Am I Financially Screwed Forever?

A legitimate question, the simple answer is "yes." The complicated answer is "no."

The past few weeks in the markets have been brutal.

Stocks are tanking.

Real estate is seizing up.

And Treasury bonds—usually the panic room of global finance—are collapsing.

Every nightly news anchor looks half-giddy as they announce that the stock market has had its worst stretch since 1932.

The housing market? A disaster.

Mortgage rates have shot through the roof.

Mortgage applications—typically a proxy for demand—have cratered by 15%.

Meanwhile, wages have barely nudged upward, rising just 0.3% across the board, while inflation continues to outpace earnings at over 2.5%.

And that’s before the “Tariffs Are a Beautiful Word” regime fully kicks in.

Make no mistake: this isn’t a cyclical downturn.

It’s not a thunderstorm.

This isn’t weather.

It’s war.

Recessions have causes. They have patterns.

They end.

What we’re living through now isn’t a recession—it’s a deliberate act of economic arson.

Picture a guy with a Gatling gun setting up outside your house every morning, unloading clip after clip into your living room.

That’s the American economy right now.

And the shooter? He goes on TV and blames you. Too “yippy,” he says. Too disrespectful. So he had to open fire.

But even before that—before 77 million people decided the price of eggs was a good enough reason to torch the Republic—we were already seeing cracks.

A man murdered the CEO of a health insurance giant, and the internet turned him into a folk hero.

Luigi Mangione “swag” is a thing now.

People donated to his legal defense fund as if he were a modern-day Robin Hood. He’s the most successful felon to capture national sympathy since Bonnie and Clyde.

So yeah. I get it.

You’re staring down a future that feels rigged, broken, or both.

And you’re angry, because here’s the part nobody says out loud:

You did everything they told you.
You followed the rules.
You went to school. You worked hard. You invested.
And now you’re being punished for believing them.

Or—

You never got the chance.
The rules were rigged before you even got to the starting line.
You’re not willing to go to college and become an indentured servant.
You’re convinced you’ll never own a home.
And even if you’re making 50, 60, 70K a year, you still can’t afford the life they promised you.

That’s not just economic betrayal.

That’s existential betrayal.

And now you’re asking the only question that matters:

Am I financially screwed forever?

Let’s break that question open.

Not with platitudes.

Not with hustle-porn advice.

You don’t need another self-proclaimed guru telling you to buckle down, grind harder, or launch a dropshipping side hustle.

You need clarity.

You need to know what changed—and what it means for your future.

Because if you're going to survive this, you need to understand something almost no one in finance will admit:

The real question isn’t “Am I screwed?”

The Real Question

It’s: “What game was I even playing—and does it still exist?”

You’re not asking this because you made one bad trade, missed a crypto wave, or splurged on lattes. You’re asking because something more profound is broken, and no one will admit it out loud.

Everyone in America is taught the same formula:

• Work hard.

• Get a degree.

• Buy a house.

• Save for retirement.

• Live comfortably.

That was the contract. That was the game.

But somewhere along the line, the rules changed—and they didn’t send a memo.

Now? What’s the game look like?

• Wages have flatlined.

• Housing is a speculative bloodsport.

• Retirement is a vanishing luxury.

• And “saving” feels like slowly drowning in inflation while your future floats out of reach.

Add to that a lunatic with a Truth Social account and executive power, who’s busy lighting up the stock market like it owes him money, driving the price of everything in America up by 25%, while flailing around with all the conviction of a wet noodle in a wind tunnel in how a global trade war is being conducted.

The only problem? Policy doesn’t change until after your 401(k) is wrecked, your bank account is drained, your Social Security check is worthless, and your assets have been reduced to collateral damage in a war waged by bureaucratic idiocy.

This isn’t bad luck. It’s not personal failure. It’s not because you didn’t hustle hard enough or download the right budgeting app.

It’s because the game ended, and they’re still selling you tickets.

The economy you were trained for—stable jobs, rising pay, linear progress—is dead. What’s replaced it is something darker and more extractive: a financial system that doesn't reward effort, just positioning. One that punishes security and prizes velocity. Where value doesn’t flow from work, it flows from leverage, scale, and access.

And so you look at your 401(k), your mortgage, your bills, your kids’ future—and you ask:

Am I financially screwed forever?

And unless you understand what game you're really in, the honest answer is:

Yes.

