Once upon a time, achievements were tightly clustered.
With limited leverage, the gap between high and low performers was constrained.
But today, the difference is growing at breakneck speed.
And the winners (whether skilled or lucky) threaten to leave the rest of us behind.
I spent the last three years obsessing over this problem. And in the process, I reached some conclusions that I’ve never heard elsewhere.
With any luck, they’ll help me survive the technological rollercoaster of the future, look after my family, and stay sane in the process.
Maybe they’ll do the same for you:
Regulation As Status Game
Technology is leverage.
With the right tools, the smartest people can now be millions (and perhaps even billions) of times more productive than most others.
A single good idea can now be shared with the whole world, instantly, for free. And as LLMs and robots improve, it isn’t hard to imagine a future where every problem only needs to be solved once, no matter how many people are suffering from it.
Said differently: if someone isn’t the best in the world at their job, they may one day have no job at all.
Unless, of course, they’re protected by regulation.
Society has decided that certain roles (like doctors, lawyers, accountants and politicians) require more guardrails than others, somewhat insulating these workers.
But there’s a catch.
Once regulations are the only thing keeping people in a job, they’re incentivized to stop those regulations from changing. When someone’s fate is decided by a single policy decision, their fundamental job becomes political strategy (even if their everyday work is something completely different).
I initially failed to understand this about medical school.
The goal is no longer to just produce people who can diagnose diseases or perform surgery. It’s to produce people who are allowed to diagnose diseases and perform surgery. These are two different things.
Which creates an obvious problem:
Higher Order
Games cannot function without rules.
To win, a player needs to accept these rules as reality, and move within their confines towards victory (however “victory” is defined in that specific game).
But to accept a set of rules (such as those of medical training pathways) is a sacrifice. It’s an immediate loss of optionality with no guaranteed payoff.
So without a good reason, it makes sense that people might decide not to play.
At first, this seems rational. But the downstream societal impacts aren’t looking good.
Casino Culture
Those who refuse to play by the rules are left to try and survive on their own.
But the market is brutal. And as leverage increases, the winner-takes-all effects only become more pronounced.
What happens to the people that lose? The people that neither dominate the market nor survive in the regulatory status game?
By the look of things: they’re resorting to gambling (sometimes literally).
As the social contract weakens, more and more people seem to be using desperate Hail Mary plays as a last-ditch attempt at upward mobility.
When hard work doesn’t equal success, day trading looks a lot more appealing than a day job. Factor in youthful impatience and social media algorithms, and it’s no wonder my generation confuses work with luck (and vice versa).
Eventually, someone has to win the lottery. And when they do, they give false hope to everyone else. The result is a frustrated, disoriented underclass, jumping between opportunity vehicles without producing anything of value for the world.
I’d argue we need something better. But what?
Somebody’s Word
The Royal Society was founded on the idea of “Nullius In Verba”, meaning “take nobody’s word for it”.
To move forward as a species, we had to unlearn old doctrines, freeing us to make incredible new discoveries that changed the course of history.
But what if we lost something important in the process? And what if we need to rediscover it to overcome the challenges of the future?
Bottom Line
When people have no unifying narrative, they opt out of the game.
When they opt out of the game, they abandon the rules, leaving themselves no option but to compete in brutal, winner-take-all competitions.
This creates large groups of dejected people who see no path forward other than short-sighted gambling. And when the collective time horizon shrinks, it doesn’t take long for things to fall apart.
It’s a prisoner’s dilemma: thinking long-term requires us to forfeit our chances of unearned rewards, but if nobody does it, everything collapses.
And complicating things further: this process is iterative.
Imagine a small number of people get ultra-rich, and everybody else dies. Because status is relative, the process would start again from scratch, cutting down the population over and over until nobody remains.
It looks like there’s no way around it: a common story is the only path forward.
A story that justifies the sacrifice implicit in playing by the rules.
A story that elevates long-term thinking above short-term hedonism.
A story that people are willing to lay down their lives for.
Nullius In Verba was the spark that set off an unprecedented growth of knowledge.
But unless this spark is kept within the confines of an overarching narrative, it will burn everything to the ground.
What Now?
I’m in no position to lead large scale social reform.
But I’ve thought through the practical implications of this problem from first principles, and figured out how to future proof my own career.
The button below will show teach everything I’ve learned:
- Will