I’ve been involved in many conversations1 of late about the cluster of arrangements that the twentieth century treated as the shape of normal adult life, and how many of them are quietly turning out to have been long-term illusions.2

Mark Fisher’s hauntology work is one of the more popular treatments of why this feels the way it does from the inside, the sense of futures that were promised and then withdrawn, lingering as a kind of cultural background radiation.3 Fisher, borrowing the phrase from Franco “Bifo” Berardi, called it the slow cancellation of the future, and located its onset in the cultural expectations “fabricated during the long period of modern civilization, reaching a peak after the Second World War.”

Several recent pieces, including Jasmine Sun’s expansion notes on her Times essay on AI and the labor question, have been adding fresh material to that thread. The throwaway line I want to develop here is one I left in response to a detail in hers, but the thinking was already running.

"Ah, one of many 20th century ‘dreams’ shown to be long term illusions. "

The dream in question is not “living with your parents is bad” or “career stability was a lie.” The dream is The Bundle. For maybe sixty years across (parts of) the industrialized world, a particular bundle was treated as the shape of normal adult life: you would leave the household you grew up in, find paid work outside the home, that work would pay enough to form a new household, the household would form on a roughly predictable schedule, the work would last long enough to fund retirement, and the institutions around all of this (employers, banks, schools, neighborhoods) would hold steady enough to make the sequence legible to the person inside it.

None of those elements is unreasonable on its own. The dream was that they came as a package, and that the package was durable. The package was the thing.

It is worth being precise about one part of this, because it is where most of the lived damage actually sits. The Bundle was not merely available; it was sold as permanent. The people who came of age inside the twentieth-century arrangement were taught, in the explicit curriculum of schools and the implicit curriculum of everything else, that The Bundle was the future and would continue to be the future.4

Go to college, the deal said, and the wage premium will pay for the cost of going. Work hard, and productivity gains will accrue to your compensation. Buy a house when you can, and the asset will appreciate. The trend lines will hold. The infrastructure will hold. The energy will hold. You can plan a life around the assumption that the world your parents lived in is the world you will live in, plus some upgrades.

This is what I mean, in shorthand, when I talk about this moment catching folks generationally underprepared: not that the people in it lacked skills, but that they were specifically developed to expect a future that did not arrive, in a register that made the non-arrival feel like personal failure rather than legible structural change.

The wage-productivity gap is one form of this. According to the Economic Policy Institute’s ongoing analysis, from the end of the Second World War until 1979 productivity and typical worker pay grew in lockstep; since 1979, productivity has grown roughly 2.7 times as much as the compensation of the typical worker. That gap is almost half a century old now and was once treated as a temporary anomaly by people who expected the post-war pattern to reassert itself. It did not reassert itself. College costs are another form.

Since 1980, the BLS index for college tuition and fees has risen roughly 1,200% while the overall CPI has risen 236%, a multi-decade compounding gap, financed almost entirely on the assumption that the wage premium of a degree would justify the price. The premium is not reliably there for the cohort paying it, and the financing structure still assumes it is. The cycles of resource panic are another form.

The 2000s carried genuine fear that the United States was past peak oil, until shale and horizontal drilling reversed the curve and U.S. production rose past its 1970 high; then hydrofracking was treated as either civilizational salvation or environmental catastrophe depending on the year, with the framing flipping every few years.5

These are not failures of forecasting, necessarily. They are signs of how unstable the underlying conditions actually were, and how much weight was being put on the assumption that the trend lines would hold.

What we are watching, in slow motion — or, in Douglas Rushkoff’s Present Shock sense, far too rapidly to process at all — is the package coming apart. Not in a single dramatic failure but in the quiet way packages come apart: each component still exists, but they no longer arrive together, in that order, on that schedule, for the people who were told to expect them.

Full-time children, the Chinese phenomenon Jasmine writes about, is one shape this takes. So is the gig economy. So is the rise of one-person companies. So is the trend of household formation slipping later by years, then decades. So is the particular flavor of professional drift that people in their thirties describe when they say they don’t know what they are doing anymore.

The reason to call these illusions rather than failures is that The Bundle was never a law of nature. It was the surface impression of a specific set of post-war conditions: cheap energy, demographic expansion, a particular configuration of capital and labor, an unusual degree of institutional stability, and a set of expectations that ran on the assumption that all of the above would continue compounding. The conditions changed. The Bundle dissolved. The expectations are still installed in most of us, which is part of what makes the dissolution disorienting rather than legible.

Even the trends that did hold for decades are starting to show their conditions. Moore’s Law is the cleanest example. The transistor count doubling every couple of years has, in modified form, held for almost sixty years, and the popular version of it — that computing gets cheaper forever — became one of the load-bearing assumptions of the late twentieth century.

