A month ago, I bought a round-trip flight from Trieste to Prague for under €50, less than a modest dinner out. From my desk, I can text a friend in New York and get a reply before I've put my phone down. I can ask my laptop almost anything, and get an answer in seconds.
Fifty years ago, this would have all looked like magic. By every measure that used to define progress, we live in the most abundant era in human history.
So why doesn't it feel like it?
Everyone got richer, yet everyone feels poorer. Prices fell on technology, utilities, and the physical goods of daily life, which by the old logic should have bought us room to breathe. Instead, jobs have never felt more precarious, housing has never eaten more of a paycheck, and relationships have never felt more transactional. The abundance is real, and the data isn't lying. But the collapse sitting directly underneath it is just as real—and both are outputs of the exact same engine.
That engine is global competition, more literal than the word usually implies. Globalism moved the entire labor pool into one room, not just goods across borders. And now, under a fully networked internet and mobility programs like Schengen, an applicant no longer competes against their city or country, but against several hundred million people they will never meet instead, for a job that fifty years ago had a local pool of a few dozen. HR responded to that flood by adding any filter that makes the pile of CVs more manageable, and that is why a university degree became the baseline even for jobs like a cashier: scanning groceries didn't get harder, but requirement inflation set in.
Run that forward, and you get an economy where the price of an ordinary life (a home, stability, a family, a future you can plan around) is now a top-decile result. But exceptional capability is, by definition, a minority position, and a system that prices the median life at an exceptional rate cannot clear for most of the people standing in it.
The incentive structure breaks from both directions at once:
Most people, reading correctly that no amount of effort clears the bar, stop trying.
The minority who do clear it discover that the prize was a normal life, the exact same thing the system used to hand out by default just a few decades before.
That is what explains the casino. The surge in high-leverage crypto bets and meme-stock gambling among the young is the natural consequence of a generation that ran the numbers on salaried labor and found a zero in the ownership column. After all, if the patient path has been priced out of reach, patience stops being rational. A 200-to-1 shot is a bad bet against a fair alternative, but a completely sane bet against a guaranteed loss.
For now, cheap dopamine keeps the scale of this hidden, because digital abundance can sedate a locked-out population for a remarkably long time.
But sedation doesn't work forever.