Four years ago, Bo Burnham wrote a campfire song for the end of the world. The broken jukebox in my mind has been playing the song on a loop for the last two weeks, the lyrics surfacing intermittently as my daily life provided material for new verses. There were moments like attempting to get wrinkles out of a hot pink suit before an upbeat livestreamed event about women’s financial independence; watching a livestream of a mother being dragged into an unmarked van by two masked men as her screaming child looks on in a discount grocery store parking lot. A family playfully arguing about which ice cream flavor is superior at the shop in my neighborhood; B-52 bombers “being moved into position” in my push notifications. New seasons of Secret Lives of Mormon Wives and America’s Sweethearts (when to binge?!); news story about an Australian national being detained and deported for his Substack posts about the Columbia protests.

Finally, I was greeted by one of my dinner companions upon returning from a phone-free bathroom break Saturday evening at an upscale restaurant to learn that, in the time it took to flush away $7.50 worth of mocktail, the world had changed: “We just bombed Iran.” 

There it is again: that funny feeling. To live in the United States today is to exist in an accelerating state of contradiction, to be surrounded by entertainment and creature comforts as you feel tectonic plates shifting uneasily beneath your feet. Of course, this state of affairs is still preferable to living in one of the countries currently experiencing the explosive fruits of our tax revenues, where there is no time for the luxury of detached bewilderment, only the charred smell of terror.

There’s a Russian word—hypernormalization—for this funny feeling. It describes the uncanny psychological experience of continuing to make your bed and drive your children to school and show up for work amid a creeping sense of breakdown. In a review of an obscure film published in The New Yorker just days before the 2016 election, Brandon Harris wrote that “during the final days of Russian communism, the Soviet system had been so successful at propagandizing itself, at restricting the consideration of possible alternatives, that no one within Russian society, be they politicians or journalists, academics or citizens, could conceive of anything but the status quo until it was far too late to avoid the collapse of the old order.” The end of their country was, for the Russian people, “both unsurprising and unforeseen.” 

During such periods, depression or anxiety are rational reactions to engaging honestly with reality, and coping can manifest in strange, trivial ways. When the shape of ordinary life feels inconsequential and surreal, little luxuries start to feel like lifelines. I’ve been preoccupied lately with whether I should schedule a manicure, hyperfixating on the psychological safety of milky pink gel nails provided by a salon located in an alternate universe wherein choosing something as frivolous as a nail color, like an ice cream flavor, might feel worthy of my attention. Like any good American, I apply consumption like a balm over the spiritual burns I sustain from witnessing the fires we keep lighting, whether in Tehran or Los Angeles. Indulging feelings of guilt or rage about this state of affairs feels inane, an emotional simulation of “doing something” without having to interrupt a doomscroll. 

How did Hegseth’s group text respond to the update? I wondered privately at dinner as the conversation around me shifted to the plot of a new animated movie about a cat. I imagined the parade of closed yellow fists and American flags and fire emojis dancing across the screens of our appointed officials. Later that night at home, I watched CNN as if caught in a time warp. The coverage pivoted quickly from shock to justification, repeating an eerily familiar narrative about nuclear weapons and the “complicated” nature of our involvement in yet another conflict in the Middle East—bombing for safety, war for peace. 

The echoes of US history, both recent and ancient, are so loud that highlighting specific similarities feels unnecessary—overthrowing foreign governments that are less than expedient to our economic interests is a cherished American pastime. What’s noteworthy now is not what we’re doing, but the fractured, distorted way in which we’re experiencing it this time around. 

In March 2003, when we invaded Iraq because the country’s military had “weapons of mass destruction” (they did not, as Bush, Cheney, and Powell well knew), I was in second grade. I wrote a poem, rendered in Comic Sans, called “The War in IRAQ,” in which I implored my classmates to “raise money for the president,” “pray,” and “wear red, white, and blue.” The manufactured consent in these situations—that which gets 8-year-old girls penning patriotic haikus about the Bush administration—relies on an abstraction of what war really is. In 2004 when images emerged from Abu Ghraib of US troops abusing Iraqi prisoners, the number of Americans who reported they felt the war was going “fairly well” dropped below 50% for the first time. Confronting the unspeakable truth made Americans think twice about whether we supported our country’s vast resources being used in this way. 

But that sort of moral confrontation was rare, made possible by the fact that, until relatively recently, the atrocities were mostly happening on another continent, out of sight from our cookouts and Friday night lights—a distance just wide enough to wedge the bulky solace of our plausible deniability. By the time the details reached our TVs, US news networks had already impersonalized them with language about “strikes” and “targets” and “retaliation.” Now, we are accosted with these horrors, foreign and domestic, every time we open Instagram to post a picture of an outstretched hand bearing a fresh gel manicure, the dissonance reverberating louder. 

More than 20 years after the invasion of Iraq, a conflict which claimed $3 trillion and more than 500,000 Iraqi lives, it feels like whatever semblance of a collective plot we once maintained was fed into the internet’s meat grinder, churning out a rotting pile of hotdog meat that is, somehow, much dumber. After a journalist was added to an illicit Signal chat in March, the lion’s share of coverage focused on the offensive procedural faux pas. The contents of the messages—including the revelation that we had blown up an entire apartment complex in the hopes of killing a single person—were treated like an afterthought in the coverage, a distant second concern to the breach of communications protocol. There it is yet again: that funny feeling. Accountability, where we cared, focused mainly on ensuring we celebrated our state-sanctioned destruction via the proper channels next time. (“We used to make real national security psychopaths in this country!”) Within days, it was a meme fashioned after a Buzzfeed quiz: “Which Houthi PC Small Group member are you?” 

What does it mean to lose the ability to be horrified, or worse, to lose the capacity to imagine a version of this country that doesn’t wield its wealth and power this way? While the baldly sensationalized stories on Fox News are the traveling carnival version of the American identity industrial complex, the versions you’ll find in liberal publications are arguably more insidious, because they so effectively position themselves not as the bigoted drunk uncle at Thanksgiving, but The Serious Adults in the Room. 

Consider the recent coverage of progressive New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani across a stunning number of liberal newspapers and magazines: Mamdani’s platform—which includes things like free city buses, childcare for all, and a public option for grocery stores in lieu of subsidies for private ones, all made possible by matching New Jersey’s corporate tax rate and instituting a flat 2% tax on annual incomes of more than $1 million—is presented almost uniformly as dangerous and radical. The flurry of op-eds fuse the art of elite opinion-laundering with brute force super PAC money to explain why Mamdani’s vision is unserious, reckless, and worse yet, naïve. Never mind the groundswell of desperate support to try something different! One learns that to be a Sensible Liberal, one should instead vote for the three special interest groups in an Armani trench coat (read: Cuomo) who would never propose something as fanatical and upsetting as a 2% tax on investment bankers.

But as any American within striking distance of a critical thought is incessantly reminded, the US is a democracy (unlike all those countries in the Middle East!), where speech is free and money is speech and politics is a game best played without consequences: According to the Financial Times, “Campaign donations showed the city’s billionaire elite was determined to halt [Mamdani’s] rise,” amassing an “unprecedented” amount of money for Cuomo, a man who resigned in disgrace from his post as governor just four years ago. 

What were the conditions for hypernormalization again? “The Soviet system had been so successful at propagandizing itself, at restricting the consideration of possible alternatives, that no one could conceive of anything but the status quo until it was far too late to avoid the collapse of the old order.” 

Maybe all this talk of collapsing orders feels dramatic; if so, blame my recent reading of Ray Dalio’s new book, How Countries Go Broke, in preparation for a conversation on Friday. In it, he estimates the chances of “an unwanted major [financial] restructuring” (a friendlier way of saying “default on our national debt,” from what I can gather) at around 80% over the next decade if nothing is done to reverse our fiscal and geopolitical course. This is, of course, assuming the Big Beautiful Bill—set to add another $3–$5 trillion in deficit spending—doesn’t pass the Senate. Dalio’s alarm is thinly veiled but palpable in these pages, as it’s clear he sees us marching in the exact wrong direction of the bipartisan consensus we need to avoid catastrophe.

