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"The Collapse of the Karmic Scoreboard
There’s a reason people fantasize about winning the lottery, and it’s not just about money. It’s about the fantasy that life has some kind of a scoreboard, and that effort and suffering and even virtue might actually cash out in the end. But when you look around at billionaires in space while nurses can’t pay rent, the whole thing feels like a karmic system that got hacked—not by a scrappy underdog, but by a cartel of sociopaths who sold the cheat codes back to us as self-improvement books.
This causes both envy and metaphysical whiplash, because most people aren't really asking to be rich; they're just asking for life to make some damn sense. If the universe had a moral compass, wouldn’t it gesture vaguely in the direction of fairness? Instead, we've got a slot machine designed by Goldman Sachs, and you're the collateral damage stuck in the gears.
Historically, we had stories that patched this hole in the universe: wealth was divine favor, and poverty was punishment. Cruel, yes, but at least it was a narrative. Max Weber wrote about this in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, suggesting that early capitalism was Calvinism with spreadsheets. Success was seen as proof of salvation—meaning a figure like Jeff Bezos is basically a saint (the patron saint of two-day shipping and human bladder control, perhaps). The theological scaffolding for this belief has collapsed, yet we continue to live inside corporate capitalism as if it is a moral universe.
Hard Work and Bullshit Jobs
These days, hard work now equals exhaustion without reward, often just meaning more hard work. Meanwhile, scamming or owning the system equals reward without effort, beyond having been born at the right dinner table. This fracture is not just economic despair; it’s a spiritual vertigo. We wake up realizing the karmic contract never existed—it was a fairy tale designed to keep us compliant while someone else looted the temple.
The real cosmic joke is that not only does effort fail to equal reward, but much of the effort we put in doesn't even matter. David Graeber, in his book Bullshit Jobs, argued that a shocking number of people know deep down that their jobs are meaningless—not in a necessary-but-hard way, but in the "society would continue skipping without a beat if my role vanished" kind of way. The tragic part is that these meaningless jobs (like the consultant who consults about consulting) are often the ones that pay the best.
Conversely, the people who actually hold society together—nurses, sanitation workers, delivery drivers, farm workers—are treated like disposable labor. They were labeled "essential workers" during the pandemic, but their status quickly evaporated. The less your work matters, the more you get paid; the more vital your work is, the closer you are to poverty. Graeber argued that this inversion isn't accidental; it’s necessary to maintain the illusion of capitalism as a moral system. Rewarding real work would cause the whole illusion to collapse.
This knowledge is spiritually corrosive, slowly eating away at our sense of purpose. We are not rewarded for our value as human beings, but for our compliance in the system, for swallowing our dignity every morning.
Alienation and Capitalist Realism
This spiritual alienation was addressed by Karl Marx in the 1840s. He defined alienation as being literally cut off from the meaning of one’s own existence: making things you don't own, working on tasks you don't control, and contributing to a system that sees you as a battery to be drained. Even those with a steady paycheck are estranged from their labor and their sense of purpose, and estranged from each other, as the person next to you is your competition for the same scraps.
Mark Fisher offered the modern diagnosis of capitalist realism: the suffocating sense that corporate capitalism is not just the dominant economic system, but the only conceivable reality. It has become easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Fisher argued that this total saturation colonizes our mental health and relationships. Depression and anxiety are rational responses to a system that demands infinite productivity from finite beings. The system trains us to pathologize our exhaustion as a personal weakness rather than systemic violence.
Inequality supercharges this by reducing everything, including human worth, to market value. If you can't monetize your existence, you're disposable. This creates a dissonance where the question becomes: "If the only measure of worth is market value, and I can't generate enough of it, am I even real?"
The Consequences of a Rigged Game
Fisher called the resulting condition a kind of collective depression, a sense that there is no future worth hoping for because the future has already been canceled. People either double down on the hustle to optimize their suffering, or collapse into depressive hedonia (or anhedonia)—going through the motions of pleasure without actually feeling it (scrolling, consuming, numbing out).
Extreme inequality is an existential vertigo that destabilizes the stories we tell ourselves about meaning and purpose. When a society loses faith in its metaphysical scoreboard, things get weird. As with the collapse of Rome, when the gods stopped keeping score, people started worshiping stranger things—in our case, merit, progress, and tech billionaires. The realization that these gods are dead, or never existed, leads to a profound sense of betrayal and spiritual homelessness.
This moral vertigo is summed up by questions like: "If working hard doesn't actually get you ahead, then what the hell is the effort for?" and "Is success just genetic luck?"
Surviving the Absurdity
Inequality doesn't just crush the poor; it "screws with the rich, too". They are trapped in the same absurdity, constantly measuring themselves against someone richer, with an unfillable bottomless pit within. Success becomes its own kind of prison, albeit with nicer furniture. The poor are there "to scare the sh*t out of the middle class" (George Carlin), and everyone ends up doubting the fundamental idea that life has any structure at all beyond chaos.
To survive this, the argument suggests:
Acknowledge the absurdity without flinching.
Redefine value: Invest in things that actually matter, even if the world doesn't reward them (caring for others, teaching, creating art, being present).
Build small communities that value honesty over hustling and connection over capital.
Fight for systemic change (fair wages, wealth redistribution) to restore a sense of societal justice.
Embrace absurdist humor as a form of resistance and survival.
