This is not an accident. It is the predictable outcome of over a century of monetary debasement and we are in the stage now where the consequences are visible to everyone, yet still understood by virtually no one.

The Scale of It

The fastest-growing financial category in America is not savings. It is not investing. It is not even bitcoin or cRyPtO.

It is gambling.

Sports betting was a $1 billion business in 2019. In 2025 it booked $17 billion in revenue on $167 billion in wagers. A 15x scale-up in six years.

Prediction markets are growing even faster. In November 2024, a single Polymarket contract on the presidential election pulled in $3.7 billion. A cultural phenomenon.

Eighteen months later, that entire year looks like a drop in the bucket. Kalshi and Polymarket have already done $60 billion in combined volume in 2026 alone, more than the entire sector did in all of 2025. Bernstein is forecasting the category hits $1 trillion by 2030.

Kalshi raised $1 billion last month at a $22 billion valuation. Polymarket is now valued at $15 billion. Vlad Tenev, the CEO of Robinhood, calls it the prediction market super cycle. He is right. We are in a super cycle for gambling.

I see it all around me. Most of my friends sports gamble now. More of them are on Polymarket and Kalshi every week. A lot of them already took their shot on memecoins and meme stocks back in 2020 and 2021. With little success, of course.

So why is gambling of every flavor suddenly everywhere?

Who Actually Did This

The easy story is that gambling is just entertainment. A harmless release valve. Or that DraftKings and Polymarket and Robinhood are the villains for building the casinos.

Both stories are wrong. The real villains sit upstream.

The Federal Reserve, in coordination with the US Government, has been debasing the dollar since 1913. The pace accelerated after 1971 when the last link to gold was severed. It accelerated again after the 2008 financial crisis. It accelerated again after COVID. Every crisis gets the same response. Print. Pump. Repeat.

The project is simple. Print the money. Pump the assets. Spread the consequences across everyone who holds dollars or earns wages. Concentrate the benefits in everyone who already owns assets.

This is not a conspiracy theory. It is the system working as designed.

It even has a name. The Cantillon Effect. Named for the 18th-century economist who first described it. New money does not reach the economy uniformly. It reaches the people closest to the money printer first, and they get to spend it before prices adjust. By the time it trickles down to wage earners, the purchasing power is already gone. The insiders buy the assets. Everyone else foots the bill.

That is what has been happening in America for a century. It just got dramatically worse in the last fifty years, and outright grotesque in the last fifteen.

The casinos are downstream of that.

Robinhood did not break the economy. The Fed broke the economy and Robinhood is where people go when they realize the old game is unwinnable. Polymarket is the symptom, not the disease. DraftKings is the symptom, not the disease. Memecoins are the symptom, not the disease.

But the disease is real, and the data is everywhere if you know where to look.

The Evidence

In 1971, a median home cost 2.5x the median income. Today it costs 7x. The most stretched level in US history.

In 1950, more than half of thirty-year-olds were married and owned a home. In 2025, fewer than 15% do.

Wages are up. Prices are up more. The things that actually matter for a middle-class life (housing, healthcare, education, insurance, groceries) are compounding at 10%+ per year. The paycheck gets a 3% bump and everyone is told they’re doing great.

The boomers are sitting on $80 trillion in wealth. Most of that gain came from holding assets while the currency they were priced in got debased. It looked like smart investing. It was actually just being on the right side of the print.

The generation behind them is on the wrong side of it.

If you are 20-40 and looking around, the default path is dead. A corporate job that AI is replacing. Wages that do not keep pace. A 401(k) running a race it cannot win. A house you will never afford at normal savings rates. A retirement planned around assumptions that no longer hold.

So people look around and think: the normal game is unwinnable. Why not swing for the fences?

That is not greed. That is despair dressed up as hope.

And waiting for them on the other side is an industry that has perfected the business of monetizing that despair. Robinhood built a slot machine and called it a brokerage. DraftKings built a casino and called it sports. Polymarket built a casino and called it information. Coinbase built a casino and called it crypto. Memecoins are just the chips. The casinos did not cause the problem. But they are standing there with their hand out, ready to take what little you have left.

What Actually Works

The most unpopular thing you can say in 2026 is that boring still works and that there is still hope.

Save more than you spend. Store your savings in scarce assets that the state cannot dilute. Do it over decades, not weeks.

Nobody wants to hear that. Everyone wants a quick fix. It may not even feel like it’s working, but then one day you look back over the years and realize it is.

As my father has told me, every generation has its challenges. Ours is to figure out how to build against a broken system instead of checking out of it. The easiest thing to do is to check out, gamble, and DOOM.

Beyond just saving, I try to be high agency in a world that is increasingly passive. I try to create opportunity for myself instead of waiting for it. I try to stay on the frontier of new technologies because the frontier is where asymmetric rewards live. I’m using AI every day to do more work in less time, learn faster, and identify where I can be more valuable to my company. I’m also always looking for opportunities to increase my earnings outside of my day job.

Like anyone who understands how broken the circumstances are and what caused them, it can be easy to get discouraged. But I generally keep a positive attitude even when it looks ugly out there. Having a positive outlook on life is incredibly important, especially when others around you are dooming.

Focus on what you can control. Tune out what you can’t. Spend your time trying to improve your abilities instead of watching others.

Don’t hyper-gamble. Don’t trade shitcoins. Tune out the prediction markets.

It’s a long game. The playbook is older than any of us. Spend less than you make. Save in scarce assets. Work hard. Stay optimistic. Compound.

It’s harder in the circumstances we find ourselves in today. But that is still the playbook. And it still works.

One Last Thing

The fastest-growing financial category in America is gambling. That should tell you something about where we are.

The way out is not another bet.

It is sound money. Held the right way. For long enough.

Paired with agency. And the willingness to build.

Don’t gamble your way out. Build your way out. NEVER DOOM.

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This is probably the single biggest miss that most people make regarding their health. Anyone focused on improving their health is thinking about diet and exercise, and those matter, but almost nobody is thinking about how much time they actually spend outside. Almost nobody is thinking about their light environment.

Think about it. Human beings have historically spent the vast majority of their time outdoors.It's only in the past century that our work moved inside, under artificial light, in sedentary positions. But our biology hasn't changed. We were meant to be outside.

This doesn’t mean what most people think it means. It’s not about sitting in the sun and baking all day and burning your skin. It means spending more of your time outdoors, in nature, getting fresh air and exposure to the sun, which is the source of all energy on this planet.

This is top of mind right now because the weather is warming up here in the Northeast. It’s been a little unseasonably warm this week, and I’m not complaining. After a pretty cold and snowy winter, I’m grateful for it. As the days get longer and warmer, I just want to encourage you to take advantage.

All I’m really doing is moving things I already do to the outdoors when possible. If I have to respond to some emails for work, I’d rather do it outside for twenty minutes than sit at my desk. When I’m eating meals, I prefer to eat outside this time of year. Lunch and dinner, many days, both outside. Reading a book, same thing. Instead of the couch, take it to the porch or the yard. These aren’t new activities. You’re just changing where you do them.

It also starts with the morning. You want to set yourself up for success. Getting sunlight first thing in the morning tells your brain it's time to be alert. It suppresses the sleep hormones still lingering from the night and kicks your body into gear. It also sets a timer for that night's sleep. Your morning sunlight is literally programming your sleep quality fourteen hours later. Take a quick walk. Or if you have to rush out the door for work, at least put the windows down on your morning commute. That early light is the most important signal your body gets all day.

And here's the part most people don't appreciate. You don't need to be in direct sunlight all day to benefit from being outside. Even sitting in the shade, you're getting infrared light. Infrared makes up nearly half of all the sun's energy that reaches the earth. It bounces off trees, leaves, the ground. It's what helps your body produce energy at the cellular level. Think of it as fuel for your batteries. And most of us aren't getting enough of it, because modern windows are designed to block infrared. Sitting inside near a window is not the same as sitting outside in the shade. If you can't get outside, at least open the windows. That lets in the full spectrum of sunlight that glass would otherwise filter out

If you have pets, pay attention to them. They already know this. My dog wants to be outside all day, rotating between the sun and the shade. Cats will chase a sunbeam across the living room floor for hours. Animals don’t need a study to tell them that light matters. They orient their entire day around it. We’re the ones who forgot.

We evolved to be outside. Most people are totally discounting that from a health perspective. Use this spring to make some minor changes. Move a few daily habits outdoors. Your future self will thank you for it.

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The exploration of “why” this is happening is incredibly surface level, touting rising stock prices, home values, and private business valuations.

But the article misses the most important part. It never explains the root cause of why this is happening. And it’s a critical point to consider, especially in the context of rising support for wealth taxes, universal basic income, and other redistributive policies gaining traction in the United States.

I’ll do my best to explain why this is happening. But before I do, I’d like to share some staggering numbers from the article.

The top 0.1% of households have seen their wealth grow over 13x in the past 50 years, adjusted for inflation. 430,000 US households are now worth $30 million or more. 74,000 are worth over $100 million. Those numbers have exploded in recent decades, far outpacing population growth.

Meanwhile, the bottom 50% of American households had negative average net worth from the mid-1990s through the start of COVID. Negative. It took stimulus checks and rising home values just to bring it back above zero.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone at this point that people are calling for massive wealth redistribution. And I actually understand why. I don’t support these policies, but I can understand why they’re gaining support. The wealth inequality in this country is incredibly problematic, and it is not a product of a free capital market. It’s a product of broken money.

The Wealth Gap, Explained

The WSJ notes that “for the top 0.1%, nearly 72% of their wealth is made up of corporate equities, mutual fund shares and private businesses. The S&P 500 has more than tripled in the past decade.”

I think this is an incredibly important data point, because anyone who reads it should ask the obvious question. Why has the S&P 500 tripled in the past decade? What is actually driving that?

Look at these two charts. The first is M2 money supply, which is a measure of the total number of dollars in the US financial system. The second is the S&P 500 over the same time period.

Notice anything? They tell the same story. More dollars, higher asset prices.

Look at the acceleration after 2008. Look at the vertical spike in 2020. The M2 chart shows roughly $6 trillion in new dollars created in less than two years. The S&P chart shows the stock market nearly doubling over that same stretch. That is not a coincidence.

The stock market is not going up because the economy is that much more productive. It’s going up because trillions of new dollars are being created and they have to go somewhere. They flow into financial assets. Stocks, real estate, private businesses. And the people who already owned those assets get wealthier automatically while everyone else pays higher prices for everything from groceries to rent to insurance.

This is the mechanism behind the wealth divide. The Federal Reserve creates new money to bail out the financial system, to keep interest rates low, to finance government deficits. They dropped interest rates to zero after 2008 and kept them there for over a decade. Then in 2020 it happened again on an even larger scale. Each time, asset prices surge. Each time, the gap widens.

For the average person, here is what this means in simple terms. When more dollars are created, the dollars you already have buy less. But the assets that absorb those new dollars, stocks, real estate, businesses, go up in price. If you own those assets, your wealth grows. If you don’t, your cost of living rises while your savings lose value.

This process has a name. It’s called the Cantillon Effect, named after an 18th century economist who observed that when new money enters an economy, it doesn’t reach everyone at the same time. Whoever gets it first benefits the most.

Here’s how it works today. New money flows first to the financial system, to banks, to large institutions, to well-connected borrowers. They invest and expand at today’s prices before those prices adjust. Asset prices rise as all that new money chases a limited number of assets. Consumer prices follow. And wages? Wages rise last, usually well after purchasing power has already declined.

The result is a wealth transfer that most people can feel but can’t quite explain. Your groceries cost more. Your rent is higher. Your insurance premiums jumped. But the stock market tripled. The people closest to the money printer got richer. Everyone else got poorer.

This is not a conspiracy theory. It’s a well-documented monetary phenomenon. And it has been the primary driver of wealth concentration in the United States for decades.

The Generational Divide Is Staggering

I think we can all agree that if the economy doesn’t serve younger people and doesn’t help them get ahead in life, that is a fundamental problem. They are the future of this country.

And what you’re seeing now is more and more younger people checking out. They feel like they have no shot at a future, so why build one? It’s easier to open up an account to gamble on sports or prediction markets. It’s easier to just check out entirely than it is to face the seemingly insurmountable task of meeting the standard of living your parents had.

The article points out a massive generational divide. Baby boomers collectively hold $88.5 trillion. Millennials and Gen Z combined hold $18.25 trillion. Two thirds of the households worth $30 million or more are headed by boomers.

I don’t say this to blame the boomers. Many of them worked hard and made great decisions. But they also had the wind at their backs in a way that younger generations simply do not.

They started accumulating assets decades ago. They bought their first homes when housing was still affordable. And they rode the wave of declining interest rates from the highs of 1980 all the way down to nearly zero for the past decade plus. All asset prices appreciated meaningfully under that tailwind of lower rates and more dollars entering the system.

Now you can kind of see that this is broken. The median homebuyer today is 59 years old. In 2010 it was 39. The median home price is now above 7x median income. That’s worse than before the Great Financial Crisis. I experience this firsthand, like almost everyone in my peer group. It’s just expensive to be alive.

The wealth gap isn’t an accident. It’s the predictable, mathematical outcome of a system that inflates asset prices while wages stagnate. If you already own the house, the stocks, the business, you get richer. If you’re still trying to get in, the door moves further away every year.

The Frustration Is Valid. The Proposed Solutions Aren’t.

I completely understand why people are calling for wealth taxes and universal basic income. The frustration is real. People can feel that the system is broken even though most do not know the exact reason why.

But these proposals treat the symptom, not the cause. A wealth tax doesn’t change the fact that money creation benefits asset holders. UBI doesn’t change the fact that every new dollar printed reduces the purchasing power of the dollars people already have. You can’t solve an inflation problem with more inflation. Redistributing newly printed money doesn’t fix anything if the money itself is losing value. And I’m sure in the process the government would find a way to line their own pockets handsomely.

Since 1971, every financial crisis has been met with the same playbook. Lower rates. Print money. Bail out the system. Each time, the gap widens. Each time, the people at the bottom fall further behind. And each time, the proposed fix is some variation of “let’s do more of the thing that caused the problem.”

The US has $39 trillion in federal debt. The dollar has lost 97% of its purchasing power since 1913. There is no political path out of this that doesn’t involve the printer. Both parties are responsible. Neither will stop spending. The only exit is more money creation, which means more wealth concentration, which means more frustration, which means more calls for redistribution. It’s a cycle, and it’s accelerating.