Dalio wrote the book and made these calculations before ICE raids began in earnest, the economic consequences of which will almost certainly compound the effects of any new deficit spending in the form of slower growth and lower tax revenues. The raiding of workplaces and immigration courts and elementary school graduations has been the most affecting policy instituted so far, because unlike that which can be avoided online by closing an app or climbing into a different echo chamber, it’s hard to ignore someone being dragged out of the Home Depot where you’re perusing paint chips for a nursery. It appears to be the rare Trump policy that appeals to a subcutaneous layer of humanity still untainted by Fox News-induced psychosis—people are, perhaps naïvely, surprised when their friends and neighbors are targeted by ICE, shaking confidence in a simplistic narrative about roving bands of “illegal alien criminals,” a fear-inducing turn of phrase repeated with such relentless enthusiasm on the campaign trail it calls to mind the early aughts fixation with “terrorist enemy combatants.” 

The difficulty of engaging with any of this as it unfolds—whether bombs dropped abroad or neighbors detained at home or a media apparatus committed to playing nose tackle for Wall Street billionaires—is not just about the discomfort of witnessing suffering, but confronting the reality that to be American is to actively benefit from injustice. That confrontation would implicate everyone who gains from social programs that undocumented people pay for but cannot use ($25.7 billion in Social Security taxes in 2022 alone); everyone whose retirement relies on the performance of an S&P 500 index fund that will inevitably surge from the successful voyage of Northrop Grumman’s ($NOC) B-2 bomber. 

A 2025 Brown University report estimated US-sponsored violence in the Middle East since 2001—committed in the name of liberty and justice for all—cost $8 trillion and has killed between 4.5 million and 4.7 million people. That Donald Trump has managed to convince so many Americans that we are the ultimate victims in this global order is a stunning inversion of reality, sure, but it’s also narratively consistent for a nation that’s always been addicted to its fictions, impressively adept at “propagandizing itself.” 

The funny feeling is what seeps through the cracks of that crumbling facade, a glimmer of the country we know we could be if we were brave enough to look.

*Discerning readers will notice that the 2021 lyric “seven more [years] to go” would indicate we’ve got about three left. 

“There’s a reason why in the 2010s everything from Ubers to Netflix subscriptions felt oddly cheap,” writes Sirena Bergman for Business Insider, describing the “millennial lifestyle subsidy,” so named for the way growth-focused companies with billions of dollars in funding could, for years, price their products and services below those which weren’t on an intravenous drip to Founders Fund fentanyl, embedding themselves in the lives and routines of consumers. But the more noteworthy dynamic at play is that such a strategy could make billions for investors while the companies themselves remained unprofitable, a math equation that doesn’t seem like it should be possible. Two plus two can’t equal $100 million, can it? 

In the popular 2023 paper “Venture Predation,” Matthew Wansley and Samuel Weinstein argued that, for some investors, whether a startup could actually recoup its costs later was less important than whether it appeared plausible enough to the next round of investors that it might, eventually. In other words, early-stage investors, having distorted a market through a flood of capital and blitzscaling strategies, made their returns not by funding a new technology or efficiency that enabled profit, but by exiting before the business had to do something as blasé as actually making money, passing the hyped-up hot potato to the next batch of buyers. This phenomenon, they said, can “harm consumers, distort market incentives, and misallocate capital away from genuine innovations,” and should be thought of like an antitrust issue.

This is notable because venture capital is a form of private equity that has long traded on its reputation for being an investment style that drives our world forward. Even the no-nonsense data dealers at the St. Louis Federal Reserve publish papers solemnly commending it as an engine of “innovation and growth.” To prove this point, it cites VC’s prevalence during eras of technological explosion: “World War II and the start of the Cold War ushered in new technologies, such as jets, nuclear weapons, radars, and rockets, along with a splurge of spending by the U.S. Department of Defense,” they write, adding that a “handful of VC firms were formed to leverage the commercialization of scientific advances.” The wars “ushered in” invention, as if by spontaneous generation, “along with” a splurge of spending by the US Department of Defense. This is a strange way to describe a causal relationship, like saying a rainstorm ushered in an umbrella, along with a purchase at Walgreens. (In this analogy, the VC firms are those tasked with expanding the umbrella company’s market share after the US taxpayer puts up the money to invent the umbrella.)

Nitpicking the sterile rhetoric of a FRED paper might be unfair, and it’s indisputable that venture capital has played a role in funding some genuinely remarkable things: search engines, personal computing, artificial intelligence. (And few would argue that Yellow Cabs are perfect.) But the primary innovation taking place over the last decade might have been a breakthrough in financial engineering: creating investment vehicles out of startups that appeared to offer genuinely improved products or uncannily affordable convenience…at first.

Millennials who came of age and purchasing power in the 2010s have traversed a consumer landscape largely shaped by venture capital’s money, aesthetic, and scale: “Digital-first, ultra-modern companies rose to prominence in the 2010s,” CNBC reported, thanks to “a huge wave of venture capital funding propped up by low interest rates,” which meant companies that barely generated revenue (“in some cases, none at all,” Fortune reported) could still, through the magic of a slickly formatted slide deck, go public attached to 10-figure valuations. The founders were often millennials themselves, metamorphosing inside the plush cocoon of a venture fund from members of a stereotypically unlucky generation to overnight multimillionaires. 

Much of the industry’s logic rests on the supposed foresight of a few famous men who could plausibly play supervillains in a Marvel movie (see also: Andreessen, Thiel), gods of capital allocation performing alchemy with their money and brilliance. But it might be less about recognizing winners than anointing them, sidestepping the laws of gravity that tether regular businesses to their balance sheets and instead manifesting the future through the blunt force of billions of dollars.

When we’re throwing around 10-figure sums and the biggest names in an industry that prides itself on its ability to “disrupt,” it can be easy to forget we’re often talking about gussied up food couriers and taxi services, two things that have existed in some capacity since at least the early twentieth century. A 2022 roundup of the top 50 venture-backed companies stretches the definition of “innovation” beyond recognition. Many are riffs on suspiciously recurrent themes—13 of the 50 are grocery or food delivery apps, nine more are for hailing cars or renting bikes. Nearly all of the companies that weren’t food delivery or rideshare apps were “marketplaces”: a marketplace for gardening equipment, a marketplace for baby supplies, a marketplace for used designer handbags. The few that were producing physical products were mostly wrapping a sans serif font and sleek ordering experience around extremely basic commodities that have existed for eons, like the razor, first mass-produced in 1903.

Take e-commerce brand Harry’s, which isn’t just selling a minimalist orange razor and matching shaving cream—it’s a “global, multi-channel grooming brand.” Its origin story, as described in its 2016 investor pitch deck, begins with the brand’s cofounder being inconvenienced while he “waited for a clerk” to retrieve a razor with a design that “didn’t appeal to him” from “behind a glass case,” an experience that distressed him so thoroughly he called his friend afterward—who “empathized”—and they decided that, together, they’d start Harry’s to address this “pain point.” The razor market is dominated by “two major players,” whose razors are “overpriced,” “over-designed,” and “inconvenient to purchase.” The idea, I guess, was that men would rather order razors online than buy them in person like the pilgrims used to do. Harry’s original starter set is $8—it comes with two ounces of Foaming Shave Gel and a single razor. (Amazon tells me that I can get its competitor, a Gillette razor with four refill blades, delivered tomorrow for $15.75. But does the design appeal to me? A question for another day.) To date, the company has fundraised more than $600 million.

I don’t mean to pick on Harry’s. I’m sure the razors are fine, and its subscription model might be perfectly convenient. But it’s illustrative of a pattern that has copy-pasted itself across nearly every industry over the last decade and a half, producing a flurry of pastel-hued, direct-to-consumer companies fluent in Instagram that sell everything from mattresses to coffee to luggage to cookware, often aimed at Gen Z women who have been trained to trust a brand that employs ample negative space on its website and demands a semi-premium price point. All this would be less offensive if the investment style in question wasn’t constantly positioned as uniquely capable of inventing the future.

