically fed to us by people who own our attention. If you've ever felt like you're working harder and getting less, it's not just your imagination because not only was the middle class lost, it was harvested.
Okay, so here's the current reality. The top 1% now owns more than the entire bottom half of humanity. Think about that. 1% a statistical blip with a private jet. And meanwhile, you're hoping your credit card can survive one more emergency before it basically bursts into flames.
Wealth inequality is really an economic disaster that warps our understanding of value and success and what it even means to live a good life. And like any good con, the brilliance lies in how personal it feels when you fail inside a rigged system.
Okay, so how did we get here? Well, the short answer, centuries of economic structures designed to reward accumulation over contribution. And the long answer, well, you better buckle up.
So, in theory, capitalism, at least at the cottage industry level, looks pretty good. You build something of value and ideally you're rewarded proportionally. But you know theory exists in textbooks. In practice, late-stage corporate capitalism has pretty much mutated into a high-stakes Ponzi scheme where ownership is rewarded infinitely more than labor. And that's really the key distinction here. Wealth doesn't come from doing anymore. It comes from owning. And the only thing harder than working your way up is buying your way in, especially when you're broke.
So trickle down economics turned out to be more like a golden shower for the working class. The idea was if you cut taxes for the rich, they'll invest in jobs and growth and then everybody wins. But that didn't happen. What did happen was the biggest upward wealth transfer in modern history due in part to nefarious activities such as stock buybacks and offshore accounts.
So we got a few decades of corporate gluttony and wage stagnation and they called it freedom. And while all this was occurring, you have globalization and automation quietly developing in the background. So eventually came the rise of gig work which was an entire generation told do what you love only to end up doing what you hate for tips with no health insurance. Of course the economy isn't actually broken. It's functioning exactly as designed, just not for you.
You know, we like to believe we've evolved, that we're somehow more ethical and more advanced, maybe a little more conscious than the societies that came before us. But if you peel back the branding, we're still running a medieval economy with modern Wi-Fi. See, technofeudalism. We've just replaced kings with CEOs and throne rooms with boardrooms. And now the peasants are freelancers desperately trying to land their next gig. So what we're living through isn't some novel failure. It's really the return of feudalism dressed in Patagonia vests and startup equity packages.
Okay, let's rewind for a minute. Back in the Gilded Age, the late 19th century, we had industrial tycoons like Rockefeller, Carnegie, and J.P. Morgan accumulating enough wealth to basically destabilize democracy. And workers were dying in steel mills while the bosses were building mansions with rooms they never even set foot in. Sound familiar?
So that era gave rise to unions and labor strikes with a few well-placed anarchist bombs here and there. Then eventually came the post-war boom, 1945 to about 1975 or so, the one time in modern history where the middle class actually got to breathe. And I know it sounds incredible now to a lot of us, but one income could support a household. Healthcare was not a death sentence. And amazingly, you could pay for a year of college tuition by working a summer job. So during this golden age, taxes on the rich were very high, much higher than they are now, and unions were strong, and CEOs weren't earning 500 times what their employees made. But unfortunately, like all things that benefit the majority, you know, it didn't last. It couldn't last under the changing circumstances.
Okay. Enter neoliberalism, the soft smiling assassin of the working class. Deregulate everything, privatize public goods, worship the free market like it's a benevolent god instead of a sociopathic algorithm. And slowly, brick by brick, they dismantled the foundation of economic mobility.
And here we are. Millennials and Gen Z staring down the barrel of climate collapse and student debt with unaffordable housing and job markets that ask for 10 years of experience in entry-level roles, etc., etc. And still somehow we're the entitled ones. I mean, we've been completely gaslighted, but I think people are waking up finally.
The Psychological Impact of Wealth Inequality
Okay, so let's talk about what this actually looks like and what this actually does to people because wealth inequality isn't just a socioeconomic phenomenon. It's a slow private psychological breakdown happening in millions of individual minds. And most people don't even know it's happening to them. It's insidious. They just think they suck at life. But here's the deal. Once the system becomes unlivable, the clever trick is to convince you that you are the problem.
Now, we all know we're not supposed to question the structure. We're only supposed to question our productivity and our, you know, grind-set attitude. Because if the system is working for someone, then obviously it works, right? But if it's not working for you, well, that's a you problem. So naturally, we end up internalizing the shame and we keep trying to optimize our resumes and we find ourselves following productivity gurus with teeth too white to trust. And then we get ourselves into side hustles and 12-hour hustle porn, which leads us to mistake burnout for a lack of hustle. It's just a shitty situation all around. And slowly we are forgetting that we're not products, we're people.
So the people who really understand what's going on are not influencers or politicians. They're not billionaires going through a spiritual phase after their third divorce. The people who understand what's going on have managed to escape the machine and then turn around to say, "Listen, it's on fire."
