The world has become extremely chaotic.

You do everything right, get that fat FAANG offer, and discover that your future now depends on how an immigration lawyer interprets a random H1B update.

Your company announces a record quarter, but also 10% layoffs due to “AI efficiency”. There is no baseline protection anymore.

The rules have become arbitrary and people are not built for this much uncertainty.

With the stable path collapsing, people are doing two contradictory things at once. On one side, they are retreating into things that feel lindy. People are becoming more conservative in values: more religious, more tribal, and more skeptical of outsiders. And hatred for ‘the others’ is on the rise again.

On the other side, they are getting more degenerate with their money. They are day trading options. Putting their savings into meme coins.

The middle class bargain was a duration trade. You exchanged years of predictable effort for a slow compounded growth in your networth. The safe path does not exist anymore. The middle class ladder is gone. The dream of security through hard work has collapsed.

And everyone is trying to escape the permanent underclass. With the normal way up blocked, people are just gambling harder than ever.

The archetype of the next decade is the conservative degenerate. And this is the age of hyperspeculation.