How America works
What it means to live in America is to self-actualize. To become something you were not before, or that you wouldn’t be somewhere else, by working and striving and building and doing and dreaming.
This is the most optimistic value proposition you could ever hope to slap on a nation’s wall. Come here and do great work. Get rewarded. Be something.
It’s no accident that this country is the home of Silicon Valley, the realm of digital dreamers and doers. Or that it is the home of Harvard, MIT, Stanford, et al, arguably the absolute pinnacle of educational culture.
It’s also no accident that the US is the place where, for the last century, almost all world-changing technologies and ideas have been born. Because part of our mission statement is to make the world better by infusing new ideas into it.
America is literally the place where you turn dreams into reality.
Ah, but there’s a catch.
Another part of our mission statement is to get rich. The complete mission statement goes something like this: to use ideas to get rich, thereby self-actualizing. To improve the world, yes. To build things people want, yes. To make something of yourself, yes. But also to get rich.
If there’s no chance of getting rich, the value proposition kind of falls apart. Not because people don’t want to do good (they do), but because getting rich is the only way a culture of risk and progress can be sustained.
You could argue that America was once founded on the ideal of working hard. And I agree. But working hard does not make you into the best country on Earth. Ideas do. Big, big ideas. Big ideas that pay well. You can’t just “work ethic” your way into being the best at something — China has been trying and failing at that for 70 years.
Without the getting rich part, there is no incentive for people to continue moving to the city, or to start incredibly risky startups, or to spend years building something that utterly consumes their consciousness. Without the getting rich part, there is no Facebook. There is no Microsoft, or Apple, or Google. Because nobody is going to spend 20 years building an absurdly complex global empire and sitting before Congress and pushing up against the laws of human morality for $30 an hour. They’re only going to do that if their pay is more like $80,000 an hour.
For a less extreme example: imagine opening a restaurant. If, after two years of stress and misery and long hours and dealing with employee turnover, you find yourself only making $13 an hour after taxes, you simply are not going to keep doing it. You’re going to close the doors and go work in an office. Because that level of stress and responsibility is simply not worth $13 an hour. It’s worth more like $100 an hour. At minimum.
Even if people love what you’re doing, and the world needs it, sometimes the price just isn’t right. In order to keep your restaurant going, the sacrifices would no longer even make sense.
America’s position as a global superpower and tech leader relies on the very concept of getting rich. It’s necessary in order to reward people for continuing to push ideas and take risks. If you want your country to have the best ideas, you have to pay for them. You have to let some people make too much money.
In other words, inequality — extreme, extreme inequality — is baked right into the formula of what makes America America. You can’t strip out the inequality without also getting rid of our ability to innovate and drive and push and create. They’re the same thing.
How America doesn’t work
So the promise of the United States of America is self-actualization. It’s what we want. It’s what we’re told we should want, and what we should expect.
But it's not like there's a queue you can go stand in to get your actualization stub. They’re not just giving it away.
Because self-actualization is not a basic human right. If you're not putting in the work to be your best self and Make It™, you're missing out on all the benefits of living here.
And paying all the costs.
The problem with having a country founded on the ideal of self-actualization is that this leads most people to feel entitled to it. Put simply, most people want the best. The best careers, the best wages, the best marriages, the most interesting lives. But by definition most people can't have them. Otherwise they wouldn't be the best things.
Now you might say to me, “dude, you’re being way too hard on people. People don’t actually want the best all of the time. People are more realistic than that.”
Ok, let me ask you this: how many people do you know who will voluntarily take a middle-of-the-road option? In anything important? How many 5s do you know who will look in the mirror, admit it, and say “yea I’d like to just find me a 5 and settle down”? How many people do you know who don’t want to be making twice as much money 6 years from now, simply by sticking around? How many people do you know who buy off-brand smart phones?
My guess is, approximately none. We want the best because our culture tells us that we ought to. American culture changes our relationship with the mirror: every mirror in our home becomes a Snapchat filter telling us we’re better and more deserving than we actually are.
This has been a problem since World War II: after the war, the US (and much of the world) embarked upon an unbelievable (and unsustainable) period of prosperity. Everyone wanted the best life, and most people actually got it. But that wasn’t because most people were suddenly great at chasing the American Dream, or suddenly full of useful ideas. It was because there were systems and regulations in place that virtually guaranteed equality for most of the middle class.
Business was booming. Factories were being turned from military supply shops back into commercial shops for consumer goods. Corporate competition was fierce. People got higher wages and regular raises. Corporations started offering pensions and outstanding employee benefits packages to compete for the very best workers. Unions ensured a fair shake for the average American worker and his average American family.