All right. So, one of those people is Gary Stevenson, a former Citibank trader who got rich betting on the financial collapse. Now, Gary grew up poor, made millions in his early 20s, walked into the upper class, looked around and went, "Oh, this is a house of cards run by a bunch of psychopaths." So, I guess you could say he had an epiphany.
So now Gary spends his time breaking down how wealth inequality works in plain language using whiteboards and sarcasm. He's pretty engaging to watch. I mean, look up his videos. He explains that the rich don't just accumulate money. They actually remove it from circulation. Kind of like dragons who not only hoard gold but also set fire to the village's economy just for sport. And the more they hoard, the more the rest of us are left scurrying for scraps and of course blaming each other for the shortages. And this is exactly what the status quo want.
Or another example, take Chris Hedges. He's a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who, by the way, makes even the most cynical of us feel like wide-eyed optimists. Now, what I like about Hedges is that he doesn't sugarcoat anything. He talks about our toxic system like a battlefield report. He calls out the hollowing out of institutions and the militarization of poverty. He talks about the spiritual death that occurs when you commodify every aspect of existence. So in his view, not only is this an economic collapse, it's a moral and existential one. A collapse of meaning, you might say. Because when all value becomes monetary, you end up with a society that worships sociopaths and ignores poets.
And here we are in a world where a billionaire who pays less in taxes than a middle school teacher is called a visionary. But someone who spends their life helping others is seen as naive and lacking ambition or worse broke.
I think one of the biggest cons ever pulled is the concept of meritocracy. It's basically this idea that if you just work hard and play fair, you'll get ahead. As if life were a clean, fair game of Monopoly and not, you know, Monopoly where three people are already bankrupt and one guy is playing with counterfeit money and no pants. The illusion of upward mobility is powerful because it gives people just enough hope not to revolt, but not enough support to ever actually escape. It's probably why we feel ashamed for not owning a house even though the housing market was swallowed whole by private equity and maybe stock buybacks and offshore accounts and the like. It's why you think you're a lazy piece of sh*t for not having savings even though the average rent is now half your paycheck.
But you know, here's the problem. When everything becomes transactional, including your sense of identity, you're never allowed to just be. You're only as good as your output, your salary, net worth, your hustle, and ultimately your brand. And if you can't monetize your soul, well, that's too bad. Better luck next time, if there is a next time.
Now, this isn't just a political issue. It's also metaphysical. I say this because when money becomes the universal metric for worth, I think we lose the plot completely. We stop asking what kind of world are we building and instead we ask something like how much is it worth on the open market? So wealth inequality does something much darker than just impoverish people. It impoverishes meaning. You can't meditate your way out of a broken economy, but you also can't buy your way out of spiritual emptiness. And somewhere in that contradiction is where most people now live. Just numb enough to keep going, but aware enough to know they're slowly dying in plain sight.
And I think this is why wealth inequality hits so hard because it tells you implicitly and constantly that your suffering is not only deserved but it's boring and that if you were really worthy, you wouldn't be suffering at all in the first place.
Why the System is Rigged
Okay, so let's get this out of the way. The reason you're poor probably isn't because you don't work hard enough. It's more likely because the game was rigged before you were born. You're just the unlucky bastard who showed up late to Monopoly Night and all the good properties are already gone. Boardwalk's owned by BlackRock. Of course, your cousin owns Park Place and, you know, somehow your landlord owns Baltic but still charges $1,900 a month.
In the past, the pitch was something like this. You go to college and then you get a job and buy a house and you retire before your spine gives out. But the current version is going into debt while hustling three jobs and renting a room from a tech bro with a ring light addiction. And maybe if you're lucky, you get a 4-day weekend every once in a blue moon if you sell a kidney. Wealth inequality has turned what used to be aspirations into delusions.
I wouldn't say that you're falling behind, but you are being economically waterboarded while a billionaire tells you to try yoga or something. Here's the thing, though. Wealth inequality, it isn't just a byproduct of capitalism. It's baked in, built right into the firmware. And the update log just says fixes nothing, double CEO bonuses or something like that.
Okay. Thomas Piketty, who I've mentioned several times in other videos, is the guy who made economic inequality cool for a brief minute in intellectual circles. He pointed out the obvious. When the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of economic growth, wealth concentrates like a cancer. It metastasizes. So, in plain English, rich people make money faster than you can blink. And you can't even get a raise without submitting a 12-page proposal to your emotionally constipated manager. And Joseph Stiglitz, the brilliant economist who I've also mentioned previously, he said it flat out, inequality is a choice, a political one. It's a deliberate stacking of the deck by those who already hold all the chips. It's like a game of poker where one guy has 10 aces and you're playing go fish with a Capri Sun.