Rather than introducing something original, many of these capital-rich companies simply erect a new construction on the sturdy foundation of old ideas. The products often do cost less than the incumbents, cultivating a sense of upscale approachability: Compare DTC brand Caraway’s Ceramic Dutch Oven, $135, to the 100-year-old French brand Le Creuset’s equivalent, which runs around $400. Because these brands tend to follow the same design and user experience best practices optimized for making buying stuff as easy as possible, interacting with them often feels like getting gently lobotomized by a robot—their sans serif fonts, flat, bright colors, and twee, hand-drawn illustrations coalesce around cheeky, conversational prompts (“What kind of sorcery is this?” asks the Magic Spoon FAQs, a venture-backed, DTC cereal company). Each element is a user-tested breadcrumb, leaving a trail they hope you’ll follow to the 25% Subscribe & Save checkout option. (For the low, low price of $54, you can get six whole boxes of “protein cereal.” Magic Spoon’s funding as of 2022: $85 million.) 

Venture-backed salad chain Sweetgreen ($472 million in funding) isn’t merely following in the grand tradition of fast, healthy dining blazed first by companies like Chipotle 30 years ago, it’s “leading a movement to reimagine fast food for a new era.” This is the sort of baldly ridiculous mission statement a restaurant must adopt if it accepts half a billion dollars from investors to sling $17 fast-casual salads to people with desk jobs. (Again, the salads: perfectly serviceable. Tasty, even! Just not “a movement,” nor symbolic of “a new era.”) Whether salad or breakfast cereal, much of the differentiation in the DTC world comes down only to marketing and packaging—the products themselves are, more often than not, unremarkable. Recall the Caraway pans: Its $135 Dutch Oven may seem reasonably priced, but its one-year warranty belies what purchasers congregate in subreddits to lament: The pots are practically unusable within two years. By contrast, that fusty old Le Creuset Dutch Oven is guaranteed for a lifetime.  

One might wonder generously if these disruptors are keeping legacy brands on their toes by injecting competition into century-old markets. But it seems the primary lesson the legacy brands have adopted from the young, venture-backed ones is the bottom line-boosting power of the subscription model, the creeping ubiquity of which appeared in the new season of Black Mirror, a plot line that some viewers criticized as being so commonplace as to be predictable.

Many of these companies smell like solutions in search of a problem, reverse-engineering a punchy raison d’être to supplant the less romantic explanation for their existence: that is, generating returns for early investors and enriching founders, even if nothing new is introduced in the process. “If a company is not profitable, then you have to ask, is social value being created? And if social value is created trying to develop a technology and it just never really works, that’s okay because there’s still important learning done there,” one Venture Predation coauthor told Fortune. “But if there was never any real technology to begin with, we question whether it’s creating any value.”

After all, companies like DoorDash and Lyft aren’t finally turning a profit because they unearthed some paradigm-shifting, cost-saving efficiency in the age-old problem of transporting goods and people, but because they simply raised the prices and lowered the pay—the same old boring way businesses have always made money.

As we chatted, a silver-haired man wearing AirPods approached us from behind the mass of boxes. I scanned his face for signs of an impending lecture about the moving truck parked on the street, but it turned out he thought we were moving in. He introduced himself and explained he had recently relocated from Newport Beach, a town where the median home costs around $3.5 million. He said he loved the Sacramento area. “Everyone’s so nice,” he gushed. “Even the kids who work at Chick-fil-A and Starbucks seem happy all the time. Back in Orange County, everyone who works at Starbucks seems angry you’re there.” 

I braced myself for the rich Southern Californian Baby Boomer and Maserati-driving Berkshire Hathaway real estate agent to commiserate with one another over the lackluster work ethic of Kids These Days, but Maserati Man threw a welcome curveball: “It’s because the cost of living is so high,” he said matter-of-factly. “They’re probably tired, working multiple jobs, and absolutely miserable trying to make ends meet.” Stunned into silence by this unlikely demonstration of class consciousness, I turned to my old/new neighbor for his rebuttal. Thoughts? I wanted to ask. 

He smiled and shrugged, and shortly thereafter received a call and wandered down the driveway with a wave and little explanation. I turned back to face the agent, titillated by this turn of events. If even this wealthy beneficiary of rapid real estate appreciation is defending the hypothetical bad attitudes of the working class, things must really be bleak, I thought. 

I sensed that whatever polite shroud of distanced small talk that separated us before had evaporated; we were no longer method-acting as the Diligent Renter and Knowledgeable Real Estate Professional. Our conversation quickly turned to the economy, how disparities are so apparent now, how he remembered when the $2,500 rents in his neighborhood were $500 in 2005. I detected a weariness in his eyes that I hadn’t noticed previously when we were discussing the particulars of waterfront property values. The mask of normalcy slipped once we recognized in each other the same deep well of unease about the future.

Lately, things have felt tonally reminiscent of early 2021, when I spent my days making Powerpoint presentations about user experience updates while daily breaking news alerts reported the pandemic’s rising death toll. In Dallas, where I lived at the time, a cold snap that proved too much for the deregulated Texas energy grid plunged large swaths of the state into frozen darkness for days. On the Teams calls we held anyway using hot spots and portable chargers, it often seemed like we were side-eyeing each other nervously, searching for signs of hidden panic as we continued to play our instruments on a ship we feared was sinking.

Back in the driveway, the agent and I briefly discussed our proposed solutions (his: more government subsidies for aspiring homeowners; mine: disconnecting housing from speculative markets) before parting ways. I drove to Safeway.

An hour later, distracted by a parade of logistics as I climbed back into my car with a bag of sour candies and last-minute gifts for our neighbors, I failed to activate my standard podcast routine. Instead, the default FM country station—one I’d never bothered to change—crackled to life in the middle of a debt consolidation ad.

“You’re drowning in debt!” a self-assured voice boomed merrily as I backed out of my spot, “and we can help!” I reached for the gearshift as he continued making his pitch over upbeat Muzak. “For a limited time, you could qualify for up to $10,000 in debt relief, with no upfront fees.” At this, my hand froze and I stared blankly out the windshield, trapped in an abrupt trance by the sudden realization that something had gone very wrong—and had been wrong for a long time.

The pedestrian events of the day—the moving man’s mathematically questionable foreclosure coup, the Berkshire Hathaway agent’s cursory understanding of the plight of the millennial underclass, the oblivious ex-Newport Beach dad who preferred his baristas cheery and nonunionized, the chipper debt consolidation ad—coalesced into a cohesive picture of an empire in decline. I thought of Joe Bauers in Idiocracy, waking up in the year 2505 and being told repeatedly by the corporate-captured denizens of the United States of America Brought to You by American Express that “Brawndo’s got what plants crave!” while harvest after harvest withers.

Like most people who pay attention to the economy and financial trends for a living, I had spent the week spinning my wheels over the distractions du jour—tariffs, historic one-day market losses, divining a strategy from the word “yippy.” But it was as if breaking the fourth wall with the real estate agent—an unexpected, shared acknowledgment of peril—weakened the façade of normalcy that shields most of my interactions these days. This brief lapse meant the commonplace “drowning in debt” radio spot—which assumed, rightly, that its median listener was struggling under the weight of thousands, if not tens of thousands, in debt—managed to bypass the part of my brain that had long ago acclimatized to this state of affairs. 

In the last week, it became commonplace to suggest any attempt to make sense of the economic turbulence was about as worthwhile as any other parlor game. To rationalize or infer strategy was, basically, a fool’s errand: The policies weren’t just poorly implemented; they were alternately “mindless,” self-contradictory, or just plain “stupid.” But that assumes we aren’t constantly engaged in this sort of sanity-washing for the status quo. We might be so conditioned to lifestyles that require vast levels of personal indebtedness to sustain that we don’t often notice—the median non-mortgage debt in the US is around $25,000—but every once in a while, the naked absurdity of such an arrangement comes sharply into focus. 

