I see a pattern in lots of seemingly independent sources in the West.

People increasingly perceive that things are not working out for them. The people who work hard doing an honest job can’t even make ends meet, let alone buy a home or feel good about finances. The people who went to college like they were told end up with debt and are either unemployable or end up working low-paying jobs that are significantly beneath what they expected to be working with their degree. People increasingly understand that they can’t retire because their retirement fund is basically guaranteeing them poverty if they do. Women who believed in feminism find out that they are undesirable and ruined after their youth has been consumed whoring around and chasing irrelevant “careers”. Men are asking themselves why the hell are we doing all this for? People who have been getting in debt and spending the money they don’t have in order to keep pretences that they are doing well, like they were told good consumers should do in order to drive the machine of capitalism, find out that they are financially distressed and without hope on the horizon. People increasingly invest in high-risk schemes trying to multiply their insufficient funds because they are desperate.

The emotional undercurrent of this is “that’s not what I signed up for”; basically, the deal was that they get to be rich and powerful, above all those “third world” people. The deal was that they get to ironically complain about having “first world problems” because all the money they have is so hard to keep track of, or parking for all their cars being expensive in that high-rent neighbourhood they live in. We, who live in countries that are not America and not “the West” get to be poor and we are supposed to try hard to get a visa to get to America and try to join their privileged club. They get to earn more than our doctors and lawyers by just pumping gas and working at the cash register in America. They get to have the greatest ego trip and they get to feel successful, powerful and in a position to teach the rest of the world how to exist properly. They weren’t supposed to have a favela of homeless people in their rich California, with human excrement mixed with drug needles on the sidewalks; they weren’t supposed to have fucked up lives with nothing to show for and no hopes outsides of drugs, alcohol and suicide. Sacrifice, failure and suffering was for other people. This is not what they signed up for. Buddha taught that suffering is inherent in this place because he was a loser living in a third world shithole; he should have been born in America, then he would have said otherwise.

The thing is, you can make almost everything seem like a good idea for a short period of time. All kinds of questionable financial schemes, for instance having money that’s based on debt and not gold, look like a great idea, until the bill arrives. People knew the current economic model was unsustainable in the long run when it was originally introduced, and Keynes himself answered “in the long run, we’re all dead”.

Yes, in the long run you’re all dead. You spent ten trillion times more than you’re collectively worth, and now you’re going to die on a pile of manure. The Western civilisation introduced several dangerous experiments – atheism, egalitarianism, republic, democracy, communism, feminism, fiat money and so on, and some ended in disaster sooner than others, but apparently it took time for the entire thing to unravel, and now the bill is due. Truly, how much of this progressivism had produced true and legitimate progress, something worth keeping and building on? Most of it all was some ego-trip or another, for the sake of hunting for mirages in the world and calling it emancipation. This might not be what they signed up for, but what they signed up for will have destitution, ruin, hopelessness and humiliation as the ultimate result.