What I’m Actually Doing About It

I’m not going to pretend I have the answer for fixing this system. I don’t. But I do know what I’m doing about it in my own life, and I’ll share my reasoning.

First, I’m focused on earning aggressively. If your income isn’t growing at 10 to 15% per year, you’re losing ground in real terms. That’s a tough reality. The thing that secures my family’s future isn’t any single asset, it’s my ability to earn. I’m all in on bitcoin but I’m not banking on it to save me. It’s possible that bitcoin could go to zero, although the trend moves further in the other direction every day. What I’m trying to figure out right now is how to stack several incomes. The good news is that AI is creating efficiencies that were previously unimaginable.

Second, I save in scarce assets. I use bitcoin as my primary savings vehicle because it can’t be debased. It has a fixed supply of 21 million. No government, no company, no person can print more of it. In a world where the only exit is more money creation, I want my savings in something that doesn’t lose value every time a central banker fires up the printer. Bitcoin’s 5-year return looks rough right now, but the 3-year and 6-year crush every other asset class. This is why dollar cost averaging is your best friend.

Third, I’m building locally. I write this newsletter every week, but I’ve also launched a local community to bring together others who think like me. I believe in the power of local networks and the compounding effect of surrounding yourself with people who are building rather than complaining.

The Sound Life Framework

You can’t fix the monetary system. But you can build a life that isn’t entirely dependent on it.

That means earning more than you think you need to. Saving in things that can’t be diluted. Building skills and relationships and projects that compound over time. Being intentional about where your time and energy go instead of doom scrolling about how unfair it all is.

The WSJ data is shocking, but it shouldn’t be surprising. This is what happens when money is broken. The people who own assets get richer. The people who don’t get poorer. It’s been happening in this country for decades and it’s accelerating.

The question isn’t whether the system is rigged. The data makes that clear. The question is what you’re going to do about it in your own life.

I know what I’m doing. I’m earning, saving in bitcoin, building every week, and trying to live well despite a system that makes it harder every year. That’s the sound life.

If this piece helped you understand what’s actually going on, share it with someone who needs to read it. I write one of these every week. Make sure you’re on the list so you don’t miss the next one. And if you reply or comment below with what you thought, it helps me keep improving.

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It may be one of the most relevant things ever written about modern life. I have barely scratched the surface on Lewis’ work, but the more I see from him, the more I can tell that he is one of the more prescient and wise authors of the past century.

I wonder what Lewis would say today about our addictions to social media, 24-hour news cycles, the constant outrage and state of worry that most people find themselves in now that every conflict, scandal, and crisis is in your face around the clock.

Right now the Middle East conflict is dominating every media outlet. Legacy, alternative, socials, all of it. And I’ll be honest with you, I don’t know much about what’s going on there. I don’t think many people do. And quite frankly, I don’t care to. Because at the end of the day, it’s not something I can have any impact on. And it’s a conflict we shouldn’t be involved in at all.

Maybe that sounds dismissive. But it’s a deliberate choice I have to make about where to focus my time and energy.

The Hopelessness Trap

If you spend enough time “monitoring the situation” (the meme of a guy obsessively watching global crises unfold on social media while taking no direct action), it’s very easy to be discouraged and feel hopeless about the world around you.

The corruption alone is staggering. Just look at what has come out of the Epstein files. I personally was not shocked, but it can be discouraging to see how many political leaders and influential figures are compromised. And that’s just the surface level stuff we know about. It’s one example of many that paints a picture of how deep the rot goes.

Then there’s the incredibly corrupt financial system. A system that literally steals your time and energy through inflation and then throws egregious taxes on top. Your savings and your earnings are a representation of the time and energy you spent to earn them. That is being structurally devalued by a system of inflation where central banks and governments coordinate to create endless supplies of currency from nothing. It’s backed by nothing. It devalues the savings and labor of ordinary people. The government runs on unsustainable debt and nobody in power has any intention of fixing it. Because fixing it at this point would mean a financial reset of epic proportions, making the 2008 crisis look like child’s play.

This isn’t capitalism. It’s not even close. Capitalism, real capitalism, is probably the fairest system that exists. What we have is something else entirely. A parasitic structure that funnels wealth upward while the cost of living crushes everyone below.

And it doesn’t stop there. There’s violence around the world. Food crises. A cost of living crisis that’s hitting families hard. The list goes on.

If you sit with all of that long enough, hopelessness starts to feel rational. When things are this broken and you have no power to fix them, what’s the point of even trying?

The Illusion of Top-Down Change

A lot of people believed, and most still believe, that we could affect change through the political process. Many of us thought electing Trump would shift things in a meaningful way. And while I’m not here to write a political analysis, I think it’s fair to say that a lot of us are disappointed. His presidency, in many respects, feels no different than most. More government spending, more wars, generally more of the same.

This isn’t unique to one president or one party. The machine is the machine. Whoever sits in the chair inherits a structure that is designed to perpetuate itself. Expecting a single election to reverse decades of institutional decay is, in hindsight, unrealistic.

So if the macro picture is bleak and the political process isn’t delivering, the question becomes: where do you actually have agency?

What C.S. Lewis Understood

Here’s the full Lewis quote that’s been sitting with me:

“It is one of the evils of rapid diffusion of news that the sorrows of all the world come to us every morning. I think each village was meant to feel pity for its own sick and poor whom it can help and I doubt if it is the duty of any private person to fix his mind on ills which he cannot help. (This may even become an escape from the works of charity we really can do to those we know). A great many people do now seem think that the mere state of being worried is in itself meritorious. I don’t think it is.”

Read that last part again. The mere state of being worried is not meritorious. Worrying about things you cannot change is not a virtue. It’s actually the opposite. It’s an escape and distraction from the work you can do, the impact you can make, and the people you can help right in front of you.

That’s the trap most of us find ourselves in. We scroll through the feed or watch the “news” of every global crisis, every major scandal, every corrupt corner of this system and feel like we’re doing something by being aware, by being concerned, by having an opinion on it. But awareness without action isn’t useful. And when the things you’re aware of are completely outside your control, the awareness itself becomes a weight.

So What Can We Do?

I’ve been sitting with this Lewis quote for months now, and what I keep coming back to is the need to focus locally. The agency I have is in my own life, my family, my health, my work, my community. It’s in the decisions I make every day about where to direct my time, energy, and focus to better the immediate world around me.

I can’t fix the financial system. But I can educate myself, protect my purchasing power, and help others understand what’s happening to their money.

I can’t reform the food system or reverse the sickness crisis in this country. But I can choose where to source my food locally. And I can help others connect with local sources too.

I can’t stop a war overseas. But I can bring connection, joy, and peace to the people around me instead of doom-scrolling through the latest developments.

I can’t change what’s happening at the federal level. But I can build something meaningful in my own community.

This is what I keep coming back to. Not whatever the current thing is. Not the situation to monitor. What’s directly in front of me.

Sound Life Philly

This is why I’m building SoundLife Philly.

I’m going to continue publishing every week on this newsletter. But I also feel called now to find my people. People who are thinking about the same things I am. People who care about their health and are skeptical of a system that profits from keeping us sick. People who recognize that the financial system is broken and are looking for solutions. People who are questioning the narratives they’ve been fed, whether it’s about food, money, medicine, or media.

My goal is to build a local community of like-minded individuals and families who are focused on building a sound life. We don’t need to see eye to eye on everything, but I think we’ll share more in common than we think. I want to find the kindred spirits who share the conviction that the way forward is to build, not to wait for someone else to fix things.

In practice, that means a free weekly note covering what’s on my mind about health, money, and life in this area, plus local farms, restaurants, and events worth knowing about. And more importantly, a monthly in-person gathering. Happy hours, farm tours, dinners, whatever brings people together. The first one is happening next month.

If you’re in the greater Philadelphia area, I’d love for you to join. You can get on the list at soundlifephilly.com to receive the weekly note and get details on the gatherings. And if you know someone in the area who might be a fit, please share this with them or connect us directly.

Join Sound Life Philly

For the rest of you who aren’t local to me, we’ll stay connected right here. I’ll continue publishing weekly. And I’d encourage you to think about what building locally looks like in your own community.

The world is chaotic. It’s uncertain. And it’s far more corrupt than most people realize. But you have more agency than you think. It’s just not where most people are looking. It’s not overseas and it’s not in DC. It’s in our backyards.

Lewis finished that passage by saying he thinks we’re meant to enjoy our friends, our food, our sleep, and the frosty sunrise. I think he’s right.

The world will do what it does. Focus on what’s in front of you. Build the life you want to live. Find the people who are doing the same.

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The reason it stuck with me is because it lays out, with real clarity, a tension that I believe underpins everything happening in markets and the economy today. And it is arguably the biggest dynamic in the system right now.

The main thesis is this. Technology is deflationary. It allows us to do more with less, and it naturally wants to drive prices down over time. But the monetary system is inflationary. It is built on debt, and it requires ever more dollars, ever more credit, and ever more debt to keep the whole thing afloat.

The simplest way to see this is to look at the federal debt, which has exploded from roughly $400 billion in 1971, when Nixon closed the gold window, to over $38 trillion today.

These two forces are completely at odds with each other. They are on a collision course, and most people have no idea it is happening.

The System Needs Prices to Rise

Here is the simplest way to understand why.

The entire financial system runs on credit. Governments borrow, businesses borrow, consumers borrow. The stability of the system depends on the ability to service and roll over that debt. And that only works if the economy is growing, which in practice means prices need to keep rising.

Think about it this way. A business takes out a $1 million loan because they expect to sell $2 million worth of product. Their revenue covers operating costs, debt payments, and leaves a margin. The math works. But what if prices start falling? If that same business can only sell $1.2 million, or $800,000, the loan doesn’t get easier. It gets harder. The debt stays fixed while revenue shrinks. At some point, they can’t make the payments.

Now multiply that across every business, every mortgage, every government bond in the system. That is why deflation is an existential threat to a debt-based economy. It is not that falling prices are inherently bad for people. It is that the math of the debt breaks if they do.

This is why central banks have explicit inflation targets. It is why the Federal Reserve will do almost anything to prevent sustained deflation. It is a structural requirement to keep the system afloat.

And the scale of the debt makes it more urgent, not less.

In his book, Booth points out that between 2000 and 2018, global debt grew from roughly $62 trillion to over $247 trillion. In that same period, the global economy only grew from about $33.5 trillion to $80 trillion. It took approximately $185 trillion of new debt to generate about $46 trillion of growth. That is roughly $4 of debt created for every $1 of economic output.

Imagine pitching that to a bank as a business plan. Even if you taxed the entire $1 of growth at 100%, you could never repay the original loan.

The so-called growth in the economy is largely a function of creating more debt and more currency to stimulate economic activity. The second that stimulation stops and liquidity dries up, you get a massive credit contraction and the system starts to unravel. So governments keep spending and central banks keep printing, because the alternative is a deflationary spiral they cannot allow.

As Ray Dalio puts it, when debt gets out of hand, governments have four options: austerity, debt restructuring, money printing, or wealth transfers. But austerity and restructuring trigger the exact collapse everyone fears. Wealth transfers don’t happen at sufficient scale without revolution. So they print. Every time.

Technology Wants the Opposite

Meanwhile, technology is pushing the cost of nearly everything exponentially lower.

In 1972, Hewlett-Packard released the HP-35 scientific calculator. It sold for $395, which is over $2,900 in today’s dollars. Now compare that to an iPhone, which you can get for around $600, and can do a whole lot more than a scientific calculator.

Technology has always been a deflationary force. The internet disrupted media, publishing, travel, banking, advertising, and far more. It changed how products and services were distributed and accessed.

But here is an important distinction. The internet mostly disrupted distribution. It changed how things reached you, but it still required humans to create the underlying product. You still needed the journalist, the analyst, the designer, the engineer. The internet made their output more accessible. It did not replace the work itself.

AI is different. AI is disrupting production. It is going after the labor required to create the thing, not just the channel through which it reaches you. That is a fundamentally different kind of deflationary pressure because it attacks the biggest cost structure in any business: human capital.

What happens when a startup can do what a large incumbent does at one hundredth of the cost? An established company has 200 employees, $20 million in payroll, office leases, legacy systems, and debt on its books. A new entrant with five people and AI tools delivers the same product at a fraction of the price. The incumbent’s clients leave or demand lower prices. Revenue compresses, but the debt stays fixed. Layoffs follow. Those people stop spending. The businesses around them lose customers. Tax receipts drop. The deflationary spiral begins.

Now multiply that across thousands of companies in dozens of industries simultaneously. That is what makes this moment different from anything Booth could have pointed to when he wrote the book six years ago. The internet caused enormous disruption just by changing distribution, and that transition took decades and left a lot of pain in its wake. What happens when the disruption hits production itself, across nearly every sector, at the same time?

And we are still incredibly early. Roughly 84% of the global population has never used an AI tool. Less than 1% pay for one. The disruption curve has barely started.

In a natural state, all of these forces should be driving prices lower over time. Technology should be making life more affordable for everyone. That is what deflation from innovation looks like. It is a good thing. It means abundance.

But the financial system cannot allow it.

The Collision

This is the tension. Technology is becoming exponentially more deflationary. And the debt is becoming exponentially larger. So the central bank’s response will have to become exponentially more aggressive.

What that means in practice is more money printing. More creation of currency. More debasement of your purchasing power to fight the very force that should be making your life cheaper.

Jeff Booth saw this coming. He published The Price of Tomorrow about six years ago, before ChatGPT existed, before AI was part of the mainstream conversation. And it reads like a blueprint for what is unfolding right now.

His core argument is straightforward. In a technology-driven deflationary world, the natural path is for prices to fall and the benefits of innovation to flow to everyone. But because the monetary system requires inflation to survive, governments and central banks will fight deflation with everything they have. The result is a widening gap between what things should cost and what they actually cost. And that gap is paid for by the purchasing power of your savings.

Now, to be fair, Booth’s timeline has not played out exactly as he projected. He anticipated the pace of debt creation would need to accelerate far faster than it has. Global debt has grown significantly, from $247 trillion to north of $330 trillion, but it has not followed the exponential doubling pace he described. Governments found ways to extend the cycle. COVID provided cover for the largest coordinated money printing event in history. Inflation showed up afterward, which paradoxically helped the debt math in the short term by inflating nominal GDP. And the US dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency means the US can borrow more, for longer, and at lower cost than any other country, which stretches the timeline further than most expect.

