• “Try being average in today’s age. It’s brutal.”
  This isn’t whining, it’s existential feedback from the people under the weight of the algorithmic machine. It’s not just that life is hard—it’s that it's designed to be demoralizing if you don’t come preloaded with advantages.

• “Very successful people say, ‘See? I’m not happy either!’”
  This is that nauseating genre of elite humility. The TED Talk sob story. The influencer saying, “I struggle too” while filming their breakdown from a rented cabin with artisanal throw pillows.

• “Money is nearly everything.”
  And yep, that’s the thesis. You don’t need to be Bezos, but when rent’s a joke and healthcare’s a roulette wheel, money becomes the difference between existential dread and actual disaster.

---

My take:

This is painfully on point. There’s something uniquely cruel about being average in a system that punishes you for not being exceptional. It’s like running a treadmill that speeds up only if you start falling behind.

The “money doesn’t buy happiness” narrative is true in the abstract and utterly useless in practice—especially when you’re choosing between groceries and utility bills. Telling people that millionaires cry too is like telling someone with a broken leg that rich people also get hangnails. Thanks for the insight, Chad.

People who’ve never experienced poverty genuinely don’t understand it—not just materially, but existentially. Poverty isn’t just a lack of money. It’s a slow erasure of possibility. It makes everything harder. It’s waking up with no good choices and no margin for error, day after day.

I’d take one average person telling the truth from below over a hundred success stories apologizing from the top.

Want me to turn that into a short essay? Or are we just vibing in the comments today?

You said:

The former

ChatGPT said:

Here you go—a short essay built from @FlanzShirt's despair-laced mic drop, wrapped in something you could theoretically post on Medium without triggering a class war (but only barely):

---

The Brutality of Being Average

“Money isn’t everything,” they say—usually from an Adirondack chair, probably while holding a glass of wine that costs more than your electricity bill. It’s a common refrain from the successful and secure: I’m not happy all the time either. The implication is meant to be comforting, even humbling. A kind of egalitarian gesture. But for most people, it lands like an insult with a soft smile.

Because the truth is, for the vast majority of people—those who are not doctors backpacking through Patagonia with a healthy 401(k)—money may not be everything, but it’s close. It’s the difference between life being hard and life being unbearable. Between choices and traps. Between anxiety and catastrophe.

To be average in today’s world is to live in the shadow of scarcity. Not because you’ve failed, but because the system demands it. You’re told to dream big, but also to be realistic. To work hard, but not expect security. You’re expected to build a meaningful life on evaporating wages, in cities you can’t afford, while competing against people whose head starts you’ll never see.

The average person doesn’t want yachts or private chefs. They want breathable space. Margin. A future that isn’t a cliff. But the structure of modern life punishes averageness. If you’re not exceptional—by wealth, intellect, beauty, or charisma—you’re disposable. Quietly. Systemically.

That’s the brutal irony: those at the top must learn that money isn’t everything. Those at the bottom already know that. What they also know is this—poverty isn’t just a lack of money. It’s a lack of options. A lack of time. A lack of voice. And when someone tells you “we all suffer,” from the safety of financial immunity, it’s not solidarity. It’s erasure.

So no—money isn’t everything. But in a society that turns every interaction, every moment, every need into a transaction, it’s the closest thing we have to safety. If you’ve never felt that absence, you don’t understand the system. You’re just profiting from it.