And, importantly, you could literally make something of yourself simply by sticking around and showing loyalty to a company.
The growth of the hyper-competitive corporate world offered a middle-class life to almost anyone who wanted one. Whereas most forces in life tend to create inequality, the growth of Corporate America was a profoundly equalizing force. It drew people closer together economically, which is almost unheard of in anything resembling free markets.
But… that period is over. That kind of equality has never been seen before and may never be seen again. Because there is no recipe for it — it was an accident. It was an unforeseeable coalescing of factors that you couldn’t recreate if you wanted to.
But that era left a very specific cultural artifact in its wake: the expectation of equality and self-actualization.1 The American Dream is no longer just to live free from oppression, as it was in the beginning, but to have absolutely everything one’s neighbor has. And to have more, because that guy is an asshole and I’m smarter.
Our (now social media-driven) tendency to see what others have and want it for ourselves is a relic of the post-war era when almost everyone had the same life as everyone else. The suburbs are a relic of that era as well: everyone had the same house, because everyone could afford the same house.
At no other time in history have millions of people ever lived in the same house. That’s weird.
The reality we're faced with now is back to what I would consider to be more “normal”: more inequality, and huge gaps in outcomes driven by technology. The post-war era saw an economy driven by systematic changes to the way America was structured. Now we’re back to an economy driven mostly by technology.
It's unfortunate, but this is what normal actually is. Technology, and inequality.
Why? Why does it have to be that way? For two reasons. 1. Because most people aren't ambitious enough to create “the best” lives for themselves, or to take massive risks, and 2. Because technology does not equalize. It creates gaps and widens existing ones.
What this means is, without a naturally-occurring equalizing phenomenon to bring people together, they drift apart economically. The default state of America will always be that some people have way more than others.
Take today's obvious example: artificial intelligence. What is AI going to do for the average person? Absolutely nothing. What is it going to do for people who learn how to leverage it? It's going to give them advantages.
This is how all technology works. At least in the beginning.
It was the same with the internet. For the first 20 years, the internet didn't do anything for most people. It didn't help them make more money, it didn't help them have better relationships or better lifestyles or get promoted... it was just kind of a neat toy to play with.
Some people, on the other hand, got rich from the early internet. Because they had ideas about it and took risks with it.
Don't let people tell you that technology levels the playing field. It doesn't. It creates advantages only for the ambitious, or for those who can afford to pay the ambitious. Only for those who are willing to do the greatest work. In America specifically, that means those who are willing to take the biggest risks with it (and thereby, by definition, acquire the biggest rewards).
Technology is just one more example of how life in general works: it magnifies the force of inequality. To those who have everything, more will be given. To those who have nothing, more student loans.
Where we are now
Where we are now is basically more of those previous two sentences. Inequality has sharply risen. Because here’s the thing: we have doubled and doubled and doubled down on our mission to be the greatest technological superpower on earth. In exchange for that, we have allowed all of our systems other than the business of making money to become completely corrupted and disfigured.
The cost of being an average American has become almost, but not quite, completely unaffordable. Nonsensical.
The average 25-year old now, even with a college degree and middle-class parents, might never be able to afford a 4-bedroom home. Ever. Because housing prices just will not stop going up.
Student loans are the same thing as indentured servitude — signing up 18-years-olds, who know nothing about life yet, to take out loans to get jobs they don’t understand and to spend the next 30 years paying the salaries of university bureaucrats.
We spend our lives paying for insurance that other people spend their lives telling us can’t be used to pay our bills.
And God help you if you have a medical emergency in this country. It’s hard to describe the medical bills in this country as anything other than a crime. They’re so profoundly unreasonable that one minor medical emergency can completely change the trajectory of your life. Not even physically. Financially.
So, to recap:
The benefit of living in the United States is that you can get rich more easily than anywhere else.
The cost is that everyone else pays for it.
It’s not that wealth is a zero-sum game. Because it really isn’t. You don’t have to get poor, directly, for someone else to get rich. Good technology makes everyone richer. The problem is cultural: if you focus your country on making money, all of the other institutions turn to shit and cost average people more money. You can’t have everything.
If you're playing the game to be successful and rich, then you are accepting this fundamental trade; you're making the most of living here.
But if you're not, then you're just sitting around working jobs that don't matter, paying for insurance that doesn't make any sense, paying for college loans that don't make any sense, paying for health care that doesn't make any sense, and participating in a helpless consumer culture that doesn't make any sense.