What’s Been Erased

Let’s be blunt: the core pillars of financial stability—the things your parents were told to chase, and you were taught to believe in—have been quietly dismantled.

Not reformed. Not disrupted.

Erased.

The Wage-Work Bargain

Once upon a time, a job was a path to security. Wages rose with productivity, and benefits built over time. A single income could support a family, buy a house, and fund retirement.

As I’ve written in this Substack, up until about 1985, all of that was largely true. But then the triumph of the neoliberalist project took hold, and suddenly, it became harder to do better than our parents. The “middle class” started to dissolve, and with it, society’s stability as well.

Now? Productivity keeps rising. Wages don’t. You work more. You produce more. You get… stagnation. Maybe a pizza party. Maybe a ping-pong table.

Real wages have been flat since the early 1980s. The economy grew. You didn’t.

And if you’re my children, who enter this story at the end? Well, it was never there in the first place.

The Ownership Ladder

Homeownership used to be the anchor of the middle class. Now it’s a speculative sport for hedge funds and a debt trap for everyone else. Thanks to The Great Extraction and the financialization of housing, first-time buyers aren’t competing with neighbors—they’re competing with private equity firms like BlackRock. Zillow was bidding against you. And if you managed to “win”? You’re locked into a 7% mortgage and praying the roof doesn’t cave in—financially or literally.

Some critics argue that homeownership was never really a great investment. Maybe so. But that misses the point.

For most Americans, owning a home wasn’t about ROI—it was about security. It did two crucial things:

• First, it provided shelter at a fixed cost—“imputed rent” you’d be paying anyway, only now you paid it to yourself.

• Second, it came with tax benefits that lowered your effective income and freed up capital for saving, spending, or just staying afloat.

It wasn’t just an asset. It was a stabilizer. It made life predictable. It made the future feel real.

Owning a home was the biggest financial decision most Americans would ever make—and for decades, it worked. It was a cornerstone of the American Dream.

The American Dream is still for sale. You just can’t afford the down payment.

The Retirement Lie

Retirement used to mean rest. Now it means reinvention—because nobody’s retiring.

Pensions? Gone.

In the late 1970s and early ’80s, Congress scrapped the idea of professionally managed retirement funds and handed the risk to you. Thus was born the 401(k)—a provision in the 1978 Revenue Act that shifted the burden of retirement from employers and the government to the individual.

The result? Every American became their own portfolio manager—whether they knew what a bond yield was or not.

You weren’t just expected to work.

You were expected to master the stock market.

To become a part-time financial analyst.

To build a nest egg while inflation eroded it in real time.

To somehow retire with dignity on a system built for volatility.

And if you didn’t? There was always Social Security, right?

Maybe. But now Social Security is being quietly means-tested into irrelevance. And at the rate the Trump regime is detonating fiscal policy, there’s no telling whether it will exist in any real form by the end of the year.

As for your 401(k)? It’s not a retirement vehicle—it’s a roulette wheel. One bad year, and you’re back in the workforce at 68, hoping Trader Joe’s is still hiring.

Just ask the millions of Americans who’ve watched 30% of their portfolios vaporize in the past three weeks—thanks to a tariff policy that makes Smoot-Hawley look like a TED Talk. It wasn’t a correction. It was a deliberate economic self-immolation, built on the rantings of Peter Navarro and rubber-stamped by a man who thinks trade wars are “easy to win.”

Professional traders took a haircut.

You took a chainsaw to the face.

That’s the legacy of “individual contributions” in an age of institutional lunacy.

You didn’t plan poorly. The finish line was moved. Then it was monetized. And now it’s slipping further out of reach every time the President opens his mouth.

The Education Trap

Education was supposed to be the great equalizer. Now it’s the great mortgager. Student loans were rebranded as “investment in your future,” but they’ve functionally become a federal indenture system—one that can’t be discharged, only managed.

If your degree doesn’t make you money, it still makes your lender money.

It’s become so ridiculous that children actively avoid education and college today. Why bother? Who wants to start their adult life with a 70-80-100K albatross hanging around their neck?

What’s worse, you have students who have paid their loans for decades, without ever seeing them decrease.

Again, this is the result of decisions made by Congress in 1980, 1990, and 2000. The game changed, and nobody told you.

The Safety Net Illusion

Healthcare? A luxury.