But here is the thing. The directional thesis has only gotten stronger. Six years later, the debt is higher, the tools to fight deflation are more exhausted, and with AI, the deflationary force is broader and more powerful than anything he could have pointed to when the book was published. The system has held together longer than projected. That does not mean the underlying tension has resolved. It means the pressure has been building.

What This Means

I am not going to pretend I have all the answers. But I will tell you how this framework has shaped my thinking.

If you believe that AI and technology will continue to drive efficiency gains, and that governments will continue to borrow and spend at current or accelerating rates, then you should expect more destruction of currency ahead. Not less.

That means the traditional portfolio, the 60/40, index funds, bonds as ballast, was built for a world that no longer exists. It operated under the assumption of moderate inflation, stable rates, and a slow pace of technological change. None of those assumptions hold anymore.

Perhaps the worst place to be for any long-term investor is in fixed income instruments and cash. The best place to be is in assets both physical and digital that are scarce and have utility.

I could be wrong about the timing. I could be wrong about the severity. But the direction seems clear to me. And the framework that helped me see it most clearly was Jeff Booth’s.

If you have not read The Price of Tomorrow, I would encourage you to pick it up. It is short, it is accessible, and it might change how you think about your money.

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From over 10,000 employees down to just under 6,000. Over 4,000 people were asked to leave or enter into consultation.

The stock surged over 20% on the news. That reaction should tell you everything about where this is heading.

In his note, Dorsey was clear about why. When companies lay people off, it’s usually because the business is struggling. That wasn’t the case here. Gross profit is growing, profitability is improving, and their customer base is expanding. But the rapid progress in AI tooling has changed the math. Non-technical teams are more efficient. Internal tools are replacing external vendors. Smaller, flatter teams are getting more done. The number of people needed to run the company is shrinking fast.

Dorsey was left with a choice. Rounds of layoffs, gradual cuts over months or years, or be honest about where things stand and act now. He chose to rip the bandaid off.

I think people who have not been paying attention to how quickly AI is moving may be surprised by this news. But what I keep coming back to is not the layoff itself, it’s the stock price reaction. Because that reaction just gave every other executive in the country the green light to do the same thing.

The Buyback Parallel

Stock buybacks have been the dominant form of financial engineering at the company level for the past two decades. The playbook is simple. A company buys back its own shares, reducing the number of shares outstanding. Fewer shares means earnings per share goes up, even if the business isn’t actually growing. Stock goes up. Executives get paid. Shareholders are happy.

Buybacks weren’t even legal until 1982. Since then they’ve grown into the single largest form of capital return to shareholders, outpacing dividends by roughly 2:1 in recent years.

The post-2008 era showed how quickly this kind of strategy scales once the incentives are in place. The economy was in shambles. Millions lost jobs, homes, savings. And yet within a few years, corporations were borrowing at near-zero interest rates and pouring hundreds of billions into buybacks.

S&P 500 buyback spending went from roughly $150 billion annually in the early 2000s to over $800 billion by 2018. After the 2017 tax cuts, it accelerated further as companies used the windfall for repurchases rather than hiring. A 1% excise tax was introduced in 2023 and it barely slowed them down. In 2024, S&P 500 companies spent a record $942.5 billion on buybacks. In 2025, that number crossed $1.1 trillion.

The mechanism works because the market rewards it. Rather than trying to identify opportunities to grow the business, it is the path of least resistance while still rewarding executives and shareholders. Boards adopted buybacks en masse once they saw how consistently the market responded. It spread from a handful of companies to nearly every public company in America.

Not because every company needed to do it, but because the incentive structure made it the obvious play.

AI layoffs are following the exact same arc.

Companies don’t even need to innovate or grow product lines to benefit from this. They can cut headcount dramatically under the air cover of artificial intelligence replacing jobs across the workforce.

Human resources are most companies’ biggest expense. Cut that line item and margins expand immediately, fundamentals improve on paper, and the stock reacts. There’s also a real opportunity to maintain or even grow output with AI tools and technology. But the margin expansion alone is enough to move the stock.

Block just demonstrated the proof of concept, and the market’s response was about as clear as it gets. A 20% move on the day of a mass layoff at a company that’s already profitable.

Just like buybacks, this will spread. Not because every company needs to cut 40% of its workforce, but because the market will reward the ones that do.

Once boards see what happened to Block’s stock price, the calculus changes. The question shifts from “should we do this” to “when do we do this and how do we communicate it.”

I think AI layoffs will follow the same growth trajectory as buybacks, probably faster. Everything moves faster in the AI era. But the pattern is the same. A handful of companies prove it works, the market rewards them, and then everyone follows.

Dorsey just created the template.

The Question Nobody’s Asking

In the short to medium term, this is bullish for stock prices. Companies that can demonstrate they’re doing more with less, leveraging AI to maintain output while cutting costs, will be rewarded by the market. Asset prices go up. Margins improve. The numbers look great on paper.

But longer term, I genuinely don’t know what happens.

The US economy is 60-70% consumer spending. If companies across the board pursue this strategy, and I think many will, the downstream effects are significant. Fewer jobs means less disposable income. Less disposable income means less consumer spending. Less consumer spending means less revenue for the companies that just cut their workforce to improve margins.

It’s a feedback loop that nobody is really talking about yet.

Who Benefits?

There’s another dimension to this that I think is worth raising. The top 10% of US households already own roughly 90% of all stocks. The top 1% alone owns over 50%. If this strategy plays out the way I think it will, stock prices go up, which disproportionately benefits the people who already own the most.

Meanwhile, the people being laid off are losing their primary source of income. You end up with more wealth concentration at the top and more economic pressure at the bottom. I could see this accelerating calls for universal basic income or similar programs. The political tension between the people benefiting from rising asset prices and the people being displaced by the strategy driving those prices is only going to intensify.

The people most at risk are not the 20-somethings and 30-somethings who are willing to learn new tools and adapt. It’s the 40s and 50s cohort. Middle management. People who have been on the conventional path for decades, maybe coasting a bit, doing their work but not necessarily going above and beyond.

These are also the people with mortgages, families, and real consumer spending tied to their income. That’s the part of the economy that gets pressured when this scales.

Obviously it’s my best guess, but that’s how I currently think about it. Short to medium term, these layoffs become the next leg of financial engineering to keep asset prices moving. Longer term, the implications for the consumer economy are an open question.

The Window

Here’s where I’ll leave you.

Look at the AI usage data right now. 84% of the global population has never used AI. About 16% have used a free chatbot. Only 0.3%, roughly 15-25 million people globally, actually pay for an AI tool. And the subset that uses AI with any real proficiency to build, create, or accelerate their work is even smaller than that.

If AI layoffs are the new stock buybacks, and I believe they are, then a wave of these is coming. More companies will follow Block’s lead. The market will reward them for it. The number of people needed to run a business is going to keep shrinking.

Your opportunity in this environment is to be on the right side of that equation. Be the person who is learning these technologies, building with them, and becoming more valuable because of them. Not the person who gets replaced by them.

The window to get ahead of this is wide open. Most people aren’t even in the game yet. That’s the arbitrage.

If you found this valuable, share it with someone who needs to read it. I'm not writing about this from the sidelines. I work in financial services, I use these AI tools every day, and I'm watching this play out in real time. I write about what I'm seeing and thinking every week. Join me!

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By most measures, I have pretty good balance. I work hard, probably 60ish hours a week at my day job and another 5 to 10 on my own projects (like what you’re reading here).

My time during the week is pretty much accounted for between day job, personal projects, family time, and exercise. On the weekends, I have more free time, typically spent with my wife and our baby, and perhaps seeing our family or friends.

Despite having that balance, I still can’t sit still on a Saturday or Sunday. It’s really hard for me to enjoy leisure at home on a Sunday with my wife and our baby, no deadlines, nowhere to be, and still feel this pull that I should be working on something.

Sometimes because I want to. I do want to be creating and building projects of my own. But maybe more so because some part of me believes that if I stop, we’ll fall behind. I want to be able to choose rest without guilt. Right now, I can’t. The chatter of falling behind, of not getting to where I need to be, shows up uninvited.

All I’m after is a good life. And by that I mean no/little financial stress. The ability to take care of what we need for us and our children, and enjoy what we want without pinching pennies. I like nice things, but within reason. I’m not chasing riches, I don’t need to be ultra-wealthy, I just want a life well lived and financial stability for the long term.

And yet even to achieve that simple desire, I feel a daily tension. I want to be present for the time I spend with my wife and our baby, but my perception is that it has never been harder to build a family and attain the same life our parents did. We are regressing as a country in our ability to live on par with the generation before us.

I’m sure this feeling is as old as time. But my perception is that three forces unique to this moment may be making it more pronounced than ever.

Part of this is probably just me. I’m wired this way. My old man can’t sit still either. He’s always keeping himself busy with a project around the house. I’m less inclined to do a house project, more inclined to be constantly building something online, ideating, thinking about the next thing.

But it’s not just me. Even if I’m predisposed to this, I think there’s an entire generation of people who can’t relax, and I’m trying to unpack why. Some see the challenge ahead of them and check out and give up. Others, like myself, have that constant nag that what they’re doing is not enough.

I think it comes down to three forces working on us at the same time.

The first is how fast technology is moving.

Things are advancing at an unprecedented rate. I’ve been using AI every day for over a year now and increasingly so for more advanced work, strategic planning, and even building basic applications for work.

It’s creating an immense amount of opportunity, and if you’re not constantly staying in the loop and pushing the edges of what’s possible, it’s hard not to feel like you’re falling behind. It’s partially a feeling and partially true.

The acceleration creates this perception that there are unlimited options available to you at all times, and if you’re not working toward something every single day, you’re losing ground.

That said, I think this is also deeply connected to the second force. You may not see nearly the same volume of progress and taste of what’s possible with these technologies that I do, since my feed on X is dominated by AI and entrepreneurship at this point. As well as the many viral posts about how you have a short window of time to build and invest your way out of serfdom. I’ve written before about why that framing should be ignored, but it still gets in your head.

The second is that we’re chronically online.

We can access information at all times of the day. We can see what the top builders, creators, and entrepreneurs are doing. Most people are sharing their wins, posting about what they’ve shipped, what they’ve accomplished before breakfast. Or even now, what their AI agents have accomplished while they were asleep.

Even though I understand a lot of these posts are performative, designed to get engagement, a lot of it is also true. What’s possible with these technologies today compared to a year ago is remarkable.

I noticed this recently. I had a great day. Went up to New York with my family. During the morning, I met up with other people building local media. Then we went and grabbed a bite with friends at one of our favorite places in the city. It was a nice time and I was totally unplugged for the day.

And then later that night, I wanted to share my experience online, mostly because I committed to myself that I would share one thing each day in 2026. So I didn’t want to break my consistency streak.

The moment I opened Twitter, I was immediately bombarded with everything other people are building. That feeling of FOMO, of falling behind because I wasn’t building that day. Even though I had just spent the day doing something meaningful.

That’s the thing about being online. Before all of this, you were unplugged. You were focused on what was immediately in front of you and in your local community. There was no ambient scoreboard running in the background.

It's a double-edged sword. Social media can be a great tool. In fact, it's how I discovered the people I met up with earlier that day in New York. But there's no doubt that it can easily do more harm than good, even if you're intentional about how you use it. No matter how disciplined you are, the feelings of inadequacy still creep in.

The third is how unaffordable life has become.

We’ve all seen the statistics. Homes are less affordable today than at nearly any point in modern US history. The median home now costs close to 7x times the median household income. A generation ago, that number was closer to 3.5x. And there are downstream consequences: lower marriage rates, lower birth rates, more depression, less social cohesion, a declining belief that you can actually get ahead.

For many people, achieving even a decent life, nothing extravagant, is becoming increasingly difficult on a single income and in many cases even two. Supporting a growing family and trying to set them up for success? That’s becoming a tall order.

A big part of the pressure I feel every day is rooted in this. I realize how stacked the odds are. I know that just working a stable 9-to-5 is probably not enough to build the life I want for my family, which is why I don’t do that... among other reasons. So I am constantly feeling like I need to be evolving, constantly need to be building, constantly need to be thinking about work and how to get ahead.

A lot of that pressure is self-imposed. But it’s self-imposed because of what I know. Because I can see how expensive it is to be alive and to support a family right now.

If I could distill all of this down, it’s the collision of three things: technology moving at an unprecedented pace and creating massive opportunity, a culture of being chronically online where you’re constantly exposed to what the highest achievers are doing, and an affordability crisis that makes even reasonable expectations feel out of reach.

Put those three together and they create an immense pressure. A pressure that makes it genuinely hard to just be at ease, even when you have pretty good balance, even when that’s the only thing you actually want.

If you can’t tell, I am still trying to figure this one out. And I’m not sure if I am close yet.

What I do know is that I want to be the kind of person who can enjoy a quiet Saturday without feeling like I’m losing ground. I want to be fully present with my wife, with my family, without the low hum of “you should be working” running in the background.

I know that some of this pressure is structural and real. It’s not all in my head. The system we live in has made it genuinely harder to just exist comfortably, and that reality creates a kind of survival mode that’s hard to shut off even when you’re safe.

But I’m also self-aware enough to know that a lot of it is self-imposed pressure. Expectations I’ve set for myself. But these are expectations that I don’t necessarily think are incorrect, I just need to get better at managing them.

Easier said than done, trying to operate in a broken financial system, where the measuring stick (the dollar) constantly changes. Cost of living continuing to climb at an accelerating rate. A technological exponential curve that is just getting started. A loud and performative culture online. And the struggle within.

My grandfather didn’t have a newsletter. He didn’t have a Twitter feed. He didn’t have a side project. He had a job, a family, and a garden. And I think he was at peace with that in a way that I’m still learning how to be, if it’s still possible in 2026.

Maybe that’s the real cost of the world we’ve built. Not just the financial cost, which is staggering. But the psychological cost. The inability to rest. The feeling that enough is never enough. The quiet erosion of something that used to come naturally to people: the ability to just be.

I'm working on it. If this resonates, I'd love to hear from you. Do you experience this too? How do you manage it?

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Last week I wrote about why organizing your 20s and 30s around retirement is an admission of defeat.

A lot of you reached out asking: okay, but how do you actually make the shift? How do you go from counting down the years to being in a position you don’t want to escape from?

Here’s what worked for me.

Showing Initiative

I remember my parents always telling me this when I was younger. In middle school, high school, and so on. Guess it stuck with me because I am writing about it right now and I’ve shown a lot of initiative in my adult life.

Going back to my first job out of school. 22 years old. Hated it. Showed up that first day knowing I didn’t want to be there. I’d actually interned at that firm the summer before my senior year and really did not like it AT ALL.

