Transcription
So, I've been feeling this quiet shift recently. It's kind of subtle, and I think that most people, they won't actually name it, but I can sense it. Okay. And there is this feeling that we are all becoming more and more dependent on work than ever before. You know, it's sort of like the walls are sort of slowly closing in on us. You know, like a cage, and I'm going to come back to that word, but the cage, it's just getting smaller and smaller. And I don't think it's very dramatic. Like, it's, I'm not talking about chains or force. It's just this constant pressure, you know, like it's almost consistent enough to feel like a choice. And that's what scares me about it, you know, because I think that the price of existing in this world is working. And, you know, I get it. Work is natural. Building something, solving something, contributing something. I don't hate work. I really don't. But I hate this part: the conditions of it, and the fact that I spend the majority of my waking life inside a structure I didn't design. I didn't choose. And I can't change it, like, in a meaningful way at least, because it's built by other people, not by a god, not by some natural law of physics, but by people. People who decided a long time ago that 40 hours a week is what my time is worth. People who decided that the price of living is just barely enough to make it to the next month. And sometimes I feel like a big cat in a small cage, you know? I can't run. I can't go left. I can't go right. And the walls are always there, you know? And the cage, it just wasn't built for me. Like, some people are fine living in this cage, but it's just not for me. You know, the problem with this cage is that it's sort of measured just large enough that I can't claim that I'm truly trapped. You know what I mean? Like, it's just small enough that I can never fully move. And that's what I want to talk about today. Not the work, the cage. Oh, and if any of this resonates, consider subscribing. More videos like this are coming.
So, I want to start with something that I noticed. People don't seem to believe in their jobs anymore. Like, nobody I know actually believes in their job. And that makes me think that something has shifted. It's not just, you know, individual dissatisfaction. I think it's something much bigger, something collective. Now, a few years ago, there was this phrase going around, "quiet quitting." I made videos about it. It became this media moment, something to debate on morning television. But underneath that discourse, there was something real. Millions of people had recognized this feeling: "I will do exactly what is required of me. Nothing more. I will stop pouring myself into something that doesn't pour back, right?" And I recognize that feeling. And what strikes me is that I don't think it was laziness. It was actually, it felt more like grief, you know, a quiet acknowledgement. The implicit deal, you know, "work hard, be loyal, the company will look after you," had sort of quietly expired. You know, nobody officially announced it. Like, historically, the relationship between people and their employers wasn't always this coldly transactional. And I don't want to be one of those people who romanticizes the past. You know, conditions were often, at least materially, far worse. But there was a different spirit in some eras. Something that at least resembled some kind of mutual obligation. What I see now, it just feels very different. Now, I've watched companies, large ones, profitable ones, lay off thousands of people overnight. Not because those people failed, not because the company was struggling, but to move a number up, to make shareholders who will never meet those workers, who will never know their names, marginally happier with a quarterly result. The workers go home, the executives get their bonuses, the stock price picks up, the world moves on, and then it happens again. And, you know, we sort of keep calling it "weather," you know? And I think people are starting to internalize this, not always in the most articulate way, but somewhere below what most people can name, in the Sunday evening dread, in the way energy drops when you walk through the door, the workforce has absorbed the information: "You're not a person here. You're a resource." And once you feel that, not an idea, but like, in your body, it's very hard to unfeel it, you know? People are leaving, job hopping has increased. The anti-work movement, even in its more exaggerated forms, is a symptom of something real. People are opting out where they can, withdrawing where they can't, struggling to explain even to themselves why everything feels sort of slightly hollow. And I spent time doing that, jumping myself as a consultant, looking for a good company, you know, the one that would be different. And I found these different work cultures, different slogans on the walls, different words for the same structures. The logic underneath never changes. You know, "You're useful to us while you're useful to us. That's not personal. That's just how it runs."
So, here's where I want to go a bit deeper because I think that there is something underneath the individual company, underneath the specific bad employer or toxic workplace. It's, it's something structural in society, as I've noticed. So, here's an example. A few months ago, I had this consulting assignment as a credit card fraud investigator. And that was some job. And the strangest part, it wasn't the fraud of, you know, credit card companies. It was what I saw underneath it. How many people live on credit, not just customers, but people who work, their colleagues, people with steady jobs financing their lives month-to-month on a card. And I asked one of them why, and she sort of paused and then she said, "To survive." Now, when she said that, I just froze, you know? I mean, not to get ahead, not to buy something nice, but to survive, you know? Just to keep going until next month arrives. And I thought, you know, when you think about it, isn't that what everyone is doing anyway without the credit card? Like, not we're not thriving. We're just surviving every month. You know, we're running a loop where this month's salary covers last month's life. And I couldn't shake that. And, you know, here's the thing that makes everything just worse. I used to study macroeconomics at the university. And one thing that I learned that genuinely disturbed me, right, is that the system is actually designed so that doing nothing slowly makes you poor. Now, let me explain. So, you have these central banks, right? The European Central Bank, the Federal Reserve. They target around 2% inflation on purpose, not because things went wrong. Because a stable, slowly inflating economy keeps people spending, keeps money moving, keeps the machine running. And what that means in practice is that your savings lose value over time. Prices rise even when nothing breaks. And just hoarding money, just sitting on it, which is what most people with very little have to do, quietly costs you. This is not some conspiracy theory. This is just called, I think it's called monetary policy, you know? And it's not hidden, or rather, it is hidden, but it's hidden in plain sight. It's discussed in board meetings and central bank reports. You know, it's sort of like a pot that needs to be stirred so the bottom doesn't burn. But nobody in those meetings asks, "Who is at the bottom of the pot?" And, you know, throughout my lifetime, just looking at the historical events, it's like crisis after crisis, bank collapses, inflation spikes, recessions. The question of who gets protected and who absorbs the cost resolves the same way every single time: the little people deal with it. Not with anger, but more with a kind of tired recognition.