On a recent episode of Scott Galloway’s Prof G Markets, Scott and his producer Ed sat down to hash out what might be coming after the latest wild week of announcements. To do this, they invited Gary Stevenson, the former British trader known for his sober, no-bullshit commentary. As Gary tells it, he worked as a trader during the Great Financial Crisis and saw the rebound differently than most of his peers. In the aftermath, he says, the other financiers kept assuming—year after year—that things would turn around soon. When they kept getting it wrong, they were confused: Why weren’t people spending money? Why wasn’t the stimulant stimulating anything?

Since he came from a working-class background, he decided to ask the friends he grew up with in east London—none of whom became wealthy traders like he did—the question that stumped his colleagues: Why aren’t you spending money? He learned the answer was simple: They didn’t really have any extra money to spend. He began aligning trades with his prediction that the events of 2008 were going to set global wealth inequality on a sharply rising path, and that real economic growth would become harder and harder to come by. Today, Gary seems aware of the irony of earning millions each year betting on collapse. 

Valiantly searching for an actionable takeaway at the end of the interview, Ed asks Gary what advice he has for young men who feel increasingly disillusioned by their job prospects and earning potential. “For people who are listening to this and want to protect themselves at the individual level,” he begins, acknowledging that most people still want to become wealthy despite the inconvenient trends Gary just outlined, “what’s your advice for dealing with this new world?” Gary laughs and restates the question: “If the Titanic’s going down, what do you do at an individual level?” 

After he rattled off the standard response (work hard, be clever, invest a lot), he delivered the most honest answer I’ve heard in such a profoundly uncertain moment. The truth is, he says, most people listening to their conversation will probably never “get rich” without systemic reform.

“But that doesn’t mean your life is over,” he adds pointedly. “There are important things you can achieve for yourself, your family, and the people you care about.” In other words, you don’t need to be a wealthy person to live with dignity and meaning; you can choose to construct your life around something other than the ruthless pursuit of social mobility. In a global economy where the rules seem to change by the week, this sentiment was like a long exhale after forgetting you’d been holding your breath. 

The anxieties that ripple through reporting about the birth rate collapse or worm their way into awkward, sweeping political statements practically begging for “more babies in America” feel incongruous with the lives I observe on my various screens. Most of the popular figures that flit across my feeds, whether famous actresses or billionaires or the more amorphous “lifestyle influencers,” have oodles of kids. Sometimes the children are explicitly part of the brand’s central value proposition (à la the cursed family YouTube channel), but usually, they exist on the periphery, like accessories. 

First, there are the billionaires: Elon Musk has 13 children with four different women. Chamath Palihapitiya, noted billionaire-turned-SPAC rugpull connoisseur (not necessarily in that order) of “All-In Podcast” fame, has five with two. Sara Blakeley, the youngest self-made female billionaire at 41 (if you, like me, thought it was Oprah, she was 49), does not have the luxury of multiple wives, and thus pulls up the rear of this group with four. In 2022, Forbes reported that there were “22 U.S. billionaires with seven or more kids,” including, I learned, Steven Spielberg. (This was three years and four children ago for Musk.) I don’t know what The Economist is so worried about—it certainly seems like some people are having children, and lots of them!

Then, there are the influencers. Often hailing from the B-team Real Housewives franchise cities (think Dallas, Salt Lake City), their brands are ostensibly about “fashion” or “travel” or the more nebulous “lifestyle”—but more often than not, the unifying theme is just “wealth.” These grids are populated with walk-in closets full of luxury logos, lush waist-length hair extensions, matte black SUVs, and yes, usually no fewer than three young children, who are as fundamental to the aura of abundance as the Hermès and Chanel bags. Influencer Krystiana Tiana has more than 15 million followers across platforms and five children. Kristi, a New York City fashion and lifestyle influencer with 400,000 followers, has five as well. Fashion influencer Madi Nelson has a million followers, but only four children. It goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: Hannah Neeleman (better known as “Ballerina Farm”) reigns supreme in this category, with eight kids and 22 million followers.

The lucrative influencer career—especially the sort that centers a performance of upper-class motherhood with five or more children—is a notable subversion of the typical earnings pattern observed when a woman has kids (that is, incremental, permanent decreases in income associated with the birth of each child). It’s the ultimate “classy if you’re rich; trashy if you’re poor” case study, a polarity that will only grow stronger as the parenting premium rises.

While the average number of kids by household income group has fallen across the board over the last 30 years, it fell most dramatically for those at the bottom and in the middle. Comparing inflation-adjusted income and family data from 1995 to the last available figures for 2023, households earning less than $35,000 saw roughly 20% declines, as did those earning between $75,000 and $100,000. Compare this to the $150,000–$200,000 range, which declined by only about 8%. And while it’s true that people at the very bottom of the income distribution still tend to have more kids on average than those at the top, households earning more than $200,000 (the upper limit in the data set) represented around 19% of the population in 2023—but accounted for nearly one in four families with five members (most often, this means three kids). 

Typically, “choice” is the lens through which we view and discuss decisions about children (whether to have them, how many to have, etc.). But the reproductive justice framework, created by the Black Women’s Caucus of Illinois in 1994, provides an instructive critique: “Choice” is relatively meaningless if you’re structurally limited by a narrow set of options—like, say, state-sponsored forced sterilization, or childcare for one kid that costs more than your mortgage. While most often associated with abortion access, reproductive justice is equally concerned with protecting the human right to have children.

Some societies organize around this notion—not only that humans have the right to have children, but that caring for them should be a matter of public responsibility, rather than a privilege mapped to the bounds of one’s personal income. In 1981, around the same time Ronald Reagan grabbed the US by its bootstraps and yanked hard, Norway appointed its first woman prime minister, Gro Harlem Brundtland. Norway, a country roughly equal in population today to the state of South Carolina, already had a maternity leave of around 4.5 months by the time Brundtland took over. Pappapermisjon, or paternity leave, came later, in 1993.

Today, the parental leave policy in Norway offers parents 100% of their salary (up to six times the “basic” income in Norway, about $67,628) for 49 weeks or 80% of their salary for 61 weeks. (This is in addition to the government-mandated five weeks of paid vacation to which full-time workers in Norway are entitled.) Biological mothers also receive paid pregnancy leave, or between three and 12 weeks of paid time off leading up to their due date. The government reimburses employers for the wages.

“The state chose to take responsibility for planning, providing, and paying for childcare through a series of laws,” writes Natasha Hakimi Zapata in her book Another World is Possible, beginning not in the pandemic-era 2020s, but in the 1970s, just a few years after the 1969 discovery of oil in the North Sea made the country rich. By 2005, all resident children of Norway were granted the right to a place in a barnehage, or childcare center, after age 1, when parental leave ends. It costs, at the high end, around $287 per month. For an extra $20 per month, daily meals are included. Families earning less than around $33,000 can qualify for 20 hours of free care per week. Around 93% of Norwegian kids attend these centers where the care workers are early childhood educators, many of whom hold advanced degrees. All this thanks to radical socialist principles, like the right of a parent to bond with their child without losing their job in the Amazon warehouse! 

Curiously, these policies aren’t reflected in Norway’s birth rate, which is lower than that of the US. But this is only evidence of some failure if you believe (like the billionaires, apparently) that the blunt object of family size is the best measure of prosperity. The real difference isn’t captured by “Live Human Births Per 1,000,” but by a flow of collective abundance wielded less like a privately contracted firehose and more like rainfall.

Norway is an example of what it might look like to design an economic and public support system around the belief that every person has a right to a family. In America, we orient around a different aphorism: “Don’t have kids you can’t afford.” But what will happen when (almost) nobody can afford them anymore? Will American children, like American wealth, pool with the one percent? A more distressing question: How long has it already been a luxury? (I’m reminded again of the Brady Bunch family and their live-in maid.) Another way is not only possible—it already exists somewhere else.