All in all, for the average person, living in America is a pretty bad deal. At least right now it is. It used to be a good deal and it has become a bad one.
People still get indignant and judgmental when I say I don't plan to live here forever, or that it's definitely not the greatest country on Earth. “How dare you not appreciate the gift of living here.” No partner, I do appreciate it. I’m trying to do useful things and touch people’s lives so that I can maybe one day have more resources than I need. I’m trying to get rich so I don't have to play this game anymore at all. Furthermore, I’m trying to make money so that I can do useful things with it. This game doesn’t have to be purely psychopathic — it can also be optimistic and giving.
And if I wasn't playing this game, I would not want to live here now. Because economically it doesn't even make sense anymore.
Now something else you might say is, “no, you’re just weak and you’re giving up — we can fix this system to make it more equal for those without the biggest ideas.” Or you might say, “Those ideas aren’t all that important anyway. In the grand scheme of things, are Instagram or Snapchat or Airbnb really that important?”
No. No they’re not. I agree with you. People should not be rewarded this largely, for anything ever. I agree. And I don’t care that much about ideas in the first place.
But trying to fix America at this point is the same thing as trying to tell a person to be someone else. You’re better off just finding someone else.
Which brings me to the original reason I started writing this piece: if you don’t like this system, you’re better off just moving to a different country. If you don’t like the culture of New York, you move to LA. You don’t try to fix New York.
And it’s never been easier to move.
Economically speaking, there are better options. They just don't come with as much possibility of getting rich or having “status.”
But not everyone cares about that. And not everyone should.
This piece started off as more of a rant — as much writing does — about how much America sucks and how I’d rather live somewhere with a better culture. Because, culturally, America doesn’t even line up with my values. And I’m fine saying that out loud. Just because I happened to be born here doesn’t mean I have to fit in here.
But as I fleshed this out, I stopped ranting and tried to tell a better story and be more reasonable. Because I want desperately to self-actualize into a reasonable person.
It is also possible that the structure of America will someday soon shift back towards the individual. The pendulum will swing back this-a-way. After all, most things in life tend to move in cycles over and over.
People these days are having fewer kids, which means there may be more demand for our kids, professionally, than there was for us. Maybe someday soon our economy will pay more for good workers, and our sons and daughters will have a better jobs market and better homes and a better chance at self-actualization with fewer of the trade-offs.
It’s possible. Although it’s hard to say, because that force conflicts directly with the structural risk-taking and inequality-inducing nature of the country.
So when we, as individuals, are faced with a thing in life, there are a few paths we can take. We can play along, we can change it, we can accept it, we can leave it, or we can change our expectations. I don’t think America is changing anytime soon, because this country’s very fabric is about ideas and wealth. Therefore we, as individuals, seem to have four choices.
Play the “getting rich” game;
Redefine self-actualization to be about who we are, not what we have — and then continue living here unbothered;
Move to somewhere where culture is about people and time spent, instead of status and material and progress (a couple of ideas: Italy and Denmark)2; or
Wait for our economy to cycle back to a period of empowerment for the average person.
It may happen. Maybe this is just a cyclical period of particularly ruthless capitalism. Things do tend to move in cycles.
And if that happens, maybe we can all enjoy a period of prosperity and then start the whole thing over.
Borrow some water and spend 30 years paying for it.
JDR
“We work to become, not to acquire.” - Elbert Hubbard
Another artifact of the post-World War II era: parents saying things like “pursuing a career in art/creativity is risky.” People got so used to the job security, advancement, seniority, pensions, and other structures provided by the corporate world, that they thought abandoning it was foolish.
These days, you have more tools at your disposal to succeed as an artist than you do as a middle manager or an office worker. Things have changed. You still have to be good at art, of course, but the corporate world no longer offers most of the benefits that once made it the safer alternative. There is no career anymore that isn’t risky.
I have a strong desire to just find somewhere in the US to live where people live simple lives. Where people put their phones down for entire evenings, knock on each other’s doors on their ways home from work to chat and have a random glass of wine, and eat out of gardens. I think a lot of people want this. But it’s a catch-22: in order to find people like this, there have to already be people like this to be found. And nobody wants to be the first to make the move. Almost nobody, despite how much we all want to, can seem to start living this way again. Which is why the idea of leaving America has become more appealing. Because people in parts of Europe, for instance, still do live this way.
I walk away from every single one of your notes thinking "this guy makes nothing but sense.” Thumb up.
Outstanding post! So much truth in what you say and the reason socialism doesn’t work.