So why did I go back full time? Well sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do. My goal senior year was to find a job I actually enjoyed more, and I got some other offers, but none of them were in New York where I wanted to be.

So I took the job at the firm I’d interned at, the one I knew I was going to hate, because it was a reputable financial services firm in Manhattan.

Dead on arrival. Showing up knowing I didn’t even want to be there.

So first day, I immediately started thinking: how do I get out of this?

I started networking heavy. I went to events even though I didn’t want to go. Networked a ton internally with other departments and even more externally.

Networking in traditional finance felt artificial, everyone had an agenda, myself included. But I did it anyway, because I knew that submitting job applications into the void wasn’t going to get me anywhere.

Also ripped the band aid off and started on the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) track. For those unfamiliar, considered to be THE credential on Wall Street. It’s no easy undertaking. Three parts, typically about 300 hours of studying to pass each part. Pass rate was around 40%.

I knew I needed to be proactive. Show initiative. And I knew these credentials proved many things: discipline, hard work, and motivation.

When I passed that first exam, it was like a huge weight had been lifted. All those hours paid off. That credential made me a more interesting hire. I was looking at analyst roles competing with fresh college graduates or recent graduates like myself, but this helped me differentiate a bit.

Almost 18 months after showing up dead on arrival, I ended up getting my next job through a connection. The introduction got my foot in the door with the hiring manager. I still had to go through several rounds of interviews and do a case study, but I landed it. This was at the end of 2019 working on investment research of hedge funds and private equity.

Fast forward into the next year. 2020. COVID. Lots changed. Stuck at home, started listening to more podcasts. Lots of walks. Time out of the hustle and bustle of NYC.

By mid 2021, I was ready for the next thing. The next job I got was at a startup that I heard about on a macro finance podcast Macro Voices. Heard the CEO on the podcast. Saw they were hiring a sales hire. I had a research background at that point but felt like I was more of a sales person. I reached out to the hiring manager for an interview. Crushed all the interviews including with the C Suite as I already knew the business well from my diligence ahead of time.

Got that job as the first sales hire.

Fast forward to my next job in 2023. My current employer. Reached out to one of the co-founders on Twitter, had an interview, got the job.

The main point: you need to be proactive. You need to show initiative.

This is only becoming more important. The gap between high agency/high initiative people and low has never been wider. So how do you actually show initiative?

Network constantly. Not just at formal events, but everywhere. Online, in-person, through introductions. Build relationships before you need them.

Build in public. Start sharing your thoughts, your work publicly. Twitter, LinkedIn, a newsletter, whatever. Let people see what you’re capable of before they meet you.

Get on the forefront of new technology. The people ahead on AI right now are going to win. Same was true for the internet, mobile, social media. Be early to what’s coming.

Provide value upfront. If you want to work somewhere, do some work first. Send the hiring manager a case study or do a project upfront. Show them what you could do for them before they even interview you.

Spend your free time learning skills that get you closer to where you want to be. Not just consuming content - actually building, creating, practicing.

Or spend your free time building your own company. Even if it goes nowhere, you’ll learn more in six months of building than six years of consuming.

Rethinking Retirement Savings

I was fortunate. My father taught me personal finance principles from a young age. When I started working part-time around 15 or 16, he taught me about retirement accounts, even matched my earnings for the year.

He gave me a useful foundation in traditional retirement planning and living below your means. Spend less than you earn, put the excess into the market - S&P 500.

I still keep a lot of those principles. But my thinking on long-term saving, retirement, and how to invest has evolved.

I haven’t had a 401k in almost five years. I’ve been working at smaller companies that don’t offer traditional benefits. I traded the 401k for company equity, which probably will amount to very little with my previous employer, but that’s part of the learning process.

I’ve put most of my cash flow since 2021 into Bitcoin. Most of my net worth is in Bitcoin, though I also have some equity exposure and traditional IRAs.

But most importantly, my thinking on my relationship with work and retirement has evolved. I’m not waiting 30 to 40 years to pursue what I want to do. I’m confident that if I pursue what I want today, I’ll get there when I’m ready in the future.

I want more autonomy over my time. But I’ve realized retirement isn’t the only path to that. If you get closer to work you actually want to be doing, you start getting autonomy now - not in 30 years.

Here’s how I think about capital now: I want long-term savings that compound without me touching them. But I also keep a separate buffer I’m willing to deploy - for a business venture, for runway to take a risk, for giving myself options.

When I took my current job at a startup, I walked away from traditional benefits - 401k match, health insurance, all of it. But I had savings if needed and conviction in what I was building. A big part of this for me is getting closer to what I’m being called to do. Following that, I don’t think I can lose.

You can’t bank on a pension or Social Security. So yes, save for the long term. But also keep capital available to invest in yourself - because that’s the best investment you can make.

I’d also challenge the common allocation playbook. S&P 500, maybe some bonds. For wealth building in this day and age, you need to invest on the frontier where there’s disproportionate returns, asymmetric upside.

That’s why I like Bitcoin. That’s why I think it’s interesting to invest in yourself to build skills, particularly in the AI space.

When to Take Risks and How Much Runway You Need

It’s always easier to take risks when you don’t have as much responsibility.

The first job I took away from the traditional career path - with the 401k and all that - was before I was married. Fewer responsibilities, fewer people relying on you.

So if you’re younger and thinking about it: start pursuing those interests. Start taking calculated risks. Join the perceived risky company. Make the investment in yourself.

I felt comfortable doing that when I had very little responsibilities.

But I’ve continued on this path even as I’ve grown my family, because now I have conviction. Now I’ve figured out how to make it work. I’m working at a small company, no 401k, no traditional health insurance (I figure out alternatives), saving in Bitcoin.

On paper, I’m considered very risky. But I don’t feel that way. I’m just pursuing something that’s interesting to me.

How much runway should you keep liquid before making jumps?

Generally a good practice is to have up to 6 months of expenses for an emergency. But you may want more if you’re starting a business that needs a longer runway for cash flow purposes.

It depends on what you’re building, what the initial investment is, what your financial situation looks like.

Even now, married with a child, I’m still not uncomfortable taking risk. I’m still going to pursue what I think is the path I’m meant to be on.

I’m not going to play it safe, especially because that has never been riskier.

The Path Forward

You don’t need to follow my exact path. But you do need to make a choice.

You can organize your life around eventual escape - save everything, defer everything, count down the years to 65. Or you can start building now. Build skills. Build capital. Build conviction. Build something you don’t actually want to retire from.

The gap between those two paths only gets wider with time.

I spent my early 20s hating my job and studying for the CFA on weekends. But every networking event, every credential, every cold email was moving me closer to work I didn’t need to escape from.

That’s the shift. Not quitting everything. Not taking reckless risks. But refusing to accept that your best option is to defer life for 30 years.

You only get one shot at this. The future is too uncertain to bet everything on a far-off finish line.

Build something you don’t need to retire from.

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I spent hours reading about the FIRE movement - Financial Independence Retire Early. People obsessing over savings rates and withdrawal strategies, calculating down to the month when they could finally escape. Looking back, it’s kind of an insane way to live. Someone fresh out of school already thinking about retirement, about how to escape. That’s not a good signal.

Look, if you’ve been working for 20 or 30 years and you’re looking forward to actual retirement, I get it. You’ve earned it. But if you’re in your 20s or 30s and already organizing your life around an exit strategy decades away, that’s a different story. The thing is, many people never escape the living for the weekends and retirement daydream way of life.

Fortunately, I was not one of those people. But that was not by sheer luck or coincidence. It took intentionality from almost the moment I started that first job I hated. And now, nearly 10 years later, I no longer spend my days thinking about being 60 years old and not having to work anymore. In fact, now I enjoy working, and I’m not sure how I’d fill my days if I wasn’t building something I found meaningful.

I think most people in the same situation don’t actually want to retire. They just want to live life more on their own terms, do something meaningful, or at least somewhat interesting to them.

When people say “I can’t wait to retire,” what they really mean is “I want to do things on my own terms” or “I want to wake up each day and spend my time on things that interest me.” Look, when you think about it that way, this is not something that needs to wait until you’re 60 years old to achieve.

Now, I will say there are people who just don’t want to work at all. Period. This publication is not for those people. This publication is for people who have ambition and drive, who show initiative and want to live an intentional, meaningful life. And for those types, I don’t think you’re looking forward to retirement. You’re looking forward to waking up and spending time on something that interests you, excites you, and still pays the bills.

I think it’s incredibly depressing and an admission of defeat for people to be organizing their 20s and 30s around this destination they hope to reach when they’re 60 years old. I didn’t want to be wishing my days away. And you probably don’t either.

And honestly, this strategy is only getting worse over time. I wrote recently about how playing it safe is now actually the riskiest move you can make.

The safe job, climbing the corporate ladder for 20 or 30 years, saving in an index fund - I’m confident to say that is no longer a winning strategy. In fact, people are taking on a lot more risk than they want to admit.

• The CEO of Microsoft AI just said most tasks accountants, lawyers, and consultants do will be automated within 12 to 18 months.

• Baker McKenzie - one of the world’s largest law firms - just laid off nearly 700 staff, just under 10%, because of AI.

• January 2026 saw the highest layoffs to start a year since 2009.

Not only is this an admission of defeat, but it’s also becoming even more challenging to plan that far into the future. The rate of technological progression is insane.

ChatGPT launched in 2022. Claude came out in spring 2023. Google Gemini launched at the end of 2023. These technologies didn’t exist a few years ago, and now they’re totally reshaping the workforce and the way we work. It’s hard to know what technology will bring in the next 5 years, let alone 10 or 20 or 30.

I really think this idea of retirement is going to look entirely different for people my age - early 30s, late 20s, and younger. It’s a relic of the past.

So here’s the main point: if you’re already thinking about retirement, you’ve already lost.

You’re wishing away your days. What you really want is something more meaningful. The question shouldn’t be “how much do I need to retire?” or “when will I be able to retire?” The question should be: what can I change about my life today so I’m not spending the next 30 years counting down?

For me, the path to where I am today was not linear. There were lots of moments of failure. Lots of uncertainty. There still is uncertainty. But I at least know that where I am today is much better than where I was when I first started my career almost 10 years ago.

I made that shift by refusing to accept that my best option was to endure work I hated for decades. I took risks. I built skills. I changed direction when things weren’t working. I invested in myself rather than just deferring everything to some distant future.

You can do the same. Not by following my exact path, but by rejecting the premise that you should organize your life around eventual escape.

Build something you don’t need to retire from. Find work that’s actually yours in some meaningful sense. Develop skills that compound. Take calculated risks while you’re young enough that the downside is manageable and the upside is massive.

The future is too uncertain to bet everything on a far-off finish line. Technology is moving too fast. The systems are too unstable. And life is too short to spend your best years in waiting mode.

You only get one shot at this. Why spend it planning to escape?

Next week, I’ll share how I actually made this shift and how you can too.

If this resonated with you, share it with someone in their 20s or 30s who’s already counting down to retirement. I send one of these each week, so make sure to get on the list. And if you reply or comment below with what you thought about this piece, that helps me keep improving.

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These posts constantly go viral on X. They tap into something real, concerns that many people have, questions about what the future holds in a world where computers are agentic and intelligent. But the posts are always doomer and that’s exactly why they spread and are promoted. But most importantly, they are wrong. Let me explain.

The Concerns Are Real

I’m not going to sugar coat it. There is going to be massive workforce disruption and many jobs will be lost.

In October 2025, U.S. employers announced 153,074 job cuts, the highest October total since 2003. That’s a 175% increase over October 2024 and a 183% rise from just the month before.

The median new hire is now 42 years old. Pressures on entry level jobs are building. I see this in my own work, the amount that I can hand off to AI rather than having to hire another junior person is quite astonishing.

Amazon now has over one million robots deployed across its facilities, nearly matching its 1.56 million human workforce. Internal documents suggest the company aims to automate 75% of operations and could eliminate 600,000 positions by 2033. The average employees per Amazon fulfillment center, around 670, is the lowest in 16 years. Meanwhile, packages handled per worker surged from 175 in 2016 to 3,870 today.

So yes, this is happening, and it is accelerating. There is no doubt about it.

And let me pile on for a second. Then there’s the affordability crisis, which I experience first hand like almost everyone in my peer group. It’s just expensive to be alive. The median home price is above 7x median income, levels even worse than before the Great Financial Crisis. For context, my parents generation were buying their first homes around 3-4x range.

And then how about your earnings? If you work in Corporate America you might see your wages grow 3% year over year. A little bump that probably most people appreciate, but don’t recognize they’re actually getting poorer each year. The thing is that real inflation is running easily 5-10% each year now. Your net worth might look like it’s growing on paper, but your purchasing power is eroding, outside of an occasional promotion.

This also means for the assets you want to save in such as S&P 500, real estate, or otherwise, they are also growing more than 3% per year, so each year you can afford less assets, which are the primary avenue for building wealth.

Again this is specific to white collar “safe path” jobs, but this is the lived experience for many.

So I understand the frustration, don’t get me wrong. I have it too.

What the Doomers Miss

But look, here’s what the doomers are missing. When technology destroys jobs, it creates opportunities. Technology is leverage, and that leverage is available to anyone willing to learn how to use it.

Only 12% of American workers use AI daily in their professional roles. That number has tripled in 2.5 years, and it’s accelerating. But we’re still incredibly early. I am one of those people, and have been for the past 18 months or so, and I will tell you first hand, I can accomplish far more at work than just a few years ago, making me more valuable to my employer and also giving me a wider range of skills that can be leveraged in other ways should I want to.

So if you’re in that 12%, you’re not at odds against AI. AI is on your team. You are competing against the 88% who aren’t using it. The window isn’t closing, it’s wide open.

Another thing to consider is technology adoption skews younger. I know for a fact my parents don’t even know what Claude is (Right Dad?). The people leading the charge and exploring what’s possible with AI are almost all younger. The push for vibe coding, agentic work, and just general use of AI for productivity boosts, these are outsized to people in their 20s, 30s, 40s.

Older demographics largely won’t use this technology, at least not for a while. I am reminded of how when I was younger my grandfather had a PC desktop but he didn’t have internet, I’m pretty sure he just played solitaire on it.

The younger generations will benefit disproportionately by these technologies.

This is the great irony of the doom narrative. The same technology supposedly ending all opportunity is the same technology creating unprecedented leverage and younger generations are growing up with and will be “AI native” just like I grew up in a world of being “internet native.”

