It’s insane, absolutely insane, how people keep talking about “good jobs” like they’re going to magically come back if we all hold hands and wish hard enough. There’s no return to the old world, because the old world is gone — sold off, outsourced, financialized, hollowed out. The people who could do the work that mattered, the actual hands-on, blood-and-grit jobs that built houses, roads, and industry, have long since been pushed aside. Outsourced. Relegated. Those “bullshit jobs” that everyone now clings to, the paper-pushing, meeting-attending, bureaucratic fluff that fills the calendars of the credentialed elite — that’s all that’s left for the natives. And they love it. They sit there, comfortable, smug, imagining themselves contributing while someone else sweats, cooks, fixes, or literally builds the foundation of their lifestyle.
And the idea that you can start a small-town conservative utopia, an autodidactic enclave where everyone suddenly values skill and productivity, is cute until reality hits. People are all different. You’ll get the doers, sure — the ones who love building, making, learning, surviving. But for every one of them, there’s someone who smells the roses, thinks ideals are more important than reality, and wants to play the status game. They’ll leech, they’ll extract, they’ll turn productivity into debt and frustration because that’s what humans do if the system allows it. Extractors are inevitable. They exist in every society. Call it what you want — Ponzi, monopoly, wealth capture — but it doesn’t disappear just because you read a few books, start an AI learning system, or try to teach people to value real work.
And the conservatives — God, the people who think they can resurrect “good jobs” and restore some mythical equilibrium — are often too busy smelling the roses. They look around and see a chance for nostalgia, a patch of old-fashioned virtue, and they imagine that if they gather enough like-minded people, the world will bend to their will. Meanwhile, the infrastructure, the economy, the culture, the actual physical labour — all of it — is gone, parceled out, extracted, or automated. They can’t bring it back because they never controlled it in the first place. Those jobs were hard, dangerous, and valuable, and people did them because they had to survive, because there was no alternative. Now survival has been outsourced to credit, to debt, to the global labour pool. You can’t wave a magic wand and put it back.
And yes, I get it — the autodidactic, AI-driven learning, the “second brain” approach, the idea that someone could take knowledge and skill into their own hands and bypass this hollow system — that’s beautiful. It’s brilliant. But even there, you’re fighting the same human contradictions. There will always be extractors, people trying to game the system, people who want to convert your productivity into their own gain. Skills, knowledge, capability — they don’t guarantee virtue. They don’t guarantee fairness. And still, they’re the only hope for anyone who wants to survive meaningfully in a society that has long since stopped valuing essentials.
So yes, you keep thinking about it. You keep turning it over in your head because the problem doesn’t go away. It’s like stepping on a piece of steel in the dark: you feel the pain, you can’t see it, you can’t remove it, you just keep fiddling, prodding, hoping something will change. And maybe the only thing you can do is learn, build, master, survive — not to fix the world, because that’s beyond reach — but to reclaim a tiny patch of reality you can control before the rot spreads. The rest of it? Let it run its course.
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