Now, meanwhile, we're out here gaslighting ourselves into thinking we just need to grind harder or manifest better or some other BS. You know, if we just do that, we'll finally unlock abundance, like there's some cheat code buried in a podcast somewhere. But look, I'll say it again. The system isn't broken. It's working exactly as it was designed. Okay.
So, wealth inequality isn't just a glitch in the matrix. It is the matrix. And it's older than you think. It's always existed on some level, but it was particularly pronounced during feudalism, this is when lords owned the land while peasants shoveled mud for bread. And you know, no one had Twitter back then to complain about it. So the rich lived in castles and everyone else died of dysentery around age 32 and today the castles have elevators and personal chefs and the peasants do DoorDash.
So then came the industrial revolution. This is where we collectively decided child labor and soot-covered lungs were a small price to pay for the wonders of the steam engine and eventually the microwaved burrito. So now let's fast forward to the 20th century. Post World War II, America had a golden window. Briefly, as you know, the economy boomed and the middle class blossomed and you could work a factory job, buy a house, and believe it or not, still have enough leftover to drink yourself unconscious every Friday night.
And you know, again, then came the neoliberal fever dream of the 1980s. Reaganomics, anyone? In the UK, it was Thatcherism. Trickle-down economics, they called it, which, you know, the billionaires as if the billionaires were just going to dribble money on all the rest of us like benevolent champagne fountains. But lo and behold, nothing trickled except maybe the sweat off your forehead as wages stagnated and housing costs moonwalked into the stratosphere. So this is the era when money stopped being a tool and became a god. And if you couldn't worship at the altar of capital, well then you were a lazy piece of garbage and you certainly didn't deserve dignity or respect. Never mind that wealth wasn't being created anymore. It was just being hoarded and manipulated like a sociopathic puppet show.
All right. So, enter the age of financialization and suddenly the economy wasn't about making things. It was about making money from money. You know, stocks, derivatives, in stock, you know, investment, all that. Housing which was is now an investment, not actual shelter. And you and I, we're not participants in this system. We're just collateral.
Okay. Economist Rutger Bregman. Yes. The tax the rich guy who actually called out billionaires to their faces at Davos. He said it plainly. Poverty isn't a lack of character. It's a lack of cash. And he's right. But our entire culture acts like being poor is always some sort of personal failure instead of the logical result of a rigged casino. Like you lost at Russian roulette and everyone blames your trigger discipline.
So Chris Hedges called it the cult of the self. A system that's so infected with individualism that we think every failure is our own fault and every success is proof of moral superiority. Well, I'm here to tell you it's not. Sometimes the game really is rigged.
And Gary Stevenson makes it painfully clear. He says that real wealth creation stopped decades ago. The rich don't want growth. They want collapse because collapse concentrates power and desperation makes labor cheap. They know that fear makes people compliant. So, when you feel like you're losing at life because you can't afford a second bedroom and your dental plan is a bottle of cheap whiskey and a pair of pliers, maybe it's not you who is broken. Maybe the system is.
Identity and the System
Okay, I know this is a long video, but this is an important topic and I wanted to do this. And kudos to you if you've made it this far. But, uh, look, buckle up again because here's where it gets ugly.
So, look, it's not just about money. It's also about identity. When everything is monetized, your time and your body, attention span, your hobbies, your trauma, then money becomes a measurement of who you are, not just what you have. At this point, you cease to be a person, and instead become a brand with debt. And I think this is why so many people walk around feeling like low-budget knockoffs of themselves because in this world value is unfortunately measured in social media prominence and income. And anyone who isn't visibly thriving is considered somehow defective. Not necessarily poor, defective, like a toaster that can't toast.
And this kind of emotional poverty is harder to escape than financial poverty because you start to believe it's true that you're lazy and you lack ambition that if you just worked harder or got up earlier or did the goddamn cold plunge like the affluent tech bros, you too could find inner peace in a startup worth $30 million.
I believe that this delusion is capitalism's greatest trick. It hijacks your inner monologue and it weaponizes your shame. It makes you internalize your own impression. So ultimately you become your own unpaid prison guard. It's pretty messed up.
So economist Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist at the World Bank, so not exactly a tinfoil hat type, warned years ago that inequality this extreme is corrosive to democracy. When the wealthiest 1% control more than the bottom 90% combined, you don't have a republic anymore. What you have is an oligarchy wearing a trench coat made of brand slogans and corporate lobbying.
And Thomas Piketty, whose books are dense enough to kill a burglar, basically mapped the same thing. Unless we seriously intervene, capital will always grow faster than wages. Meaning the rich will always get richer because the system is built to inflate their wealth while deflating yours. In other words, the game is not only rigged, it's also boring and soul crushing. What a what a winning combination. It's sponsored by pharmaceutical ads you can't afford to ignore.