The internet meme of “you can just do things” has never been more true. You don’t need credentials or permission. In fact I think credentials will become increasingly useless, a topic for another day.

It’s actually incredibly exciting the things that you can do now, without having to even be a technical person who can code. The people who are doom-scrolling about AI taking their jobs are probably not using AI to build anything, and probably aren’t even that dialed in to begin with.

The Hyper-Gamble Trap

Here’s the biggest problem with the viral doom content. While in some senses, it is a meme, and may not be taken too literally, the prescription is insane. And many people take it at face value.

The hyper gamble culture is pervasive and signs of the most nihilistic behavior. Maybe 1% of people who hyper-gamble will hit it big and get lucky. The other 99% will get wrecked.

And they are already beaten down and discouraged about the future, this advice only worsens their future outlook.

You can see the symptoms of the hyper gamble despair everywhere. U.S. sports betting revenue grew from about $1 billion in 2019 to nearly $14 billion in 2024. That’s a 15x expansion in five years. Prediction market volume exploded from roughly $6 billion in 2024 to over $60 billion in 2025, 10x in one year.

And then there is crypto. Most of the space is just degenerate gambling dressed up as innovative “tokens.” Platforms like Pump.fun are just casinos, I mean even Coinbase is a casino, and they are the biggest company in the industry. People are aping into “fartcoin” hoping for a 100x because they’ve given up on building anything real.

The Real Play

So what’s the alternative? You don’t need to hyper-gamble. You need to take calculated risk. Let me be specific about what that actually means.

AI takes people who are good at something and makes them very good. And it takes people who are very good and makes them best in class. The best programmers in the world aren’t saying they’re twice as productive with AI. They’re saying 10x.

And what if you feel like you aren’t great at anything to begin with? Well, first, don’t discount yourself so much, people are often their biggest critic. But also, AI can not only get you from good to great, it can also get you from nowhere to somewhere.

It’s not just a tool that can take work off your plate, you can literally tell it “teach me how to do this” and it will walk you through it, and along the way you can ask clarifying questions and get explanations on where you went wrong. This kind of one-on-one instruction used to cost thousands of dollars or require knowing the right people. Now it’s in your pocket for $20/month.

Another big unlock is combining skills. Being good at two things isn’t just additive, it’s multiplicative. Being good at three things is more than triple. You become irreplaceable through the combination, not through any single skill. A coder who can also design and manage product is exponentially more valuable than someone who can only write code. AI makes that kind of cross-training possible for basically everyone now.

So what should you do?

Build something. Start a side project. Create content. Develop a skill that compounds. A little each day adds up faster than you think.

And remember that affordability crisis I mentioned earlier? Your skills aren't the only thing that need to outpace the system

Save in assets that can’t be diluted. If you’re saving in dollars, you’re destroying your wealth. Store your value in assets that grow against the real rate of inflation. I use Bitcoin as my primary savings vehicle because it can’t be debased and has asymmetric upside for anyone with a multi-decade time horizon.

The career advice for this era is simple. Don’t be fungible. If you can be swapped out, eventually you will be. But if you have a rare combination of skills amplified by AI, you’re not competing against the machine. You’re operating the machine.

Doom is the Easy Way Out

Here’s the thing about the viral doom content. It gives people permission to give up. Every day more people realize the game is rigged, the financial system is broken, and they split into two camps. Some go into degenerate gambling on prediction markets and memecoins. Others decide the whole system is beyond repair and just check out entirely. But these are just two flavors of the same thing. Excuses for inaction and despair.

This is not new. Every major technological revolution produces the same panic. The printing press was going to destroy the church. The automobile was going to destroy the horse economy and everyone who depended on it. The internet was going to make us all unemployable. And every single time, the people who adapted and built with the new technology didn’t just survive. They thrived. The ones who sat around predicting the end of the world got left behind.

The doomers and the hyper-gamblers are two sides of the same coin. One group says the future is hopeless so why bother. The other says the future is hopeless so just roll the dice. Both have given up on the actual work of building something. Both are coping.

The future is going to suck and we are all serfs? I don’t buy it. I never have.

It’s still the best time to be alive. But only if you choose to build rather than doom-scroll. The future is yours if you want it.

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But when you look around, you start to get discouraged. The cost to just be alive is crazy. Everything you need - a home, food, insurance, utilities, a car - costs more every year. And what you want? A family, an occasional vacation, time with friends? That’s increasingly out of reach too. You start to look around and something doesn’t add up.

Maybe you’ve seen those TikTok videos, often a younger girl in the car, maybe early to mid 20s, visibly distraught, realizing the path is not working.

You’re not having a breakdown on camera, but you may be at the point where you get where she is coming from. That discouragement in the back of your head? That feeling that everything you want is just out of reach, or will take decades longer than it should? That’s the signal.

The question nobody’s asking: What if the path itself is the problem?

The Rules Changed

The “safe” playbook you inherited was built for a different era. The times were different. The workforce was less competitive. Institutions were more accountable. The dollar actually held value.

But the most important difference? The money itself broke. Since 1971, the dollar isn’t backed by gold anymore. The Federal Reserve can create trillions at will, and the government runs on unsustainable debt. More dollars get created every year, which means everything gets more expensive - not because you’re failing, but because the currency is failing.

Everything is more expensive, both consumable goods like food and whatever else and also assets like a home or a share of the S&P500. The goalposts move every year, and nobody told you the game changed.

The “safe” path you’re on now exposes you to systemic risks that only grow every year.

The Illusion of Safety

Here’s the truth: you’re already taking massive risk. You just don’t see it.

You’re working a job that gives you a 3% annual raise while real inflation runs 5-10% each year. Every few years you might get a promotion 10-15%, maybe 20% if you’re lucky. Meanwhile, food prices and house prices are climbing higher.

The math doesn’t work. You know it deep down, but it feels “safe” because it’s what you think you are supposed to do. You see it has worked for your parents, grandparents, or others in your life, and you think it will work for you.

But the path you’re on is within a system itself that is unsustainable. The US Government is now $38 trillion in debt, which is only growing.

Bonds, savings accounts, stable employment, all denominated in and dependent on a monetary system that’s structurally broken. You’re not building on solid ground. You’re building on quicksand.

Even if your 401(k) grows 15% by investing in the S&P500 and you feel like you’re winning, when you account for inflation, your growth may be closer to 5%. And the bigger problem is that your wages aren’t keeping pace with asset prices, meaning if homes and stocks are going up, but your wages only increase by 3% most years, you can afford less and less over time.

Your net worth might look like its growing on paper, but your purchasing power is eroding. The S&P might be up, but you’re still losing ground in real terms.

And then there’s AI. Marc Andreessen calls it the biggest technical revolution of his career, bigger than the internet.

In October 2025, over 100,000 jobs were cut, the most in 22 years. The labor market is softening. The median new hire is now 42 years old. Entry-level positions are vanishing. Junior roles are being automated.

The ladder you’re trying to climb is disappearing beneath you. The disruption isn’t coming, it’s here and it is accelerating. The “stable” path is getting exponentially riskier by the year.

The Liberation

You’re already taking risk, so instead take intentional risk.

You’re on the conventional path right now, and the conventional path doesn’t work anymore. So if you’re going to take risk anyway - and you are - take it toward something that actually works. Take control instead of hoping the broken system carries you through.

Stop dooming. Start building.

Every generation has its challenges. Your parents had theirs. Your grandparents had theirs. Back in 2020, I found myself unsure of what the future held, discouraged in the wake of all the chaos around COVID, lockdowns, etc.

My dad told me: “Jackson, every generation has their challenges.” That stuck with me. Because it’s true. Our situation is not unique and our challenges are arguably easier than previous generations.

That said, the dooming culture is getting worse. Doomscrolling and gambling on prediction markets won’t save you. The future belongs to people who lean in, learn, and build, not people who check out.

Here’s what I mean by calculated risk:

Learn emerging technologies. You have a supercomputer in your pocket and AI to turbocharge it. Think about this: when the internet was emerging, you had to learn it with books and trial and error. The internet didn’t exist yet, so you couldn’t look things up on the internet. Now? You have infinite knowledge at your fingertips. Find what excites you and start learning. Most people won’t do this. That’s your edge.

Pursue your calling. You’re already on a path that isn’t working. Stop and reflect. Pray on it, meditate on it, take long walks - whatever works for you. Figure out where your mind drifts to, what interests you, and start pursuing it, even a little each day. A little each day compounds. You’ll get closer to where you need to be faster than you think. Your parents, friends, whoever may question you, but you need to listen to yourself. If I’d listened to other people’s advice, I’d still be on the “safe path.” You have to trust yourself. That discomfort of going against the grain? That’s not a warning sign. That’s the signal you’re on the right track.

Save in assets that can’t be diluted. If you’re saving in dollars, you’re destroying your wealth. Store your wealth in assets that can’t be debased and that grow against the real rate of inflation - the one you live every day in groceries, utilities, insurance, and housing costs. Personally, I use Bitcoin as my main savings account, with investments still in equities and precious metals.

Stay ahead of the curve. Most people will doom. That’s the reality. You don’t have to be most people. If you spend time each day to better yourself, learn new skills, pursue your interests, you’ll be in a totally different place before you know it.

You don’t know exactly what the future holds. Nobody does. But you know there’s a path that works and you are starting to realize it’s not the conventional one.

The Best Time to Be Alive

This is still the best time to be alive. Not in spite of the disruption, but because of it.

Everything is changing. You have infinite leverage in your pocket if you can figure it out. The people who see this early and move will build the future.

Yeah, it’s going to take effort and “risky” choices. It’s going to require lots of time and sacrifice. Picking up your bootstraps and staying ahead of the curve. But that’s always been true for people who actually win. The difference now is the upside is bigger and the gap with those who don’t is wider.

You’re already on the risky path. You just don’t realize it yet. The conventional playbook is the high-risk bet. Don’t doom. Take control. Take agency. Build something real. And if I can be helpful along the way, reach out.

If this resonated with you, share it with someone on the conventional path who needs to hear it. I send one of these each week, so make sure to get on the list. And if you reply or comment below with what you thought about this piece, that helps me keep improving.

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Signals Worth Your Time

Ideas, conversations, and work that shaped how I’m thinking this week.

1. 1. The Great Rebalancing by Jeroen Blokland
   Started this book, which explains the underpinnings of our debt-driven global economy and why scarce assets have become the ultimate investment. Blokland is a portfolio manager with 20+ years of experience who no longer owns bonds - not personally, not for clients. Recorded a podcast to discuss. Link here.

   2. Claude Code
   Claude Code has been all over my feed, so I’ve been spending more time in it. Still early, but I’m finding real efficiencies in automating work. Worth exploring if you’re looking to stay ahead of the curve.

   3. Bitcoin’s Silent IPO: Why This Consolidation Isn’t What You Think
   For anyone confused by Bitcoin’s price action, Jordi Visser’s piece from November explains the dynamics well. I continue to have a positive outlook for 2026 - more Wall Street firms are enabling access, significant rate cuts are expected, and we’re in an election year that may see major stimulus.

We typically associate a negative connotation with the word scarcity. It’s often linked to anxiety, tension, and conflict. When resources are limited, stress and uncertainty rise. Scarcity becomes something to avoid at all costs.

In contrast, abundance is treated as the goal. More food. More money. More time. More options. That instinct makes sense. When food or water becomes scarce, people suffer. When a society lacks basic resources, coordination of economic activity and civilization building falters.

But scarcity is not solely something to view as bad. In some cases, it is the signal that keeps systems functioning as they should.

Winter as a Living Example of Scarcity

This has been on my mind as we move through winter.

Mid-January in Pennsylvania. We are past the winter solstice, and the days are slowly getting longer, yet daylight remains scarce. The sun rises after 7 a.m. and sets around 5 p.m. Most of the day exists in darkness.

Like many people who live in colder climates, I’ve never really liked winter. Summer has always been my favorite season. Early sunrises, late sunsets, and everything in between. More energy. More activity. The warmth of the sun. Long days on the beach. I don’t think I’m in the minority on this one.

January and February have never been months I looked forward to. Once Christmas and New Year’s are over, it usually becomes a race to get to spring as quickly as possible. These months tend to drag on.

But this winter, I’ve tried to approach it differently.

Rather than resisting the slowness of the season and fighting the darkness, wishing it away and living at odds with nature, I’ve tried to embrace it.

Darkness, Sleep, and Repair

Right now, daylight is scarce. Darkness is abundant. Your body is responding accordingly. I know mine is. You’ve probably felt it yourself. It’s 7 p.m. and you’re exhausted. Your body winds down much earlier than it does in summer. That doesn’t mean something is wrong. It means your body is doing exactly what it’s designed to do.

Darkness signals melatonin release from the brain to the body. Melatonin is the body’s darkness hormone. As it rises, the nervous system slows, the mind quiets, and the body shifts toward repair. Your body prepares for sleep, and during sleep, recovery improves. The additional hours of darkness in winter act as a signal that this is a season for deeper rest and repair.

This year, I’ve been listening to that signal. I get into bed around 8:30p.m. most nights. Full disclosure, I also have a baby who goes to bed around 7:30 or 8 p.m., so it’s in my best interest to get to bed early too.

I wear blue light blockers after sunset, especially if I’m still working, which is most days. By 7:30 or 8p.m., I’m tired. By 9 p.m., I’m usually asleep. I wake up most mornings around 4 or 5 a.m. feeling decently well rested, or as well rested as you can be with a baby.

This time around, rather than fighting the constraint of winter, I’ve accepted it. Less light. Shorter days. A slower schedule. This is how the season is designed, and living in alignment with it is better for both the body and the mind.

Modern Life Has No Room for Winter

Modern life has little respect for nature and its cycles. Most people rarely consider this at all. Schedules and obligations remain nearly identical throughout the year. Watching TV late into the night. Leaving lights on in the house or office late into the evening. Eating meals at the same times regardless of season. Productivity is expected to remain constant.

There is very little room for winter in modern schedules.

The result is low energy, compounding exhaustion, and a subtle sense of misalignment. Darkness becomes something we ignore rather than embrace. Honoring the scarcity of light in winter is one of the simplest ways to live in alignment with the season.

Money as an Environment

Money, like light, shapes behavior more than we tend to realize. Most people don’t think about the monetary environment, yet they live inside its constraints every day.

In the current U.S. dollar system, money is abundant. The supply of new dollars is constantly increasing through coordination between the Federal Reserve and the U.S. government.