Data sidenote:

There’s just one subgroup for whom the decrease was similarly low: those earning between $35,000 and $50,000 in today’s dollars. Since the 1995 and 2023 data sets were presented differently, I did my best to (a) inflation-adjust and (b) normalize the value ranges so they could be compared more easily, but these ranges are approximate.

Perhaps the most jarring developments come attached to the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE), a group whose name should be permanently written in Comic Sans, named for a memecoin that was funny four years ago. Led by Elon Musk and designed to “provide advice and guidance from outside of government,” we were assured last year it would be a non-governmental entity with no real authority. Approximately two days into Trump’s second term in a move Nobody Could’ve Seen Coming, DOGE swiftly became part of the government, body-snatching the office of the US Digital Service (that’s US DOGE Service to you). 

Then, on Saturday, news broke that the new Treasury Secretary, ex-hedge-fund billionaire Scott Bessent, let the DOGEs out: He agreed to provide what Politico classified as “read-only access” to the Treasury systems responsible for, among other things, making payments associated with programs like Social Security and Medicare. Musk, who is an unelected, random person with no legitimate claim to the power of the state beyond making some modest campaign donations, had reportedly become “fixated” on these payment systems, and a “top Treasury Department official” was placed on administrative leave after “resisting requests.”

Most of the reporting on this story explained the reason for DOGE’s existence with reluctant references to overspending, usually citing a US Government Accountability Office (GAO) report that estimated the federal government made $236 billion in “improper payments” in 2023. This eye-popping sum was peppered throughout this coverage, presumably to provide context for why Musk might be so “fixated.” At least superficially, it appears to justify taking unorthodox measures. 

Few Americans doubt the existence of bureaucratic waste, and it doesn’t exactly strain credulity that a quarter of a trillion dollars could be vanishing annually after what we witnessed with the pandemic-era stimulus that produced things like absurd Maserati PPP fraud and, I don’t know, the Church of Scientology receiving legitimate paycheck protection funds. There’s just one problem: This figure (and statistics like it) fundamentally misrepresents the big picture of how public funds are most egregiously abused. GAO’s full report reveals a far less salacious story, one that’s more “administrative headaches” than “it’s time to hand the terminally online man passwords to treasury.gov’s Bank of America account on a greasy McDonald’s napkin.” 

First, consider that 74% of the funds were categorized as “overpayments,” meaning payments that were made to the right entities, just in excess of the approved amount and should be, according to the third footnote on page 13, returned. 19% of payments were classified as “unknown,” as in, it could not be determined whether they were improper. 5% were underpayments (money that should’ve been paid, but actually wasn’t), and 2% were “technically improper,” which meant “recipients received funds they were entitled to, but the payment failed to follow all applicable statutes or regulations.” It’s obviously important that there’s accountability in how our nation’s money is spent, but the oft-cited $236 billion is a red herring that obscures a more insidious dynamic hiding in plain sight. 

Moreover, the largest reporters of improper payments of this kind were Medicare and Medicaid at around 43% of the total, not exactly agencies you’d expect to covertly fund “terrorist groups” like Musk suggested (unless you count private health insurers like Humana, which incidentally, I do). In light of the state of our healthcare “system” and United HealthCare having been caught on more than one occasion defrauding Medicare Advantage of billions of dollars for diagnoses that didn’t exist, one has to wonder how much waste could be traced back to this style of public-private partnership, rather than the specter of legions of individuals living on the dole. (How many times do we have to tell Granny to stop hoodwinking Part D for extra insulin?) 

Most who encounter these stories amid the flurry of other updates likely won’t have time to read the footnotes in the report linked two sites away, or know that public-private partnerships often transform publicly owned funds into private gain—they’ll just remember “$236 billion in improper payments,” get a vague sense of the government’s excesses as the source of our financial woes, and move on with their day. The fog of stats about wrongdoing impresses upon the average citizen a photonegative of reality: a sprawling, greedy bureaucracy engaged in widespread fraud, waste, and abuse in sore need of being disbanded, defunded, and privatized further to make it more “efficient.”

It’s true our public funds have an efficiency problem, but it has little to do with one-off civil servants who can be lured away with resignation offers or poor single parents collecting extra on their EBT cards. Since the 1980s, the federal government has functioned less like a state providing benefits directly to its citizens, and more like a shell company employing for-profit subcontractors to provide its services (the “public-private partnership”). As of 2015, there were 2.6 private contractors for every one federal employee. In theory, this outsourcing was supposed to lead to less spending and lower taxes, which has turned out to be exactly half true. But in practice, it’s more like a one-way funnel of public funds into private coffers, a transfer of wealth and power that creates more opportunity for corruption.

The welfare system in Texas, for example, was outsourced and privatized decades ago in the name of “small government.” Now, the publicly traded Maximus plays the role of “welfare agency” in Texas. According to its 10-K filing, Maximus earned $4.9 billion in 2023, $4.2 billion of which came from the US federal government or other state actors. Its gross profits were $1 billion, a margin of about 20%. Don’t worry—I’m sure the company is putting our tax dollars to efficient use. (The linked story is a Maximus press release from December about a $200 million stock buyback that reiterated its “disciplined approach” to “maximiz[ing] value for our shareholders.”)  

“If [a] person wants to interact with the government to get access to the benefits to which they are entitled, they have to interface with the company that the government has outsourced these services to,” Anne Kim, author of Poverty for Profit, told Nathan Robinson in an interview with Current Affairs. And since there are “really only a handful of companies that compete and…swap contracts every few years around the country,” there’s little incentive to provide the best service at the lowest cost, the purported benefit of privatizing public goods. This sort of anticompetitive arrangement is common, and at scale, it’s the reason why things like the poverty rate seem so intractable despite steadily increased spending. Thanks to contracts like these, public funds—distributed in ways considered “proper,” thereby raising no internal alarms about impropriety or waste—are simply pooling in the wrong places, like Maximus’s 20% margins, instead of being invested in the people and communities they were earmarked to benefit. This setup reduces citizens seeking public services to customers of private companies. It replaces elected officials who are accountable to their constituents with the board of a publicly traded company that’s responsible only to its shareholders. 

This isn’t the type of waste that Musk appears intent on rooting out. And why would he, when you could argue he’s the single most fortunate recipient of this sort of public funding of private wealth in American history? For his part, he’s recruiting an army of “high-IQ small-government revolutionaries” who are “willing to work 80+ hours per week” (read: this is an unpaid internship) to chase down the bogeyman of Fat Cat Bureaucrats kicked back in their taxpayer-provided Eames chairs re-reading White Fragility for the latest installment of their Safe Space Seminar Speaker Series. But beyond the apparent refusal to recognize an overreliance on for-profit providers for basic government services, there’s almost impressively little interest in acknowledging the private sector dynamics that put nearly a quarter of Americans on programs like Medicaid in the first place.

The roughly 42 million American adults on Medicaid earn somewhere in the ballpark of $20,000 per year or less, assuming they have no children. As of 2020, 12 million of these individuals worked; around three in four of that group worked full time. (About half of full-time wage workers on Medicaid and SNAP benefits worked at least 35 hours each week for between 50 and 52 weeks per year.) Fewer than 10% worked for the public sector, which means the biggest beneficiaries of all this government largesse are private employers whose full-time employees are paid so little that they require publicly funded assistance to afford food. If we’re intent on eliminating waste, might it make sense to look upstream at which American businesses are most enthusiastically engaged in this indirect pilfer of public funds? (Something tells me we won’t!)

A different 91-page GAO report attempts to identify the biggest corporate offenders across 11 states. Walmart (market cap: $800 billion) is almost always first or second, and the office consistently finds that between 10 and 20% of employed Medicaid and SNAP recipients work for big-name corporations like Dunkin’ ($8.8 billion), McDonald’s ($206 billion), Meijer (privately owned, but the Meijer family is worth almost $16 billion), Kroger ($44 billion), Dollar General ($16 billion), and, of course, Amazon ($2.5 trillion). 