Insurance? A booby-trapped maze of deductibles, denials, and out-of-network surprises—designed less to protect you than to confuse you into compliance.

In theory, you’re covered.

In practice, you’re paying premiums for the privilege of negotiating with a Kafkaesque billing department after you’ve already been sliced open and sedated.

One bad diagnosis and the GoFundMe goes up before the IV bag.

One ambulance ride and your financial future is measured in CPT codes and co-pay tiers.

This is what we call a safety net in the richest country on earth.

If you’ve ever had to ask a hospital if they accept your insurance before you asked if they can save your life, you already understand.

If you’ve ever chosen between chemo and bankruptcy, you already know.

If you’ve ever opened a bill for $142,938 and thought, “I guess I’ll just die,” you’ve lived through the collapse of the American social contract.

It didn’t break. It was redesigned.

What we have now is a system that tells you health is a personal responsibility—then makes damn sure you can’t afford to be personally responsible.

And it doesn’t end with healthcare.

Unemployment insurance is a cruel joke.

Disability assistance is a bureaucratic decathlon.

Childcare support is vanishing.

Rent assistance is chronically underfunded.

And the cost of navigating any of it? Your time, your dignity, and often your sanity.

The American safety net wasn’t built to catch you.

It was built to keep you just high enough off the ground that you don’t riot.

We are the only industrialized nation where getting sick is a financial event. We are the only country where “financial planning” means guessing which part of your life will collapse first: your job, your health, or your housing.

The wealthiest country in the world runs on bake sales to treat cancer.

And if that doesn’t make you furious, you haven’t looked hard enough.

What Replaced It

The system you were trained to succeed in is gone.
But something else has taken its place.

It doesn’t look like a system because it wasn’t designed for you. It wasn’t built to promote upward mobility or reward effort. It was built to extract, to stratify, and to confuse. And once you see it clearly, you can’t unsee it.

Here’s what replaced the old financial order:

Velocity Replaced Stability

In the old world, stability was the goal. Long-term employment, homeownership, compounding savings—that was success.

Now? Stability is for suckers. The economy rewards motion: flipping assets, houses, and attention spans. If you’re not moving, you’re losing.

Fast money outperforms slow diligence. Volatility is a feature, not a bug.
And the moment you try to hold still—build a nest egg, settle down, retire—you become a target.

Capital Replaced Competence

It used to be: work hard, learn the ropes, move up.

Now? The game is access.

Your degree doesn’t matter if someone else has capital and you don’t.

Your resume doesn’t matter if the algorithm flags you as too old, too expensive, too risky.

Competence still counts—but only if you already have leverage.

Otherwise, you’re the product. You’re the margin. You’re the yield.

Loyalty Replaced Merit

The old ideal was meritocracy. The new reality is patronage.

Success depends on whose platform you’re on, who retweets you, who vouches for you in the algorithm.

Jobs go to insiders. Contracts go to cronies. Promotions go to the people who say yes fastest and question least. This isn’t just true in politics. It’s true in tech, media, finance—even medicine and academia.

Loyalty gets rewarded. Independence gets punished.

And truth? Truth is whatever your faction can defend louder, longer, and more virally than anyone else.

Again, this isn’t just in politics, it’s now everywhere.

Narrative Replaced Reality

We used to argue over opinions. Now we argue over what the facts are.

Data no longer settles debates—it’s just another tool in the toolkit of persuasion.
What matters isn’t what’s real. It’s what’s believable. And believability is driven by repetition, tribal alignment, and emotional velocity.

So if you feel like nothing makes sense anymore, it’s because you’re trying to use logic in a world governed by narrative warfare.

And that’s not your fault.

It’s the new architecture.

You’re Not Crazy. You’re Awake.

If this feels disorienting, it should.

You were told you were playing a game of discipline, savings, and upward mobility.

Instead, you woke up in a rigged casino with shifting rules, a dealer on payroll, and a fire slowly spreading through the walls.

And yet—you kept playing. Because what else were you supposed to do?

The mortgage broker told you it was normal.

The retirement advisor said just ride it out.

The HR department said "growth opportunity."

The economist said "soft landing."

The President said "greatest economy in history."

So you kept showing up. Paying in. Believing. Hoping.

And now you’re watching it fall apart in real time.

That sense of dread you’ve been carrying? That pit in your stomach when you read the news, look at your bank account, or think about the next ten years?