At face value, abundant money sounds appealing. More money for the rest of us, right? In practice, it means the value of the dollar declines and wealth concentrates toward the top. Most people have felt this directly, especially over the past six years.

New money does not enter the economy evenly. It flows first to those institutions and people closest to its creation. This process is often described by the Cantillon Effect, which explains how early recipients of newly created money benefit before prices adjust, while everyone else absorbs the higher cost of living later.

As this money works its way through the system, prices rise. This dynamic extends into nearly every area of life. Food. Housing. Utilities. Insurance. Have these goods suddenly become more valuable, or has the dollar become less valuable?

In a functioning market, rising prices reflect limited supply or increased demand. Today, they more often reflect money creation instead.

Rising prices reshape behavior more than most realize. Saving feels futile, and holding cash erodes purchasing power. Time horizons compress, consumption is pulled forward, and speculation becomes the standard.

One visible expression of this mindset is the rapid growth of prediction markets and sports gambling. Their rising popularity reflects a broader shift toward short-term payoff, risk-seeking behavior, and the financialization of everyday life, conditions that thrive when saving and long-term planning feel increasingly unrewarded.

Monetary Scarcity as Signal, Not Constraint

Prices, like light, are a signal.

It tells individuals and societies when to consume, when to save, when to invest, and when to wait. When that signal is clear, coordination happens naturally and efficiently. When it’s distorted, market signals begin to break down.

When prices stop communicating real information, rising costs no longer distinguish between genuine scarcity, which can often be addressed through increased supply, and monetary dilution. Decision-making becomes harder, and long-term planning fades.

Scarce money restores clarity and price signals. When money is scarce, prices regain meaning, inflation slows, and saving becomes viable again. Delayed gratification is rewarded rather than punished, and economic activity reorganizes around longer time horizons.

This is why gold functioned as money for so long. Its scarcity enforced discipline. It constrained excess. It preserved value across generations.

Bitcoin inherits this role in a digital context. With a fixed supply of 21 million, Bitcoin reintroduces monetary seasonality. There are periods for spending, periods for saving, periods for building.

Just as winter’s season of rest and repair plays a role in long-term health, scarce money creates a foundation for long-term wealth.

Scarcity as a Framework for Health and Wealth

My challenge for the remainder of this season is simple.

Embrace scarcity.

Embrace the shorter days. Wind down earlier in the evenings. Earlier dinners. Dimmer lights. A book instead of a screen. If you do, you’ll notice your body seeking rest much sooner. Respect the cycles that existed long before modern convenience. Your body needs it.

Embrace Bitcoin. A form of money whose supply cannot be diluted. Consider what monetary scarcity enables over long periods of time. Why has gold persisted for so long as a store of value?

Health and wealth both compound over time. Scarcity helps create a sound life.

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How I’m Embracing Scarcity This Winter

• Early bedtimes, typically in bed by 8:30–9 p.m.

• Blue light blocking glasses after sunset and before sunrise

• Shifting meals earlier, breakfast before 8:30 a.m., dinner usually around 5:30–6 p.m.

• Winding down earlier with lower light in the evenings

• Switching light bulbs from LEDs to warmer, full-spectrum incandescent lighting

Signals Worth Your Time

Why You Must Become a Creator
A reflection on human fulfillment through creation rather than passive consumption, drawing on J.R.R. Tolkien’s idea of “sub-creation” and the importance of building rather than scrolling in a distraction-saturated digital age.

Conscious Home Design: Architecture for Health and Happiness with Talor Stewart
A conversation on how environment shapes health. We often focus on nutrition and exercise, while ignoring light. Practical insights on improving the home environment to support long-term health.

Regardless of which platforms you use, your mind is operating in a hostile environment. Information is being fired at us at a velocity far greater than anything we were ever designed to process, and much of it barely qualifies as information at all.

The feeds are engineered to overwhelm, distract, and hook you, and over time, that constant assault degrades how you think, focus, and live.

Every major platform has moved further in this direction over the past few years. The goal is simple: keep you on platform for longer. Counterintuitively, that incentive pushes everything toward shorter, faster, and more stimulating content. The success of TikTok accelerated this shift, with Instagram, X, and YouTube all embracing short form at a greater rate.

Over time, the intensity increases and the assault on your mind amplifies.

I’ve experienced this firsthand, and I suspect you have too. These platforms degrade the ability to think clearly, retain focus, and exercise sound judgment. I feel it in myself. My thoughts are more scattered, and sustained attention is harder. And this wasn’t something that developed overnight. It compounded over time.

Long-Term Cognitive Atrophy

Constant exposure to high-velocity, engagement-optimized content trains the brain to crave stimulation and makes it harder to engage with longer-form ideas.

Over time, this degrades our attention, thinking becomes scattered, and sustaining focus requires more effort. It creates a persistent itch to check the phone, to scroll, to see what’s next. I, like all of you, deal with this on a daily basis.

There are broader social consequences here that I won’t fully explore in this article, but at an individual level, the cognitive atrophy is real. An environment dominated by short-form content reduces both the opportunity and the capacity for deep thinking.

The Compounding Theft of Time

Our phones fill every gap now. A few minutes waiting in line. A short break during the day. Time in the bathroom. Five minutes here and there that feel insignificant on their own. For most, those minutes compound into several hours a day. Then several days of the year. And then several years of your life.

For many people, social media becomes one of the largest time expenditures in their lives. And that time comes from somewhere. It comes from time with family and friends, building a business, learning a new hobby, or simply being present. Instead, those hours are diverted into passive consumption that is harming you.

A few minutes here and there, compounded into hours a day may not feel dramatic in the moment. Over a decade, it becomes thousands of hours. That is a significant amount of time you’ll never get back.

Living Inside the Feed

On X (formerly known as Twitter), the default experience prioritizes a “For You” feed rather than the people you intentionally follow. Content is surfaced based on engagement and virality, often because it triggers strong emotional responses or captures attention quickly. This is the platform I know the best, because it’s the one I use the most.

To a degree, there is real utility there for me. It helps me stay aware of financial markets, industry news, and ideas that I will use for my podcast or inspire topics to write about. But at the same time, it’s designed to pull me in. On days when I check it early in the day, I can feel the difference. Less clarity at work. Less motivation. A noticeable decline in productivity and focus. That initial check creates a nagging urge to keep checking throughout the day. It sets the tone for the day in a way that’s hard to ignore.

Instagram is a mental drain in another way, but harmful nonetheless. I deleted it over 5 years ago because it added very little to my life. And the emotions it consistently surfaced were envy, inadequacy, and comparison. That pattern is especially visible among teenagers and young adults, where rising rates of anxiety and depression closely track the adoption of these platforms during adolescence.

Another layer sits underneath all of this: the physical environment. Smartphones and computers emit artificial blue light. As the sun sets, that light interferes with circadian rhythms, sleep quality, and recovery. The same devices delivering endless content are also disrupting the biological systems responsible for rest, focus, and emotional regulation. A topic for another day.

Rebuilding a Sound Mind

So what do you do about it?

For me, rebuilding a sound mind starts with intentionality. This year, I’m focused on being far more deliberate with my consumption. Easier said than done, especially when the platforms are professionally designed and optimized against intentional use.

But the even more important goal and theme of this year for me is to CREATE rather than CONSUME.

You see that play out every week when I publish an article here, so hold me to it. Writing is one way of choosing creation over short-form consumption.

But creation doesn’t have to be writing. It can be any creative outlet that helps you synthesize your thoughts and express them in your own way. It can also mean creating memories with your family, scheduling time together, planning trips, or simply being more present. It can mean building skills, pursuing a hobby, or having deeper conversations.

It also means choosing long-form over short-form. Reading something longer than a few hundred characters. Engaging your mind rather than reacting to whatever the algorithm serves up next that has no importance or relevance to you.

This newsletter exists as a small act of practicing that philosophy. It’s my way of pushing back against the constant warfare on my attention. I’d encourage you to find or build an outlet that serves the same purpose for you.

Attention is finite. Where you place it compounds over time.

If you found this valuable, feel free to share it with someone who might benefit. I send one of these each week.

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Signals Worth Your Time

Ideas, conversations, and work that shaped how I’m thinking this week.

Morgan Stanley & Bank of America Signal a New Bitcoin Era

My latest episode of The Last Trade, where I cover the convergence of Bitcoin, traditional markets, and culture.

Wall Street’s largest firms are positioning themselves more deliberately around Bitcoin, signaling a shift away from the familiar four-year cycle and toward a structurally different market regime.

EAT REAL FOOD

New dietary guidelines were released by the United States government. You don’t need the government to tell you what to eat, but guidance that emphasizes nutrient-dense, whole foods and moves away from the food pyramid many of us grew up with is a step in the right direction.

The Bullish Case for Bitcoin

This is the article that started it all for me. For anyone still working up the curve on Bitcoin, trying to understand its fundamentals and place in the world from a historical perspective, this piece remains one of the clearest and most compelling starting points.

On one hand, access to information and people has never been greater. Nearly everything you could want to learn sits in your pocket. You can acquire new skills, build businesses, and connect with people across the world. The internet has collapsed the cost of education, starting companies, and building relationships. The level of leverage available to an individual today would have been unfathomable even at the turn of the millennium.

At the same time, most people feel deeply unfulfilled by their work. They spend most of their waking hours sitting behind a desk, chipping away at tasks that don’t give them a real sense of purpose and feel disconnected from their interests. That dissatisfaction is now paired with a growing anxiety about job security as artificial intelligence reshapes the workforce.

It sounds like I’m talking out both sides of my mouth. Both of these realities exist at once and everyone faces a choice between two entirely different paths. It all depends on agency.

Agency is the capacity to steer your own life. It shows up in your daily decisions and in the actions you take. It is the belief that your decisions matter and that your trajectory is not fixed. A person with agency bends the world to their vision rather than waiting for circumstances to change.

Agency has always mattered. But now more so than ever before. The gap between high- and low-agency individuals is widening quickly.

This is because we are living through a significant technological shift. Artificial intelligence has already materially impacted how businesses operate and how individuals perform their work.

Case in point, in October 2025, layoffs at large U.S. corporations reached the highest monthly level in over twenty years. Layoffs were driven by tech, retail, and services industries, with reasons cited including restructuring, AI adoption, and economic pressures, affecting major companies.

This trend is accelerating. Entrepreneurs and investors on the AI frontier openly discuss the possibility of billion-dollar companies run by a single person. The implication for us all is simple. Operate under the assumption that AI is coming for your job; it will either replace it or radically alter it. You have no choice but to use these technologies to accelerate your own skill sets and learning if you want to stay relevant.

For those who have taken the conventional career path of pursuing a stable job, usually at a large employer, in a field that historically pays the bills, you are most at risk. Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter (now X) is a good example of this. There was so much gloat in the workforce, yet he laid off 85% of employees and the business continues to run smoothly. And the October data supports that this is accelerating.

Pair these pressures with the quiet crisis of meaning. I see this in my own life. Most of my friends and connections online are far from thrilled about their work. Many are not even remotely interested. Following the familiar script of college, entry level role, and promotion cycle (by the way if you aren’t growing your earnings at least 10-15% you are falling behind due to inflation). They are waking up each day inside a job that is offering them neither fulfillment nor leverage and ownership.

They do it because it is safe, it is stable, it gives them a sense of security. So what happens when that sense of security is threatened and then lost?

This path is already under acute pressure. AI scaling, over-bloated companies, and an affordability crisis where home prices, insurance, cars, and food are all rising faster than wages. You see this evidenced in the broken housing market, which I wrote in greater detail here.

For low agency individuals, the future feels uncertain and heavy. Yet for high agency individuals, the same environment presents opportunity.

The internet has flattened access to knowledge and connections. The great internet meme “you can just do things” is the perfect mantra for this cohort. You don’t need to ask anyone’s permission or get credentials from an institution to take agency over your life and use the internet to cultivate connections and expand your opportunity set.

And your ability to “just do things” is only increasing. The barriers are lowering. For example, 2025 felt like the year of vibe coding, where nontechnical individuals who don’t know how to code can still build functioning websites and applications. Businesses can simply do more with less. That’s true from the largest organizations all the way down to startups that no longer need a massive upfront investment just to develop technology.

Another opportunity is using the internet’s ability to connect with people to your advantage. That might be finding like-minded people who share an interest, finding a cofounder for a project you’re working on, or finding a job.

My past two jobs, including my current employer, came from proactively reaching out. I didn’t wait for a job posting or hope someone reviewed my application. I reached out directly to executives, had the conversation, and got my foot in the door.

So while the future is uncertain, it does not have to be bleak. The disruption the workforce is going through presents real opportunity for people who are willing to take it.

If you’re still deciding whether this is the best or worst time to be alive, the answer depends on whether you’re willing to take responsibility for shaping your path. Sit with your habits. Look at how you spend your time and the people you surround yourself with. Ask yourself whether you’re actually taking ownership of your life.

This doesn’t mean life is easy. It never is, at any place or time in history, for most people. It does mean there are more opportunities than you might realize. So if you ask me, this is the best time to be alive. My father tells me that every generation faces its own challenges, and I’m up for it.

If you found this valuable, feel free to share it with someone who might benefit. I send one of these each week.

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Signals Worth Your Time

Ideas, conversations, and work that shaped how I’m thinking this week.

2026 Macro Outlook and What It Means for Bitcoin | Joe Carlasare
A balanced, thoughtful discussion on the economy, markets, and Bitcoin heading into 2026.

Signal: If the four-year halving cycle breaks and Bitcoin makes new all-time highs in 2026 (rather than a down year), that outcome is actually the most bullish case, because it signals a shift away from the cycle narratives.

My Conversation with Todd Graves | Founders Podcast

The energy is infectious from start to finish. Todd’s story of starting Raising Cane’s in college, still owning over 90% of the business, and building it into a company valued north of $20B is incredible.

Signal: If you need something that genuinely fires you up about building something from scratch and sticking with it for decades, this episode will do it.

Living in Sync: Circadian Health, Skin Healing & Conscious Living | Zaid K. Dahhaj

How your light environment shapes far more than just your skin, it affects sleep, hormones, mood, and long-term health. We tend to think of diet and exercise as the two pillars of health, but light belongs right at the top of that list and is the piece most people don’t even know to consider.

Signal: If your light environment is misaligned, you are doing yourself a major disservice and no amount of clean eating or exercise fully compensates.

New year resolutions are upon us. We look back on what worked and what didn’t in all facets of our lives. For those of us who spend time thinking about markets and capital allocation, it’s a good time to take inventory on how investments performed.