That said, nearly half of those on Medicaid are children, and still more are elderly or disabled, so the roughly 15% of working recipients who are employed by MegaCorps is still a relatively small fraction of the whole. But the children who need it? They likely belong to the wage workers. The elderly poor? Likely just those who clawed their way through, then aged out of, this workforce. You don’t need to currently work as a cashier for Kroger to be impacted by the economic environment Kroger creates. 

Opposite these Medicaid recipients, you’ll find Treasury Secretary Bessent, a billionaire who allegedly “engaged in tax avoidance” (an extremely diplomatic way to say “didn’t pay his taxes”) when he neglected to fork over $1 million in Medicare taxes. At around 2.35% on incomes over $200,000, a bill of $1 million implies wages of around $43 million. (I remain convinced that shirking your social responsibility when you’re that wealthy is humiliation kink-level #BrokeBitchBehavior.) During his confirmation hearing, he testified that the US faces “economic calamity” if Congress does not renew the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which, among other things, would keep the corporate tax rate at a near-100-year low of 21%, rather than reverting it back to modern history’s norm of 35%.

Imminent “economic calamity” is certainly curious framing, as conservative policy advisor Oren Cass warned definitively that “we cannot afford” the $4 trillion price tag to extend the legislation, and that the trickle-down, revenue-increasing argument initially used to justify it clearly did not come to pass. (“The decline in federal revenue after adoption [of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act] is plain for all to see,” Cass said.) To counter the argument that extension would amount to a disproportionate handout for the wealthiest Americans, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Mike Crapo (a Republican from Idaho) noted that, don’t worry, $2.6 trillion of the roughly $4 trillion in tax cuts would flow to those earning less than $400,000. 

Spending even a minute with a calculator and income distribution data reveals that Crapo’s assurance means 65% of the money would go to around 97% of US households, and the remaining 35% of funds—or $1.4 trillion—would flow to the remaining 3% who earn more than $400,000 per year. As Cass suggests, in no universe could such a move be classified as fiscally conservative legislation, and as a member of one of these households, I can assure you we do not need another tax break. So what happens now? 

Will taxes for median earners go down? Who knows. Will prices go up? We don’t know. Will Social Security and Medicare be gutted? Hard to say. What’s going to happen with the stock market? Your guess is as good as mine. In general, it’s wise to resist the urge to make major adjustments to your financial strategy right now, because it’s too easy to be on the wrong side of a bet when the terms keep changing. What we do know for certain: The longer we insist on papering over the real problems of the US economy and our government’s relationship with the private sector, the more painful things will become. Of course, when Trump or Musk post about the necessary “pain” of tariffs or spending cuts, they don’t mean pain for them—they mean pain for you. 

This is why it’s more critical than ever to transcend popular talking points about “government waste” on things like transgender comic books for Serbians or the convenient myth of billionaires (13, to be exact) who “fight for the average American.” Pushing through changes faster than anyone can metabolize them is part of the plan—a strategy of “substituting perception for reality,” hoping it will make you forget what’s real by waving around flashy distractions and pointing the finger at a rotating cast of unlikely villains supposedly to blame for Americans’ ongoing financial hardship (chief among them: your fellow American across the aisle who also spends half their income on rent checks written to a subsidiary owned by the Carlyle Group). As Sarah Kendzior wrote, “They want you to hate each other so much, you agree to their plan of tearing this country into warring fiefdoms for oligarchs to plunder. They want you to prey on the vulnerable, even though you are vulnerable too, so that the powerful can escape scrutiny. They want you to cheer your own demise, mistaking it for someone else’s. Do not fall for it.” 

Because here’s the reality Elon Musk is working so hard to make sure you forget:

Don’t forget it.

Graph comes from realtimeinequality.org’s Wealth Inequality data, set to “Average Real Wealth” for the Top 0.01% (the pink line), Top 0.1% (purple), Top 1% (yellow), Top 10% (red), Middle 40% (almost impossible to see), and Bottom 50% (basically nonexistent).

*In 1976, the top 1% owned 22% of total wealth. By 2023, the number was 35%. This 13 percentage point increase was provided by a commensurate decrease in middle and upper-middle class wealth. The bottom half of Americans, who owned 1% of all wealth in 1976, still own roughly 1%.

Despite spending my afternoon in the Wall Street Bull’s pen, I felt no more clarity about what it is this rarefied demographic actually wants. Their resentments accrue to a disorganized protest that self-reportedly loves American capitalism but appears to hate the society and people it has produced. Wealth and education do not appear to soften this dejection—and on some level, they seem to sense something, somewhere, has gone awry. But if you refuse to acknowledge that a larger or more complex force than “all choices, period, full stop” might be generating these trends at scale, all you’re left with is the belief that individual people (or entire generations and movements) are lazy, stupid, or evil. I can see why that might make someone angry; how it could poison your perspective on everything from low-wage work to cancer warnings on Budlight.

For a long time, I feared my exposure to alternative economic ideas and systems-based thinking had made me cynical, nostalgic for the days of being an empty vessel for meritocracy. Life was simpler when I accepted, whole cloth, the legitimacy of a perfectly just, hard work-rewarding world. Back then, I perceived my success in money and business (as a healthy, able-bodied person who grew up the sole progeny of two financially dependable, college-educated people who prioritized things like private school and home-cooked dinners and ACT classes) as evidence of a fair-minded distribution of spoils to those who were most inherently deserving, not proof of the opposite. (Born on second base, thought she hit a double, etc.)

But then a few weeks ago—whilst our boy Tom the Commenter was surely clocking in for his daily shift banging out fan fiction about Nancy Pelosi or college protesters or whatever—I received a message from a reader that said, “I started with you from the very beginning and was interested in the same initial materials you were writing and talking about. And then I watched you evolve and grow and saw your material success and had a moment of, ‘Dang, this girl is accomplishing so much and making so much money, and I’m trapped here in my healthcare job with a firm income ceiling and nowhere to grow.’ I felt this frustration with not being able to keep up in the same ways financially as people I saw online. And then you kept learning and opened my eyes to systems-based thinking and my whole perspective shifted—I started focusing less on individual wealth accumulation and more on the ‘why’ behind it all.”

In an instant, her insight clarified that my concerns about becoming cynical as I gained more context were unfounded; that the opposite had been true. Recognizing these broader frameworks frees you from contempt for yourself and, critically, other people. It grows, rather than shrinks, your capacity to contain both the challenges and joys of modern life. (Nuance? In this economy?!) You become more durable, not less, when you realize setbacks are not a referendum on your personal ability, and fulfillment comes more easily when you stop expecting what’s broken to make you feel whole.

This recognition transformed Commenter Tom’s Christmas Day tirade marathon from just another cranky person online to a cautionary tale of foreclosing on the possibility that anything could ever improve, and the danger of taking it upon yourself to carry water for that belief. I’ll take a page from the US Surgeon General here: Please comment responsibly.

But what if it isn’t? What if this is short-sighted selfishness, and ultimately personally detrimental, too? There are predictable consequences of divorcing friendship from assistance: It often means we are left with no choice but to pay for absolutely everything we need. 

This worldview has framed asking for help or needing support as an inexcusable burden. Its huffy refrain is don’t be cheap; do not ask me to take you to the airport. (And, I mean, sure: LAX at 4 am? Or… any time of day. Woof.) But the sentiment is clear for even the smallest asks: You must be needy, boundaryless, or inadequately self-sufficient, and your friend has every right to hit you with that I don’t have the emotional bandwidth paragraph. 

So rather than asking your friend for a ride, you take an Uber.

Need help mounting your TV? TaskRabbit.  

Instead of trading your neighbor a six-pack of beer to feed your cat while you’re away, you pay a stranger on Rover $30 a day. 

Cooking an elaborate meal and realize you’re out of a crucial ingredient? You don’t know the people in the apartment next to you, so instead of knocking and asking if they’ve got a spare lemon, you end up on DoorDash.