So, no wonder that people reach for exits. You know, you have the FIRE movement, which stands for Financial Independence, Retire Early. You can stop accumulating things you don't need, and you can invest aggressively. You can leave the workforce earlier than expected. And there is something about the FIRE movement, in its intention, that I respect a lot. But I do hold a bit of a contradiction with it. You see, if your frustration is with companies, with the way they treat people as expandable, then investing in those same companies as the route to your freedom is a kind of a strange response. Now, don't get me wrong, I invest. Me and my wife, we invest. It's, but it's honestly, it's more like protection against inflation than any ideological statement. So, um, there is this blog that I read from time to time. There is this Canadian couple who vlog about sort of radical frugality. No smartphones, even. Everything they earn, they put into dividend stocks. And their reasoning is they wanted to sort of bleed the companies out, take dividends, give nothing back. And I understood the spirit of it. I really did. But that's not really how it works. You see, the people who gain the most when prices rise are still the largest shareholders. And you can participate in the machine and maybe do well, but you're still inside the machine. So, I don't know about that. Now, something that often comes up is Bitcoin. I get a lot of comments on my videos about Bitcoin. "Bitcoin will save everyone." It comes up constantly. And, you know, maybe I genuinely don't know where it ends. I used to play around with crypto. I made a lot of money from it, but I, I don't do it anymore because it feels honestly like a casino. And then people go like, "Oh, but Bitcoin is different." Okay, Bitcoin is different. Bitcoin is special. Okay, it's almost at a religious point right now. But the problem with Bitcoin is that the biggest holders are now the institutions, you know? And so the dynamics of who benefits most are not so different from other assets, you know, like money or gold or stocks. And here's the part that nobody really seems to want to say out loud: the system doesn't require your agreement. It just requires your participation. And participation is very hard to avoid when the alternative is, well, not eating. And that's the mechanism, right? That's the quiet part of the, the whole equation. You don't have to believe in it. You don't have to respect it. You don't even have to like it. You just have to keep showing up. And then there is the more subtle layer, right? Even when you're inside it working, running the loop, most of what you do is on autopilot. Most of your spending is shaped by things outside you. You know, that ad of a product that makes you feel like this is what your life needs, you know? Or the social norm that says that someone in your situation owns certain things. You know, it's sort of this inherited idea of what a good life looks like that you've absorbed before you were old enough to question it. You know, most of our lives, they run on influences that we didn't choose and we never really examined. And if that's true, and I think it mostly is, then the question isn't just what system you're in. It's how much of the life you're living inside is actually yours.
So, I want to be a bit careful here because I've watched enough content in this space to know how easily this part becomes a lecture, you know? How quickly "here's what I've noticed" becomes "here's what you should do." I don't want to go there. Okay. I think it's up to every one of us to decide what we want to do with our lives. What I can do here, though, is I can say what I actually changed for me, concretely, like, from the inside. So, a couple of years ago, I started to write every evening. I have this little journal, and I like to write notes on my computer. And it's become this sort of running conversation with whatever is happening in my life. Whatever is bothering me, what I'm afraid of, what I want versus what I don't want, versus what I thought I was supposed to want. And it sounds kind of small because, well, it is. But it also became one of the most clarifying things I've ever done because when I write, I catch things that I wouldn't otherwise notice. I noticed, for example, that I have zero desire to build something big. You know, a company with people working for me, a team, a brand, because every piece of business content that I've ever consumed online was telling me to scale. You know, the ambition meant growth, and I had sort of absorbed it without questioning it. But then I started to write about it, and I looked at it, and then I read good books about it, especially this one book, "Company of One," which I've mentioned so many times on this channel. And I just simply realized that I just don't believe it, not even slightly. I want to do everything myself. So, for those of you who are new here, I started a company last year, my own business, and I'm doing everything myself. And I want to do everything myself. Not because I'm better at it than someone else would be. Certainly when it comes to accounting, if I suck at doing accounting, but I do it anyway, okay? And I do it because it gives me full control. My business is me. There is almost no difference between me and my business. It's the same thing. And that's a very deliberate choice, and I don't apologize for it. Every week, I get these emails from different agencies that offer to edit my videos or manage my thumbnails or optimize my channel in some way. And I decline every single time. Not because I don't think they won't do it in a good way, but because those things are the work I want to do. I want to do the editing. I want to do the thumbnails and the writing. That's not the overhead before the important stuff. That is the important stuff. And, you know, I don't take on sponsors either. I might at some point, but the way I feel about it now is AdSense is very unreliable. You know, it's the money that you'd get from YouTube for showing ads before a video. And the numbers most people assume about, you know, YouTube revenue, I think it's probably a lot higher than reality. So, I get why a lot of YouTubers take on sponsors. It's