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For those of us who invest in Bitcoin (or view Bitcoin as their savings vehicle), 2025 offered a particularly sharp lesson. Bitcoin underperformed every major asset class.

Most investors and industry participants had sky high expectations at the start of the year after breaking through $100k in Q4 2025. We awaited continued momentum paired with significant institutional and political adoption. But we finished the year down 6% and down 30% from all time highs in October of $126,000. All other major asset classes had a positive 2025.

Will Bitcoin be the best performing asset class in 2026? I don’t know. No one does. That uncertainty is part of investing.

What I can control, though, is where my time, attention, and energy go. And over long enough periods, those inputs matter just as much, if not more, than where capital is allocated.

We usually think of investments as something external and financially driven, deploying capital into assets with the hope of future returns, such as stocks, real estate, Bitcoin, or businesses.

We tend to lose sight of other ways we can invest our time and energy, especially when the returns are not immediately visible on a screen.

So where do I think the best investment is in 2026? For me, it’s an investment in myself.

Investing in yourself can take many forms beyond health. It can mean deliberately building skills that increase your leverage over time. It can also mean investing in your environment, your routines, and the quality of your inputs, what you read, who you spend time with, and how often you allow yourself to be distracted.

All of these compound quietly, often without notice, until one day they don’t.

Over the past one to two years, life has simply gotten busier. Work is demanding, family responsibilities grew, and I found myself making more excuses for missing workouts or not eating as cleanly as I was a few years prior.

For me, that lens has brought one area into particularly sharp focus. One of the challenges with health is that the feedback loop is long. Financial markets can disappoint you over a single year and cause you to check your priors.

Our bodies are more resilient than markets, but they can weaken without proper attention and commitment. Health is an investment over decades.

This is shaping how I am thinking about 2026. If I zoom out far enough, health sits underneath everything else I care about. My family, my work, my ability to go for a hike, think clearly, and enjoy a night out.

This year, I’m treating my health like a serious investment. That means returning to discipline around what I eat. Creating consistency in my workouts and doing things that I said I would for a while.

An example is this winter I finally signed up for a race series in a state park in the Philadelphia area, committed to running the trails every Sunday, building toward a half marathon in February.

This doesn’t replace a focus anywhere else, including work. If anything, it supports it. The more I focus on my health, the better I will be in my personal and professional life.

At its core, every real investment involves delayed gratification. You give up something today in service of a better future. Viewed through that lens, investing time and energy into your own health is one of the most rational decisions you can make.

Markets will do what they do. Bitcoin will go up or down this year. And over a single year outcomes can vary, but over decades, fundamentals assert themselves.

For me, the best investment for 2026 is clear. It’s building a sound life from the inside out, starting with health, and letting everything else compound from there.

What are you focused on for 2026? Let me know in the comments below.

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I took a greater interest in Bitcoin in 2020 and 2021, a period when fiscal and monetary policy went completely out of control. Trillions of new dollars flooded the financial system in the United States and globally. Prices for everything rose as newly minted currency entered the system. Financial assets continued to set new all-time highs due to the surge of liquidity, and likewise, prices of everyday goods went through the roof.

It was during those times that the Bitcoin ethos began to resonate with me more. A scarce form of money that could not be tampered with by any government or central bank. Money that could protect purchasing power from the dilution of the fiat currencies. Money that could be sent to anyone, anywhere in the world, without risk of censorship by a bank.

In an environment defined by uncertainty and heavy-handed policy, that really spoke to me.

Freedom Money in a World That Felt Less Free

The global lockdowns made this contrast even sharper. Businesses were shut down. Bank accounts were frozen. Movement was restricted under the guise of public health. A monetary system that allowed for individual autonomy and economic freedom became especially compelling.

Bitcoin education at the time reflected this reality. Most content highlighted Bitcoin’s strength as uncensorable and undilutable money.

Self-custody companies were gaining adoption. Podcasts centered on Bitcoin’s merits as a form of freedom grew rapidly. For me, the gap between the fiat system and the ability to hold money outside it was meaningful.

Bitcoin Has Not Changed, but Its Culture Has

It’s now five years later since I took a keen interest in Bitcoin. Bitcoin itself has not changed. The protocol operates exactly as it did five years ago. What has changed is the culture surrounding it. After following the industry and culture closely the past five years and working in the industry for close to three years, I have noticed the shift.

Shift One: The Arrival of Bitcoin ETFs

In early 2024, spot Bitcoin ETFs were approved. This opened the door for investors to access Bitcoin exposure through their brokerage account.

Rather than navigating exchanges and taking on the responsibility of self-custody, investors could get access to the Bitcoin price (not Bitcoin ownership) in a matter of minutes. It brought in people who otherwise would not have gotten any exposure to Bitcoin.

In my opinion, this was a critical step in furthering adoption, but not everyone shared that perspective. In fact, many people still are vehemently against any Wall Streetification of Bitcoin and view ETFs as a threat to Bitcoin’s core properties and a step toward weakening its assurances.

Shift Two: The Rise of Bitcoin Treasury Companies

The second shift arrived in late 2024 and into 2025. MicroStrategy’s playbook for acquiring Bitcoin on its balance sheet inspired hundreds of companies globally to follow the same model. These Bitcoin treasury companies raise capital through debt and equity markets for the sole purpose of accumulating more Bitcoin.

Over the past year, these companies have gained significant traction and now dominate much of the visible culture. Many prominent figureheads and thought leaders in the Bitcoin space have become vocal proponents of the treasury model, and several have joined these companies directly. In-person events, online conferences, and digital communities centered around Bitcoin treasuries have grown rapidly.

This shift has become one of the primary sources of disagreement and tension inside the Bitcoin industry.

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The Culture War Inside Bitcoin

On one side are the early users who emphasize keys, sovereignty, and independence from traditional finance.

On the other side are the new participants who build financial products and promote equity exposure to Bitcoin treasury companies.

The tension comes primarily from the self-sovereign crowd. They view these developments as compromising Bitcoin and weakening its foundations.

They believe Bitcoin’s highest use is not inside an ETF or a public company. In many ways, that perspective is accurate and I agree with it.

Where the Self-Custody Maximalists Miss Reality

Many self-custody maximalists also hold unrealistic expectations about how Bitcoin will scale. Some believed we would reach an inflection point in global adoption where Bitcoin simply took over. The idea of hyperbitcoinization was built on this expectation.

What this view misses is that interacting with Bitcoin in a self-sovereign way requires significant personal responsibility and technical competence. Most people will not do this.

Self-custody remains critical. It should be protected and supported. But most people will not self-custody meaningful amounts of Bitcoin, especially as balances grow. The risks related to loss, device failure, inheritance, and physical security only increase as the asset appreciates.

Where ETFs Fall Short

ETFs solve convenience and access, but at the cost of Bitcoin’s defining properties. If most people only experience Bitcoin as a ticker in a brokerage account, they lose the core benefits. They miss out on Bitcoin ownership and the benefits of having money outside of the traditional financial system.

That said, more financialization is inevitable. Wall Street is going to continue to create more products around this asset, and there’s not much we can do to stop it; however, we can provide alternatives.

The Middle Path the Culture War Is Missing

The culture war treats Bitcoin adoption as a binary choice. Either everyone holds their own keys or Bitcoin has failed. This framing ignores reality. There will always be far more people willing to own a Bitcoin ETF than manage their own private keys, and building a future around universal self-custody is not realistic.

What is needed is a path that lowers the barriers to owning Bitcoin while still preserving the qualities that make the asset unique.

That path is multi-institution custody.

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Why Multi-Institution Custody Is the Only Scalable Model That Enables True Bitcoin Ownership

Right now, Bitcoin ownership is treated as an all-or-nothing decision. You either self-custody and take full responsibility for managing your keys, or you hand everything over to a single company and hope they never get hacked, shut down, or pressured by outside forces. The fact that these two extremes have been the primary options shows how early we still are in building real Bitcoin infrastructure.

Multi-institution custody offers a better path. Instead of one person or one company holding all the responsibility, the control of your Bitcoin is shared across several independent businesses. No single company can move your Bitcoin, lose it, or be compromised in a way that puts your savings at risk. It removes the single point of failure that exists in exchanges and ETFs while avoiding the complexity and stress of managing self-custody on your own.

Most importantly, it still preserves what makes Bitcoin valuable. You continue to own actual Bitcoin, not a claim on Bitcoin. You can still send it to anyone, anywhere in the world. You can still hold money outside of the traditional banking system. But now you can do it with far less operational risk, using a model that scales to millions of people who will never manage their own self-custody setup.

Multi-institution custody gives people confidence that their Bitcoin is safe, even if one custodian goes offline or a single provider faces issues. And it gives peace of mind to those who do not want to become technical experts just to hold their savings.

It is the first model that makes real Bitcoin ownership accessible without sacrificing the qualities that matter.

Without It, The Culture War Has Already Lost

If Bitcoin native infrastructure like multi-institution custody does not become the standard, the culture will drift toward Wall Street and legacy financial products.

Most people will always choose convenience over operational complexity. If the industry does not provide a credible alternative, Bitcoin will be shaped by the same structures it was built to move beyond.

This is the part that the self-custody maximalists have not fully recognized. Their concerns about true Bitcoin ownership are valid. Their solution is not.

If we expect a global monetary asset to scale only through people managing their own keys, we will fail; likewise, if we hand the keys to the ETF sponsors, we will fail.

Multi-institution custody is the only model that solves both problems simultaneously.

Bitcoin Must Migrate Toward Resilient Custody

Throughout history, assets that matter migrate toward more resilient forms of custody. Gold did. Financial assets did. Bitcoin will do the same.

The culture war is a distraction. The real task is preserving Bitcoin’s core properties as adoption grows and the stakes rise.

The answer is not self-custody maximalism, nor is it Wall Street products. The answer is a custody model that distributes risk, preserves ownership, and scales with the asset itself.

This is how you grow true Bitcoin ownership and avoid a future where Bitcoin becomes just another financial product, all the while resolving the culture war that has pulled the industry off course.

Please leave a “like” if you got value from this article, it helps me grow the publication.

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First, thank you for being here. Whether you read every post or only check in occasionally, whether you were here from the early Fiat Cave days or just recently, I am grateful for your support. This publication exists because people find value in it, and that gives me a reason to keep showing up.

Over the past several months, I’ve been reflecting on what Sound Life should become. The more I sit with it, the more I keep returning to the same two pillars: generational health and generational wealth.

I don’t pretend to have attained either, and in fact, far from it, and that’s exactly why they’re worth exploring. I’m not writing as an expert. I’m writing as someone who is actively trying to build these things in my own life, day by day, and sharing that process with you.

In both domains — health and wealth (particularly Bitcoin) — I’ve noticed that extremes dominate the conversation. In Bitcoin, there are strong opinions about the “right” way to own Bitcoin or the “right” things to believe as a Bitcoiner. In the online health world, strict protocols and unrealistic expectations often take over. Influencers argue over diet dogma, and digital nomads insist you need to live off the grid or in the tropics to achieve optimal health.

The lack of nuance and rational thought online can be frustrating, overwhelming, and intimidating. Most people are busy with family, work, and their own realities. They’re juggling demanding schedules, and the extremes people preach online simply do not serve them. There are real constraints to the changes they can make and the results they can reasonably expect.

Most people don’t have time for a two-hour morning ritual or the freedom to uproot their lives for an extreme health protocol. They don’t have the risk tolerance to put all their money into Bitcoin. And truthfully, none of those extremes is a sound idea to begin with.

A sound life has to be built within those real constraints. It has to be sustainable, rational, and aligned with what you actually want for your future. That’s where I’ve found myself landing — somewhere in the middle, focused on long-term improvement rather than perfection.

That’s the direction I want to take Sound Life. I want to explore what it looks like to build health and wealth in a realistic, grounded way. My value to you is simple: I’m someone who is constantly seeking improvement, learning, experimenting, and trying to understand what actually works. I’ll share what I’m learning and the frameworks that have helped me, not as prescriptions, but as tools you can adapt to your own life.

One of the most important things about this journey is that it requires ongoing effort. Without action, wealth deteriorates over time. Inflation destroys purchasing power if you don’t build, protect, and allocate wisely.

The same is true for health. If you don’t spend time maintaining and improving your body and mind, they deteriorate too. My goal here is to continue searching for new information, challenging my own beliefs, and helping both you and me build a life that gets better over time.

To me, a sound life starts with health. If you don’t have it, you want it. And if you do have it, you should be grateful for it and work to maintain it. None of the financial pieces matter without good health.

Wealth follows, not just in the financial sense — although most of us want to at least reach a comfortable financial position, or perhaps build significant capital. But the greatest indicator of wealth, in my view, is freedom. The freedom to do what you want, when you want to. And for many people, the prerequisite to that form of wealth is financial stability or abundance.

As we head into the final stretch of the year and look toward 2026, I’d love your help shaping what comes next. Does this direction resonate with you?

If you’re willing, I’d appreciate it if you could take a moment to reply directly or leave a comment below. Tell me what topics you want to see more of or what questions you want answered.

Your comments are what guide the direction of Sound Life.

Thank you again for being here. Enjoy the rest of your weekend.

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Gold and Bitcoin address the same issue: the weakening of the global monetary order and the destruction of fiat currencies.

Both assets are scarce, both sit outside the traditional financial system, and both are widely understood as ways to preserve purchasing power in an environment defined by rising debt and declining currency strength.

Because of this, many investors rightly expect the two assets to move together. Earlier this year, that was true; gold was the top-performing major asset, and Bitcoin was close behind it in second place. But as the year progressed, gold maintained its leadership position while Bitcoin slipped to become the weakest performer among major assets.

The divergence may raise questions, but the explanation is clear once you understand the sequence of macro forces over the past several years and the different catalysts each asset responds to.

The Start of Gold’s Historical Move

Gold’s breakout is not simply the result of a slightly weaker dollar or short-term investor enthusiasm. It reflects deeper, structural forces that have been building since 2022 and have now intersected with a highly supportive macro landscape.

One of the major turning points was the seizure of Russia’s foreign reserves following the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. That event fundamentally changed how nations, largely outside the Western world, think about custodial risk in a dollar-centric system.

Central banks realized that their reserves were not truly theirs in the ultimate sense; they were liabilities of the U.S. government and could be frozen, restricted, or used as political leverage.

This recognition triggered a multi-year trend toward diversifying reserves, with gold becoming the primary beneficiary.

In 2022, central banks purchased roughly 1,100 tonnes of gold, the highest level on record. In 2023, purchases were again over 1,000 tonnes, despite higher real yields. And once again in 2024.