The fear of being a burden atomizes us, and as a result, further entrenches our reliance on something else: money. The central promise of so many apps is that they can eradicate the need to maintain relationships, look out for one another, or inconvenience yourself for the sake of a loved one. (For a price.) 

I’m heartened by the emergence of the “little favor” countertrend (aka: the way society has functioned since the beginning of time) because it acknowledges that sometimes asking for help or inconveniencing yourself for someone else’s sake (aka: friendship) strengthens bonds in your community. 

And since you’re part of that community, you benefit, too—even if, in the short-term, you’re the one troubling yourself on someone else’s behalf. 

There have long been efforts to formalize this type of money-free giving and receiving. It’s different from bartering: You aren’t necessarily trading one thing for another; at least, not simultaneously. Instead, it’s about reallocating resources amongst yourselves over time. The FI/RE (“financial independence, retire early,” for the uninitiated) community, which has its origins in an anti-consumption movement, are big proponents of local “Buy Nothing” groups, a sort of free Facebook Marketplace that allows you to ask for what you need and give what you can, with no exchange of money (though not without their flaws and scandals). You don’t need this extra pack of hangers? Meet the person two blocks over who was just about to head to Target to pick some up. 

The financialization of our every move strips us of our humanity and weakens our ties, while Little Favors create trust and common ground. The beauty in asking for what you need is not just in the straightforward receiving of it, but in allowing other people to give it to you. We glorify individual ability and self-sufficiency, which are great—but to be human is to need. So, too, is to give. 

Still, sometimes we forget this interconnectedness, disregarding that the quality of our culture necessarily shapes our individual experience of it. The other day, I saw this Tweet in my mentions: “@moneywithkatie, if the tax system were changed so that income sources were taxed equally, do you foresee any adverse consequences for regular people? Is it likely to mean the IRS taking a bigger share of inheritance or other one-off windfalls?”

I’m less interested in litigating the ins and outs of inheritance taxes (see also: my temporary retirement from thought experiments, as I am still tired). What fascinates me about the underlying assumptions baked into this question are more human, less Internal Revenue Service. 

At first glance, there doesn’t seem to be much out of the ordinary here. Am I, a regular person, going to suffer from something intended to benefit society as a whole? It’s the separation of the individual from society as a whole that jumps off the page; this idea that our individual actions are somehow divorced from broader context.

If something is good for society, and you are a member of society, it stands to reason that a better society benefits you, too. In this particular example, sure, your grandchild may stand to inherit less money, but they’re also more likely to live in a world with less wealth inequality and more opportunity as a result. Is that an adverse effect? (That’s rhetorical. Please do not send me an anti-taxation screed.)

The goal of atomizing us as individuals is that we won’t think of ourselves as members of the whole; as members of an ecosystem who can give and take as we’re able, but instead as competitors in a cutthroat game who need to take every chance to get ahead. 

Of course, these ideas are connected in an even more literal way: Your grandkid will need every penny of that inheritance if they exist in a world wherein meeting their every human need is a transaction with a price attached. 

Financial independence vs. financial freedom

Financial independence (FI) = Wonka’s chocolate-dipped Roth IRA. Rainbows, unicorns, and funded taxable brokerage accounts. You’re free of anyone else’s clutches, baby! You’ve got enough money in the bank that you never need to work the 9-5 again! Lay in bed all day like Grandpa Joe, honey.

But there’s something that comes a lot faster—something that allows you to move freely about your life—called financial freedom. 

While financial independence might mean you can retire at 35 and spend your days weaving couture magenta baskets or braiding your dog’s hair (cool!), financial freedom is the point at which “money” is no longer the #1 consideration in any given decision.

Sure, you might not be able to square-dance out of your Fortune 500 company and leave a trail of subtle-but-pointed insults in your wake just yet, but you’re no longer operating from a place of financial restriction. 

Financial freedom is the point at which the clause “…but I can’t afford it” is (mostly) stricken from your vocabulary. Want to move across the country? Change jobs? Take a six-month sabbatical to learn about the aforementioned basket-weaving? Be your guest. You’ve got it like that.

Most people really overestimate how long it takes to reach that point. After all, saving between 20% and 30% of your income means you’ll have a full year’s salary saved in three to five years—and that’s assuming you’re only saving! Throw some bull market fuel on the fire and you may find yourself with a lot more, a lot sooner.

Now, let’s circle back to the broader point of this post: contextualizing our spending to help us navigate financial decisions in pursuit of freedom and independence.

Contextualizing our spending as a portion of our net worth goal

Sometimes when I explain FI math to people, their eyes start to glaze over: “It’s just 12x monthly spend and then 25x that, unless you’re more conservative in which case…” Yeah. Not exactly a contender for most interesting conversation topics when Euphoria Season Two exists. 

But I theorize another reason why it tends to lose us, psychologically, is because the numbers we’re talking about seem so hard to conceptualize. 

Most of us deal with dollars in the “tens of thousands” realm and only occasionally in the “hundreds of thousands” realm (like if we’re buying a home or negotiating a new high salary). Annual spending of [insert large number like $90K here] * 25?! We’re now dealing with dollars in the millions, which is—likely—a lot more money than most of us can actually fathom. 

It’s hard to understand how we could go from a few thousand bucks in our savings account to a 401(k) worth $3mm. Exponential compounding defies conventional intuition. Some of us feel so discouraged by it that we just check out entirely; we assume the goal is unreachable and swipe, tap, and insert our way through town (that’s a credit card reference; get your mind out of the gutter).

But what if we reverse-engineered our FI formula to understand what a far more comprehensible amount of income requires? What each $100 we spend means for our net worth goal? 

$100 per month = $1,200 per year x 25 = $30,000

And alas, there we have it—for every $100 per month that we want to spend, we’d need $30,000 invested (in a very specific type of portfolio in the stock market with between 50-75% Large Cap Stocks and 25-50% government bonds, according to Bill Bengen’s original research) to reliably produce $100 of investment income per month. 

If you spend $1,000 per month, you’d reach financial independence with *checks notes* $300,000 in the bank. 

In the opposite direction, for every $1 you want to spend each month, you’ll need $300 invested to produce that income. Which brings me to my point…

$100 may not seem like that much…until it is.

The intent of this exercise is to provide a better sense of what your casual spending can amount to. 

Often we see examples that show “what $100 invested 20 years ago would’ve turned into.” This is the opposite. This is telling you what you’ll need 20 years from now to produce that $100. 

I’d argue it’s a much more helpful way to think about your spending, because it has a direct impact on your ability to continue spending that way into your old age. 

Why this might be a reality-slap in the face

For many of us, $100 comes and goes pretty easily. 

Hell, I got a mani/pedi for the wedding a few months ago, and—after tip—my total was $127.50. To realize that I’d need $30,000 invested to support that monthly habit in perpetuity is a bit of a reality check on whether or not having professionally polished nails is worthwhile to me. (And technically, I’d need $38,250, since it’s more than $100. Double yikes.)

Money is meant to be spent, but it’s also a limited resource that we have to allocate wisely and intentionally.

I don’t want to encourage someone to forego all of life’s little pleasures, but it’s important to remember that—for most of us whose last names aren’t Bezos, Zuckerberg, or Musk—money is a limited resource. Allocating it wisely is key, because it represents our life’s energy. 

Most of us still need to work (read: trade hours for cash) to earn and invest each incremental $30,000. And while we all likely derive varying levels of enjoyment from our work, I’d venture a guess that most of us don’t want to work forever. 

Where to go from here: How much did this month cost?

Think about how much you spent last month. (Resist the temptation to explain away one-off expenses; if there’s one thing I’ve learned in life, it’s that there’s always one-off expenses, they just change month-to-month.)

If you were to live this month on repeat for the rest of your life, how much would you need to support it? 

Remember, monthly spend * 12 * 25. Feeling sufficiently overwhelmed? Fantastic. 