And what happens to a person when they realize their odds of escaping are shrinking all the time? When the American dream starts to sound like a sick joke or a bad translation, they either go numb or they burn out. You've got depression, anxiety, addiction, mass apathy. You know, these aren't personal pathologies. They're the spiritual symptoms of a sick economy. So what this means is you are not a failure. You are responding reasonably to a world that treats you like one.
What Can We Do?
All right. At some point we need to ask if trying to win at this game is killing us. Maybe it's the game that needs to die. Right?
Gary Stevenson has said, "The economy isn't actually broken. It's working as designed. And it's designed to funnel wealth upward, to extract value from the many and consolidate it for the few. It's been designed in such a way that by the time you're done watching this video, the Walton family has made another few million dollars by selling you back the illusion of choice in 27 different cereal brands, for instance. And Chris Hedges calls it a corporate coup d'état. Like a slow motion dystopia where every public good is privatized and every private failure is made to be your personal problem." So it's not that you're underperforming. You're just trying to survive a fire while being told to smile for the quarterly report.
You know, this isn't about left versus right anymore. It's about the oxygen running out in the room and a bunch of billionaires charging admission for straws.
So, what do we do? Well, here's the part where, you know, I'm supposed to offer tidy solutions as usual, wrap it all up with a little inspirational duct tape, but I don't, you know, I don't have a cheat code. What we can do though is to stop pretending money is the only form of value.
I think, you know, we have to take an idealistic viewpoint here. And I think we can start, you know, subtracting instead of adding. I'd like to see us deprioritize wealth as a marker of success and, you know, try to rewire ourselves to care more about what we actually experience, not what we can afford to post.
I think we should look to minimalism. You know, it doesn't have to be a trendy aesthetic, but you know, more like a quiet rebellion. The radical idea that maybe you don't need a smart fridge that texts you when your almond milk is low. And maybe what we need is less to maintain, less to chase, and to owe.
As I mentioned earlier, Rutger Bregman makes a compelling case that poverty is not a lack of character. It's a lack of cash. And our culture's constant judgment of the poor is a mask for a deeper collective shame. That shame is profitable and it keeps people obedient.
Minimalism in that context isn't just a lifestyle. It's like a counterattack. It's reclaiming time and mental bandwidth. Minimalism means reclaiming the right to say no, I'm not hustling for 16 hours a day to afford rent in a building owned by a hedge fund. And no, I'm not saying minimalism fixes wealth inequality. I'm saying that it helps liberate you from trying from tying your self-worth to a number on a screen or a pile of possessions. And that that will certainly set us I think in the right direction. It's a refusal of materialism and consumerism, which is a big part of the reason we're in this situation. You know, we can't outconsume our way into peace. And no amount of avocado toast is going to close the wealth gap. But I think opting out of the consumption treadmill, even just a little, might actually help us breathe again.
So, where does this leave us?
You could start, you know, a commune in the woods and raise goats or do the whole living off the grid thing, but realistically, if you're watching this on Wi-Fi and haven't Googled how to build a composting toilet, that probably isn't happening. Still, I don't think we need a cabin and a goat to exit the rat race. I think we just need to stop believing we're supposed to win it. Here's a few things to consider.
Stop internalizing systemic failure as personal failure. This world is indeed rigged and not in a conspiracy theorist way. It's rigged in a mathematically verifiable, peer-reviewed, IMF wrote about it kind of way. So, if you feel behind, I don't believe it's because you're a lazy, dysfunctional loser who isn't manifesting hard enough. I think it's because you were born into a system that demands burnout and then blames you for being tired.
Reassess what you value. Joseph Stiglitz wrote about how GDP is a terrible measure of well-being. The economy can grow while people get sicker and more in debt. So maybe growth isn't the goal. Maybe sanity is.
I'd suggest also cultivate small-scale agency. So look, we can't fix Wall Street, but we can opt out of playing dress-up for LinkedIn. We can cook our own food and talk to our neighbors. Try planting something in the dirt. Or tell your boss you're not available on Saturdays because you're busy reclaiming your soul. Seriously, just be honest.
Piketty's research shows inequality grows exponentially unless checked. So, yeah, we need some type of policy. We need tax reform and some ethical form of universal basic income. You know, we're going to need wealth taxes, campaign finance reform, and whatever the hell else it takes to kick a few trillionaires off their private mega yachts and back into paying for public goods.
But I also think we need overall a cultural shift. I'd say a massive quiet revolution where more people are actually willing to say something like, "I don't care about your metrics. I care about meaning."
And look, I don't think it counts as failure if we're exhausted from trying to keep up all the time. We're human in a system designed to devour us. And we're going broke because the richest people on earth are siphoning off the air while selling us oxygen tanks on installment plans. I think maybe the most radical thing we can do in a collapsing empire is refuse to collapse with it. Just refuse to partake in it as much as possible".
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