Sovereign demand has been persistent and meaningful, but up until this year, the macro environment has limited the full expression of gold demand, particularly from retail and institutional investors.

Throughout 2023 and 2024, real yields were significantly higher, which has historically acted as a headwind for gold in investment portfolios.

The Federal Reserve was still publicly committed to restrictive policy, the dollar was strong, and global growth had not yet slowed enough to prompt policymakers to ease policy. These factors constrained gold’s upside even as central banks continued to accumulate at record levels, as outside the sovereign bid, limited interest existed.

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The Macro Environment & Investor Demand Flipped in 2025

Heading into 2025, those constraints finally began to reverse. Interest rates began to be cut as labor markets weakened, fiscal deficits widened, DOGE failed, and the debt ceiling debate resurfaced once again with little attempt to address long-term sustainability.

U.S. interest expense is now running at an annualized rate of $1.2 trillion, up from roughly $600 billion just a few years ago. Real yields fell as the market began pricing in additional cuts, geopolitical tensions intensified across multiple regions, and investor confidence in fiscal management further deteriorated.

Crucially, this was also the year when investor demand returned, after being absent throughout 2022, 2023, and 2024.

After nearly four years of persistent outflows, global gold ETFs saw a decisive resurgence of interest in 2025.

According to recent disclosures, institutions such as Harvard Management Company (HMC), which oversees the university’s endowment, significantly increased their exposure to gold through vehicles like GLD ETF, with positions totaling approximately $235 million as of September 30, 2025.

With both sovereign accumulation and investor flows moving in the same direction for the first time since 2020, the market finally repriced gold in a meaningful way.

Why Bitcoin’s 2025 Has Looked Very Different

Bitcoin entered 2025 with a very different backdrop. The launch of spot ETFs in 2024 brought historic inflows, regulatory clarity improved, and institutional on-ramps expanded. Bitcoin reached new all-time highs, and that momentum carried into the election, where investors anticipated a more favorable political environment and a potential shift in U.S. digital asset policy.

Expectations also grew around the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, with early signals suggesting the government might pursue some form of budget-neutral accumulation. Taken together, these developments created the sense that Bitcoin was on the cusp of a major policy tailwind heading into the new year.

But much of this narrative never materialized. The “reserve” turned out to consist of previously confiscated coins rather than a newly acquired sovereign position. Rumored quantities in the hundreds of thousands of Bitcoin proved to be far smaller, and no meaningful sovereign accumulation occurred. As the gap between expectations and reality became clear, the market was forced to reset those assumptions quickly.

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A Tightening Impulse, Not a Bitcoin Tailwind

Instead of a broadly pro-Bitcoin easing of conditions, the administration’s first major moves centered on tariffs and trade pressure, introducing new uncertainty into global markets and sending Bitcoin sharply lower at the start of Q2.

Even with only a few weeks remaining in the year, we are only now beginning to see early signs of monetary support. Quantitative Tightening is ending in December, and the Federal Reserve has cut rates, with more cuts likely ahead.

But for most of 2025, liquidity remained constrained, and Bitcoin’s performance reflected that reality.

Bitcoin Is a Liquidity Asset, Not a Geopolitical Hedge

This distinction is essential. Bitcoin tends to perform well when liquidity expands, real yields fall, and the dollar weakens. It struggles in environments defined by tightening conditions, elevated real rates, and broader market uncertainty. Those dynamics have dominated most of 2025.

While Bitcoin is an apolitical asset with long-term geopolitical relevance, it is not yet treated as a traditional flight-to-safety instrument in the way gold is. Gold has a track record of thousands of years as a reserve asset, and central banks routinely turn to it during periods of stress.

Bitcoin, by contrast, still trades primarily as a liquidity-sensitive asset. It may benefit in the years following geopolitical events, but it does not see immediate safe-haven inflows when tensions rise. Its performance hinges far more on whether policymakers are easing or tightening financial conditions.

Gold thrives during the recognition phase of a crisis, when the world acknowledges that instability is growing. Bitcoin thrives during the response phase, when policymakers attempt to counteract that instability through monetary expansion.

In 2025, we experienced the former, not the latter. Gold has responded to the acknowledgment that the system is weakening. Bitcoin is waiting for the moment when policymakers attempt to stabilize that weakness with renewed liquidity.

Structural Selling and Market Maturation

Bitcoin’s market structure has also played a significant role this year. For the first time, the asset has developed enough liquidity for early holders, many with large positions acquired over a decade ago, to sell without causing disorderly price action.

Spot ETFs, expanded Wall Street access, and corporate treasury participation have all deepened the order book. This was not possible in prior cycles. As a result, we have seen a natural distribution process take place, which is consistent with the maturation of any asset class. But in the short term, this additional supply has weighed on price at a time when expectations were already being reset.

The Divergence Is Temporary

None of these developments implies that Bitcoin’s long-term investment case is weakened. They simply reflect the fact that Bitcoin responds most strongly to liquidity-driven catalysts that have not yet begun.

Throughout its history, Bitcoin has accelerated when monetary policy shifts from tightening to easing, when liquidity expands, and when fiscal stress drives policymakers toward more accommodative measures. Those catalysts are just beginning to appear now, but they were largely absent in 2025.

The divergence between gold and Bitcoin is temporary and reflects two different stages of the same macro cycle. In a world of political instability, currency depreciation, and rising geopolitical tension, both assets become more important.

Gold responds first, during the recognition phase. Bitcoin responds later, during the response phase, when policymakers turn to monetary expansion to manage the consequences of a fragile financial system.

What Comes Next

When that response arrives, and history suggests it is only a matter of timing, the environment will shift meaningfully in Bitcoin’s favor.

Liquidity will improve, real yields will fall, the dollar will weaken, and risk appetite will return.

Bitcoin, which has spent much of the year under pressure from unmet expectations, tightening macro conditions, and large-holder distribution, will have the catalysts it needs to reflect its longer-term fundamentals once again.

Gold is telling the story of a system under strain. Bitcoin is waiting for the chapter in which policymakers attempt to relieve that strain through renewed liquidity. Both assets ultimately reflect the same structural thesis. They simply react at different points in the cycle.

I’d love to hear from you. What would you like to see me dig into next? Drop your ideas in the comments.

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The National Association of Realtors’ 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers report shows exactly how far things have fallen. First-time homebuyers now make up only 20% of purchases, the lowest share since NAR began tracking data in 1981. Before the Great Financial Crisis, this number was consistently around 40%.

Some other alarming stats from the report (charts below):

• Median age of homebuyer: 59
• Median age of repeat homebuyer: 61
• Median age of first-time buyer: 40
• Only 24 percent of buyers have children under 18 in the home

Most people know the housing market is tough, but I think it is underappreciated just how bad it is out there. And since this is such a widespread issue, there are plenty of opinions about the cause.

It is easy to blame greedy corporations, homebuilders, the current administration, or existing homeowners who are locked into low rates. But these explanations miss the root cause.

The deeper truth is that the American housing crisis is a monetary crisis.

Since the United States abandoned the gold standard in 1971, deficit spending and inflation have far outpaced real wage growth. Each financial crisis has been met with more liquidity and more money creation to bail out the financial system, rather than allowing the excess to be cleared out. The chart below shows the growth of the US money supply.

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The latest and most extreme example occurred in 2020 and 2021, when the United States created roughly $6 TRILLION in new dollars. That flood of new money increased the prices of nearly everything, especially housing, the largest asset market in the country.

The effect of money printing (inflation) is evident in the increase in the median home price from $18,000 in 1963 to $410,000 earlier this year. That is an increase of more than 22x. Wages did not rise 22x. Productivity did not rise 22x. The purchasing power of the dollar collapsed because it was printed into oblivion.

The affordability gap can be further evidenced by house prices relative to income. In 1984, the price-to-income ratio was roughly 3.5x. The median home was $78,000, and the median household income was $22,000. As of 2024, the price-to-income ratio is about 5.8x. The cost of a home has pulled far ahead of what household wages can support.

To exacerbate the affordability crisis, as inflation surged following the money printing in 2020 and 2021, the Federal Reserve hiked interest rates at the fastest pace in history. Home prices were already incredibly high, and with interest rates far above anything seen in the past 15 years, monthly payments exploded.

So what is the solution? Unfortunately, lowering interest rates will not fix this. Rate cuts would likely increase demand and push prices even higher.

You can already see policymakers attempting to patch the problem with cosmetic fixes. Proposals for fifty-year mortgages or portable mortgages, which would allow homeowners to carry their low interest rate into a new purchase, are being floated as if they will solve affordability.

But these are band aids. Stretching loans over half a century or letting people transfer a two or three percent mortgage does nothing to address the root problem. It only covers the effects of an inflationary monetary system and risks pushing prices even higher.

The challenge is structural. It sits at the heart of the fiat system itself.

When the dollar loses purchasing power each year, saving in dollars becomes impossible. People are pushed into assets simply to avoid falling behind. Real estate becomes a store of value, not just a place to call home.

Homes become an investment for many simply to protect their purchasing power as the dollar loses value. This investment-driven demand pushes prices even higher than many incomes can support.

The generational consequences are enormous. Families are not being started anywhere near the rate they once were because people simply cannot afford to.

In 1950, more than half of thirty-year-olds were married and owned a home. In 2025, fewer than fifteen percent do. That is not a small shift. That is a collapse of the American Dream. It has been hollowed out by a system that protects those who already own assets and punishes those who do not.

This is why the issue cannot be solved through small policy adjustments or temporary programs. The structure of the system creates the incentives. As long as the powers that be continue to create more currency, the dollar’s value plummets and home prices rise. Until the monetary system itself changes, the housing market will remain out of reach for the average young family.

But this does not mean the situation is hopeless. It simply means the odds are stacked against you. To achieve the American Dream, it will require hard work, like it always did, but with more intentionality, in industries that are rapidly growing, in entrepreneurial pursuits where real wealth can be created beyond the standard two percent wage bump that most people get each year in corporate America, and the occasional promotion.

And you must save in assets that outpace monetary inflation. Now more than ever, the path to the American Dream requires agency and punishes passivity. You must think in terms of ownership rather than employment. The system leaves you no other choice.

This is the heart of the Sound Life philosophy. If the structure of the world has changed, your strategy must change too. If you want to build a family, own a home, and create generational wealth, you cannot follow the default script. The default was designed for a world that no longer exists.

The path to ownership still exists. It simply requires intention. It requires a refusal to play the losing game of saving in a money that is designed to erode. And it requires the courage to build something that cannot be inflated away.

In a world where the dollar weakens each year and housing is pulled further out of reach, the only rational move is to build outside the system that created the problem. That is where the new American Dream begins.

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In a recent discussion with Alex Thorn, Head of Firmwide Research at Galaxy, we explored the forces driving the current wave of selling and why, counterintuitively, this period should be viewed as bullish rather than bearish.

The selling pressure is not primarily speculative or panic-driven. Instead, it represents long-time holders, those who accumulated Bitcoin in size at the very early days, gradually distributing to a broader base of investors that now includes institutions, RIAs, corporations, and retail participants. This natural redistribution is the same process every asset experiences as it transitions from early adoption to mass ownership.

Market Structure Doing Its Job

To understand the current correction, it is important to recognize how dramatically market plumbing has changed.

In prior cycles, Bitcoin lacked the liquidity and institutional demand required to absorb large sales without major price dislocations. Today, that dynamic has shifted.

The introduction of spot ETFs, as well as broader access through financial advisors and traditional platforms, has deepened the order book and expanded participation. For the first time, major holders can reduce exposure without collapsing the market. That is not a sign of weakness; it is a sign of resilience.

It is also worth noting that this is the first period in which large-scale sales can occur without significant political or regulatory risk. In earlier administrations, liquidating billions in Bitcoin and wiring proceeds to the banking system risked scrutiny, seizure, or even confiscation. The current environment allows legitimate settlement at scale. Combined with the emergence of new liquidity venues, it provides early holders the ability to diversify safely, a hallmark of a maturing asset class.

This distribution is entirely rational. After more than a decade of holding, many of Bitcoin’s earliest participants are engaging in estate planning, tax management, portfolio rebalancing, and realizing significant gains.

Each transfer of ownership strengthens the network by broadening the base of holders and diffusing concentration risk. What appears to be capitulation is, in truth, distribution. The short-term pain investors feel is the cost of long-term maturity.

Why This Period Is Bullish

Every major asset undergoes a similar process. Some early investors sell; liquidity deepens; a new generation of investors steps in. Rather than signaling exhaustion, this marks the transition from speculative enthusiasm to structural adoption. Thorn calls this “bullish selling.” The redistribution from concentrated whales to a diversified global investor base increases durability and legitimacy. For the first time, both institutional and individual investors can participate in the same market under comparable infrastructure and custody standards.

Some market observers have compared this phase to an initial public offering; the analogy is instructive. In an IPO, early founders and investors sell a portion of their holdings not because they have lost conviction but because liquidity allows broader ownership. The same principle applies here. Early Bitcoin holders are distributing to a wider base, enabling new participants —RIAs, institutions, and individuals — to gain exposure to Bitcoin for the first time at scale. Rather than diminishing conviction, this process expands it, transforming Bitcoin from a niche asset into a globally held monetary network.

The Broader Context

What many perceive as weakness is in fact the natural consequence of growth. Bitcoin’s volatility mirrors its expanding global footprint. Each cycle brings deeper liquidity, more sophisticated participants, and a larger share of the world’s savings. The process is uneven but necessary. As Thorn noted, there exists a theoretically infinite amount of potential demand for Bitcoin, but only a finite supply of early whales who can sell. When their distribution ends, the market will experience a supply shock that could redefine price discovery entirely.

At the macro level, the rationale for owning Bitcoin remains stronger than ever. Sovereign debt continues to climb, fiscal deficits persist, and the purchasing power of fiat currencies declines each year. In an environment defined by rising debt and diminishing trust, owning an asset with a fixed supply is not speculation; it is prudence.

Bitcoin’s current correction is therefore not something to fear, but instead something to appreciate. The volatility of the moment will fade, leaving in its place a more liquid, more distributed, and more credible monetary asset. Those who view the present sell-off as a failure misunderstand the stage of evolution we are in. Bitcoin is not collapsing; it is consolidating. The network is strengthening, the base of ownership is widening, and the path toward institutional permanence is becoming clear.

Subscribe to Sound Money, Sound Life to explore how to build generational health and generational wealth — and live a sound life in an unsound world.

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