Let’s bring it back down to earth! Checking in every once in a while to make sure that you’re actually progressing toward that goal (regardless of how big or small it is) is crucial; we don’t want to be hustling in place. (The treadmill is the worst possible analogy for building wealth. Don’t exert your precious life energy to stand still.)

While it might be depressing if you’re just beginning your journey to see financial independence on the horizon so far away, keep in mind: Financial freedom is likely closer than you think.

Reaching your first six figures in investments, for example, may take a couple of years depending on how much you’re earning, what type of employer match you have (if any), and what the stock market’s doing in the short-term (jumpcut to Q1 and Q2 2022 *winces*)—but once you hit, say, $120,000, you’ve got enough money invested already to reliably produce $400 per month in income (or, more impressively, $4,800 per year). 

That’s a sizable car payment! Two Equinox memberships! Fifty burrito bowls! (Damn inflation.)

If goals in the “millions” are daunting and feel unrealistic, incrementalize it: Make your goal your next $30,000, a number that’s representative of a tangible amount of monthly passive income. 

You’re probably already closer than you realize to your ideal lifestyle. Mine? Grandpa Joe-style cat naps on a Wednesday, baby. 

One of the most interesting things about blogging about personal finance (and, by extension, creating an Instagram presence that just screams, “Send me your deepest, darkest fears about investing!”) is that the way questions are phrased reveals a lot about the deep misunderstanding most of us have about how investing actually works.

For example, a question I receive more than I’d like to: “Should I invest in my 401(k) or index funds?”

There’s absolutely no shame in not understanding—after all, when would you have learned this stuff unless you took an active interest?

But 401(k)s and index funds are not an either/or. That’s like asking, “Should I eat fruit or strawberries?”

The strawberries are INSIDE the “fruit” category. I recently posted a picture that explains how all these terms are related:

The good news is that people are asking about index funds, which are, in my opinion, one of the absolute best ways for any individual investor to do really well in the stock market.

Jack Bogle, the founder of Vanguard, invented the index fund in 1975 and pretty much immediately pissed off and amused every big wig on Wall Street.

The premise of an index fund—that you aren’t trying to purchase individual stocks, but instead buying a fund that tracks an index—was a wild idea at the time. At first, people ridiculed Jack for suggesting investors should stop looking for the needle in the haystack and instead buy the entire haystack. How could that possibly compete against making educated guesses at which stocks would perform best? As you can probably guess, his critics promptly shut the hell up after a few years of his index funds crushing.

Why is it so hard to pick individual stocks? It has a lot to do with the fact that our perception of successful companies is very relative and skewed to our own present-day experience and biases.

Only one of the original 30 companies listed on the Dow Jones Industrial Average is still around, General Electric. Companies, industries, and the world around them changes—and usually, those changes are gradual, complex, and not obviously correlated to one another.

Once a company becomes an obvious “winner” as defined by its stature in the market, most of its explosive growth has already happened: Someone who purchased $1,000 worth of Apple stock in the 1990s when all the pundits were claiming it was a loser that would never get asked to prom saw some serious returns.

But someone who buys Apple today? Apple already popped off. The ugly duckling already had its glow-up. Nobody’s laughing at you if you buy Apple now. Sure, you’ll see growth, but will it compare to the get-rich-quick windfall that nerds in the 90s predicted when Wall Street was scoffing? Unlikely. Apple was a shooting star.

…and basing your investment strategy on your ability to seek out shooting stars is probably going to net you majority losses. Things change.

“Consider that in the 1960s the U.S. government was seriously considering (it never happened) the forced breakup of General Motors. GM was deemed so dominant and powerful that no other car company could compete. This is the same GM that survives today only by the grace of a huge bailout by that same government. On the other hand, back in the 1990s the smart money was betting Apple might not survive. As of this writing, it is the single largest U.S. company as measured by market capitalization. Today’s stars are tomorrow’s wrecks. Today’s fallen are tomorrow’s exciting turnarounds,” writes J.L. Collins in his 2016 book, The Simple Path to Wealth.

Why is it so hard for some of us to accept that picking individual stocks can ultimately net losses over time, or underperform index investing as a whole? Because we’re prideful and stupid. Just kidding (about the second part). The people I see struggle with this the most are the really smart ones: It’s hard to wrap your big brain around the fact that you’ll do better by doing nothing. It flies in the face of the way we’re taught to approach every other aspect of our lives – but investing isn’t like the other aspects of your life.

Being a successful investor comes down to a few counterintuitive principles: Being okay with boredom 90% of the time (slow growth over time) and terror 10% of the time (March 2020 COVID plummet), coupled with extreme patience.

Index investing isn’t exciting—it’s generally stable.

So what’s investing anyway?

In its simplest form, investing means you’re buying a little piece of a company. You’re not just buying a piece of paper or a number on a screen; you’re not dumping your money into an account where you’ll earn a guaranteed interest rate (another weirdly common misconception). When you invest, you’re becoming a part owner of a company—or hundreds, or thousands of them, depending on what you buy—and as that company makes money, so do you. That’s really all there is to it.

If that company loses money, so do you. This is the nauseating downside to the Apple narrative: It’s the reason individual stock investing is a double-edged sword. There are other companies that have gone from market darling to out of business just as quickly, turning whatever amount you invested into a gut-wrenching $0.

That’s why index funds like those that track the S&P 500 can be so great: Because you own pieces across the largest 500 companies in the United States, you own an index that automatically filters out certain companies, without you doing a damn thing.

Say you own an S&P 500 index fund (like VFINX, the Vanguard S&P 500 index fund, or the ETF version, VOO), you can own pieces of:

• Apple Inc. (AAPL)

• Microsoft Corp. (MSFT)

• Amazon.com Inc. ( AMZN)

• Facebook Inc. (FB)

• Tesla Inc. (TSLA)

• Alphabet Inc. Class A Shares (GOOGL)

• Alphabet Inc. Class C Shares (GOOG)

• Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (BRK.B)

And about 490 more. As companies grow and become successful, they can automatically get added to that index. As they start to shit the bed and shrink, they can be dropped— automatically.

Some financial gurus, like Paul Merriman, take the opposite approach and promote small-cap value index funds (in other words, suggest owning index funds that comprise hundreds of the smallest companies), the logic being that every Apple, Tesla, and Microsoft once started out as a fledgling baby before they became breakout stars.

If you wait until they crack the top 500, it’s likely that a lot of the explosive growth has already happened—thus the argument for owning the #SmallBoiz too, knowing the risk that most of them will fizzle and die—but if you own one or two future shooting stars, it could create a lot of growth.

Other approaches

Of course, another approach is buying the entire market in a fund like VTSAX (ETF: VTI), the Vanguard Total Stock Market fund. When you own the entire market, you’re buying the entire haystack—not just a subset of it. The tricky thing is that big companies are given preference in index funds, by nature of the fact that they’re bigger.

And while we won’t get into a deep dive today on an optimal way to structure your portfolio (hint: this is hotly contested and there are many competing schools of thought, as you may be able to tell already), it’s important to know that index funds require you to abandon your get-rich-quick fantasies and gambling tendencies and instead subscribe to the get-rich-slowly-and-steady plan.

“Great, I’m in. But what’s the difference between an index fund and an ETF?”

Ah, yes, the other great confusing topic with no great answer.

Investing is always evolving. Remember how the index fund was invented in the 70s? The ETF was invented in the 90s, and it stands for “exchange-traded fund.”

It basically just means it’s an index fund that, instead of trading once per day, can trade throughout the day as if it were an individual stock. You can get index funds (or ETFs) that track all sorts of indices: the tech sector, small companies, bonds, etc.

What does that mean for us? Nothing, really, except for the fact that they usually have slightly lower expense ratios (read: costs) and lower barriers to entry.

Where to buy index funds and ETFs

You can buy ETFs in any investment account, and it’s really easy to open one. Your 401(k). Your Roth IRA. Your taxable investing account. Your boyfriend’s sister’s 401(k)! These puppies are everywhere, and you’d probably benefit from an audit of what you’re invested in in these various accounts. Happy index investing!