the obvious solution. The problem for me is, if I'm making content about seeing past what's being sold to you, about being critical of the influences on your choices, and then I tell you about a product that will solve your problems because someone paid me to say so, I can't hold both of those things at once. So, I look for other ways, probably more slower ways, more honest ones. And recently, you're going to laugh, but recently I've been actually thinking about making a t-shirt. Yeah, I know how it sounds. And I actually used to mock this. Every influencer selling a t-shirt, it just feels like a cash grab, you know? Something with a logo and no soul behind it. But a few months ago, I was listening to this interview with Casey Neistat, this big YouTuber, in case you don't know. And he said he, he basically had the same instinct until he thought about his old Metallica t-shirt, the one that he wore as a kid. The shirt wasn't merchandise. That shirt meant something. It was a piece of identity, a signal to strangers about who you were and what you believed in. If you think about it, like, imagine you have two t-shirts. One says Nike, and one says your favorite musician in the world, someone whose work has genuinely changed how you see things. Which one holds more value? The faceless brand or the thing that lifted your soul? And that difference is huge between something made for profit and something made with intention. And I think that's what intentional living actually means, at least for me. Not like, you know, minimalism as a brand, not a productivity system, not a philosophy you adopt, but just a practice of asking, "Why am I doing this?" And then actually listening to what comes back. So, it's all about seeing an ad for what it is: a piece of engineering designed to make you feel incomplete, so you buy something to feel complete again. And I think that just by building things small and keeping them yours, rather than scaling towards some external definition of success, that's practice. And, you know, I'm just a person, you know? I fail at it all the time. Most weeks, even more than once, for sure. That's just me being honest with you. I'm not perfect. My father spent most of his life searching different jobs, different countries, a lot of mistakes. And for a long time, from the outside, it looks, it sort of looked like he was lost. But I don't think so anymore. You see, I, I think that everything he did in his life was finding his way. It was slowly, it was painful, through trial and a lot of error. But I believe that he got there in his own way, in his own time. He started living more intentionally, and I think that something shifted. And here's the thing, though: most people do this eventually. Most people reach a point in their life when they just stop running on autopilot and start questioning the whole frame of life, where they ask, "What am I actually doing with my life?" You know, the problem isn't that people don't get there. It's when. Because a lot of people get there very late, and most of the years are already spent. And I look at that, I look at my father's journey, and I think to myself, the question isn't whether you'll eventually figure this out, because most people do, in one form or another. The question is more, how much time passes first? You know, the, the price of existing in this world, it is working. That hasn't changed, and it's not going to change anytime soon. But there is a difference between a life running on someone else's logic, on autopilot, on inherited expectations, on influences you never choose and never examine. And a life that has at least stopped to ask the question, even if the answer is still sort of forming, you know? Even if you're still inside the thing that you're questioning. As always, thank you for listening. Do me a favor: tap that like button to show your support. Subscribe if you're interested in more content like this. Until next time, stay hungry, relentless, and strong in your journey of escaping wage slavery. Bye.
Oh, you're still here? Oh, that's right. It's the behind-the-scenes vlog. So, this part of the video is where I share more personal things. It's mostly for my subscribers, but if you're new here, you're more than welcome to stick around. So, things are generally good. It's nice to have the sun back here in Sweden. It's been a long stretch of dark and cold months, and, you know, I've lived here my entire life almost, and I've never really gotten used to it. So, in my previous video, "You Don't Need a Job to Make Money," I was actually very surprised by how well it performed or was received, however you want to call it, especially since it was very long and I skipped the usual B-roll and music. I wanted to keep it very simple, and it seemed like it worked. And at the same time, I also noticed something in the comment section. Some people were kind of disappointed that I didn't share some big hack for making money. But you see, that was exactly the point of the video. I was trying to show that making money outside the 9-to-5, it's not a practical problem. It's a mindset problem. Anyone can do it. You don't need special talent, and there is no secret formula you have to figure out first. You just have to start. And if you feel stuck at that stage, if you don't know where to begin, or if you want some guidance, I do offer mentorship on my Patreon. It's more of a direct way to talk to me, to ask questions, to get support while you're figuring things out. Oh, and by the way, on another note, my silver play button for reaching 100,000 subscribers is finally on its way, and it feels really good. And also, this channel got the verified check mark, which I'm honestly very relieved about because there are a lot of fake accounts out there pretending to be me, replying to your comments with things like, "Hey, join me on Telegram." Those are scams, obviously, and I spend a lot of time deleting those comments, and I'm setting up these filters to block certain words, but I can't catch everything. So, just be careful. If you see a reply from me, just check for that verification badge. If it's there, it's most likely me. Anyway, that's all I have for today. See you in the next one. Take care. Bye.