The ultimate takeaway is that extreme inequality robs people of a narrative that life makes sense. Without that narrative, society starts looking less like a community and more like a Hunger Games reboot directed by Kafka,, where nobody knows the rules, but everyone's pretty sure they're losing.
The Psychological Parasite of Inequality
Wealth inequality doesn't just crush the poor; it psychologically affects the rich, too. Not in the obvious "I'll never be happy" way, but in the insidious sense that comes from living in a world rigged to make everyone feel inadequate, regardless of their bank balance.
Even the rich are constantly measuring themselves against someone richer. The top keeps moving like a finish line on a sadist's treadmill, and there is a bottomless pit within that can never be filled. One billionaire launches a rocket; another buys a yacht he can park inside his mega-yacht. Meanwhile, the rest of us are trying to scrape together a Costco membership, convincing ourselves that buying in bulk is financial planning. It’s an absurd spectacle where no one can stop and ask why, because everyone is too exhausted.
The Prison of Success
David Graeber’s observations on "bullshit jobs" resonate even for those in high-paying, meaningless roles. They are trapped in the same omnipotent absurdity, being valued for the wrong things. Status becomes a game of signaling rather than substance; they are climbing a ladder leaning against the wrong building. If they pause to question it, everyone acts like they're the crazy one.
Social comparison is constant and exhausting, fueled by social media's highlight reels and staged "I woke up like this" photos. Those who are allegedly "winning" are trapped in a soulless rat race, exhausted, anxious, and terrified of being outflanked. Success becomes its own kind of prison, just with much nicer furniture.
Inequality is a psychological parasite that feeds on everyone's sense of fairness and self-worth. The rich feel hollow, and as George Carlin once said, "The poor are there to scare the sh*t out of the middle class to keep them showing up for those jobs." Everyone ultimately doubts the fundamental idea that life has any structure beyond chaos and lucky breaks.
The Metaphysical Crisis
This makes inequality a metaphysical and spiritual issue. It’s a slow poison that seeps into how we see ourselves and each other, leading to more moral cynicism and a slow rot of empathy. People aren't just angry about paychecks; they're angry about the universe itself. The realization that the cosmic scoreboard is rigged sticks in the gut, changing everything about how we interact and imagine the future. If the system meant to reward virtuous effort and contribution is "fubar," what do you have left to believe in?
Reclaiming Meaning in a Rigged Game
If the cosmic scoreboard is broken and the system is run by hedge fund-loving sociopaths, what can we do? The path forward involves reclaiming meaning even when the game is rigged.
Acknowledge the Absurdity
The first step is to acknowledge the absurdity without flinching. You cannot fix a system you refuse to see clearly; pretending everything's fine is just another form of surrender. As David Graeber and Mark Fisher would advise: Admit the emptiness, stare it in the face, and then build something authentic in spite of it. This takes courage—the intellectual equivalent of realizing the sky is falling and then laughing anyway.
Redefine Your Value
Stop letting money, titles, or viral social media moments set the rules for your life. Instead, invest in the things that actually matter, even if the world doesn't notice or reward you for them.
Simone Weil argued that dignity in labor, even the most mundane work has a spiritual significance; it can keep you a human being who hasn't entirely lost their soul to corporate capitalism.
Build Moral Refuges
Building small communities with like-minded people is a radical act in a world designed to isolate and monetize you. Find people who value honesty over hustling, real connection over capital, and curiosity over performance reviews. These networks become moral and emotional refuges—little islands where meaning survives and where you are seen as a person rather than a productivity metric.
Fight for Systemic Change
Fighting for systemic change still matters, even if it feels like shouting into a void. Policies like fair wages and wealth redistribution are not just economic fixes; they are ways of restoring a sense of societal justice that has been missing for decades. Reputable economists like Thomas Piketty and Joseph Stiglitz have argued that economies can be redesigned to support both survival and dignity. Small structural shifts can realign a society's moral compass.
Embrace Absurdist Humor
Finally, never underestimate the power of absurdist humor as a survival tool. Life is absurd, tragically unfair, and often horrifyingly stupid. Humor and laughter are a form of resistance—a way to survive when everything else is broken and the instruction manual is unreadable.
The takeaway is simple: you are drowning in a broken system, but acknowledging that fact and choosing your own values is the first step toward building something authentic in spite of it.
The universe may be utterly indifferent, and corporate capitalism may be a cruel cosmic prank, with inequality metastasizing like a philosophical cancer that nobody wants to treat. However, we can still live a meaningful life within it.
It may sound crazy, but we can still find dignity, a sense of meaning, and even joy—not by playing by the system's rules, but by quietly rewriting your own.
In a world with a totally dysfunctional scoreboard, your small victories, authentic connections, acts of care, and creative work that nobody asked for become your moral and spiritual currency. Unlike a billionaire's mega yacht or an NFT of a cartoon monkey, these rewards cannot be taken away from you, no matter what the universe throws your way.
Write your own rules, even if they only apply to you. Care about what actually matters. When you glance at the absurd spectacle of billionaires in space and think, "What the hell is the point of this?" try to remember that the point is the small, stubborn victories you create in a world designed to strip meaning away.
In the end, this is the spiritual currency that no one can tax, steal, or corrupt. And somehow, even when everything else is falling apart, that feels like enough—or at least it's all we've got".
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