It’s not anxiety. It’s recognition.

You’re not imagining this. You’re not overreacting. You’re just seeing it clearly, maybe for the first time.

And that clarity, painful as it is, is a gift.

Because once you know the game is broken, you can stop blaming yourself for losing. And you can start asking a better question:

If the old system is dead, how do I survive the new one?

Now, finally, we’re asking the right questions.

New Rules for a Post-Extraction Life

If the old system is dead and the new one is built to drain you dry, how will you survive?

You start by changing the frame.

The goal is no longer comfort. It’s sovereignty.

The metric is no longer wealth. It’s resilience.

You’re not trying to win the game. You’re trying to get off the board.

Here are the new rules:

1. Build for Portability, Not Permanence

The 30-year mortgage, the corner office, the hometown dream—those were traps disguised as milestones. The future belongs to the mobile, the light, the option-rich.

That doesn’t mean running. It means designing a life that can adapt when the rules change. Again.

As a political advisor, I was taught one rule, and it’s an important one: the most important thing you can do as a senior executive is to preserve flexibility. You want options. You want to be able to navigate. Why? Because you can’t always anticipate what’s coming.

Permanent lockouts have exceptionally high opportunity costs. Preserve flexibility, be nimble, and be agile. Create as many options as possible, and have more than one plan.

2. Stop Playing Prestige Games

No one is coming to reward your loyalty, degree, or tenure. The institutions are in collapse.

Instead of status, pursue utility.

Don’t chase job titles, follower counts, or applause from institutions that are hemorrhaging credibility. Learn skills that solve real problems for real people.

• Learn to build a website, not just manage a brand.

• Learn how to sell, not just how to network.

• Learn to repair, code, write, barter, farm, negotiate—anything that creates value without permission.

Because when the system stutters, status doesn’t feed you. Utility does.

Instead of titles, build tools.

You don’t need to be “Chief Strategy Officer of Content Synergy” to be dangerous.
What you need is something you can deploy at will:

• A newsletter that makes you money while you sleep (like on Substack)

• A script that automates your work.

• A product, a framework, a methodology—something that lives beyond you and scales without approval.

Tools outlast org charts.

Build things people can’t ignore—then you don’t need to beg to be included. Tools are potential long-term assets that you will own.

Instead of audience, build leverage.

An audience is attention. Leverage is power. Influencers get likes. Owners get equity. Here’s the shift:

• Don’t just write viral posts—turn them into paid publications, courses, IP.

• Don’t just take freelance work—license your method, hire subcontractors, scale yourself.

• Don’t just grow a list—build a pipeline, a platform, a system that compounds.

An audience is a flash. Leverage is a fuse.

In a world where one-to-one isn’t enough, leverage is the only real game to play.

3. Own Something Real

Land. Skills. Relationships. Code. Gold. Intellectual property.

Whatever you can defend and rebuild from.

The extraction machine hates sovereignty.

Give it indigestion.

Some of this you can buy (gold, silver, and land). Some of this, you can create (any intellectual property work that is licensable.) The core idea is owning assets.

You can start right now, today. If your brain works, you can create intellectual property that could be licensed. I’m not saying that process would be easy. But you cannot use the excuse that you don’t have enough money. JK Rowling described herself as "poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless," and lived on government benefits while writing the first book, *Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.” Don’t excuse yourself from doing the same.

4. Decouple From Systems That Despise You

Your employer will not protect you.

Your government may not even acknowledge you.

Your bank would rather algorithmically flag you than fund you.

So stop outsourcing your future to systems that see you as a liability.

Start asking: How do I make this decision as if no one is coming to save me?

Again, that ties to ensuring you have options (see rule one.)

5. Learn to See Clearly, Even When It Hurts

This is your greatest asset.

Most people will deny what’s happening until the water’s over their head.

You already know.

You’ve already seen it.

Now act like it.

Because you’re not financially screwed forever.

You’re just done waiting to be rescued by a system designed to fail.

You are not powerless. You’re just waking up.

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If this hit you in the gut, don’t keep it to yourself.

Share it. Please.
On Reddit.
In group chats.
To your cousin who just pulled their 401(k).
To your friend who thinks they’re crazy for feeling like they did everything right and still lost.

Because they’re not crazy.

They’re awake.

And the more people who see this clearly, the fewer get crushed pretending everything is fine.

I made this post free because I think it’s that important.