Memory prices in 2026 are the counter-text. DRAM contract prices roughly doubled in the first quarter of this year, driven by AI infrastructure demand. Micron is exiting the consumer side of its memory business to serve hyperscaler customers; its CFO has said the company is “sold out for 2026” with new fabs not coming online until 2027 and 2028. IDC describes the situation as “the end of an era of cheap, abundant memory and storage.”

The popular trend held for as long as the conditions held, and a single large new demand source — AI infrastructure — was enough to reverse it inside a few quarters. The pattern was real. The pattern was also conditional. The conditions were doing more of the work than most of us understood.

The same pattern is being made in present-tense planning, not just retrospectively in old assumptions. has a recent piece on the assumption — common in AI policy thinking outside Silicon Valley — that frontier-AI tokens will soon be abundant and broadly available, and that whole national strategies are being quietly built on top of that assumption. His argument is that the assumption is already breaking. The specifics of his case are about cybersecurity, compute, and U.S. government leverage; the structural move is the one I keep pointing at. A popular trend is being treated as a durable condition, and the people planning around it have not yet noticed how conditional the trend actually is.

There is real work to be done in noticing this clearly, separate from grieving it or celebrating it or shrugging at it.6 The grief response says the package should be restored. The celebration response says it was always confining and good riddance. The shrug response says nothing was ever guaranteed and you should have known. None of those responses helps you read what is actually happening, which is that a load-bearing arrangement is being replaced, in pieces, by something whose shape is not yet settled.

What is settling into place instead is partly visible in the symptoms: more relational economy, more informal work, more multi-generational household structures, more dependence on platforms for the connective tissue that used to come from employers or neighborhoods or extended family. Some of this is genuinely new. Some of it is older than The Bundle was. Multi-generational households were the norm for most of human history, before the post-war detached-house decades. The point is not whether the new shape is good or bad. The point is that it is real, it is forming whether we attend to it or not, and the people who will be best positioned in it are the ones who can read it clearly while it is still forming.

This is much of what I mean when I write about literacy in the body of work I’m developing. The arrangements we inherited were legible because they were stable enough to be named.7 The arrangements we are entering are illegible mostly because they have not stabilized yet, not because they are inherently obscure.8 The work of the next few years, for anyone trying to build inside them, is partly the work of seeing them sooner than the language for them arrives.

There are a lot of twentieth-century dreams. Most of them were dreams about how The Bundle was supposed to hold, and a few of them were dreams about how the trend lines would hold. The longer timeline is showing us, one piece at a time, that neither did.

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That line has lived in gaming culture for forty years. An old man in a cave hands you a sword. It’s not much, but it’s something. It’s an acknowledgment that what you’re about to face is real and difficult, and that someone who came before you cared enough to say so. And to put something in your hands before you walked out the door.

Another month passes, another conversation reinforces the sentiment: I don’t think we’ve done that. Not well enough.

The “Professors as Customer Service Associates” analogy (rather than stewards of learning) has stayed with me for weeks now. A colleague used it offhandedly, but it landed hard, because it describes something I keep encountering across the survey of graduate programs and learning environments we’ve1 been looking at: an institutional posture oriented more toward satisfaction metrics than toward the actual, difficult work of cultivating understanding.

This isn’t about bashing professors2. Many are doing extraordinary work under deteriorating conditions. But the structural incentives have shifted, and the results are showing. According to the Lumina Foundation-Gallup State of Higher Education study, only 35% of Americans now say a college education is “very important”, which is a dramatic slide from 70% just over a decade ago. Among those who lack confidence in higher education, a recurring reason is that institutions aren’t teaching the right things for the world students are actually entering.

Meanwhile, 87% of Gen Z workers report feeling unprepared to succeed in the workforce, citing limited guidance, unclear pathways from school to career, and uncertainty about which skills and credentials actually matter. This is not a marginal finding. That is a generational signal.

There are entirely different arenas and qualities of work and learning across these programs and spaces. Folks are looking for real teaching and real learning, and the migration away from conventional academia — even toward TikToks and shorts — makes a certain kind of sense beyond just the soundbite orientation. For a true seeker of knowledge, it’s “water, water everywhere,” but most of the readily available, institutionalized “drinking glasses” offer the appearance of cultivation, promise some kind of certification, yet land as hollow.

So here we are on Substack (and the increasingly commodified “digital third spaces” of social media) wandering3 in and out of collectives who care, and who dare: to auto-didactically scour the internet, employ critical thinking, and glue-stick-together something like a mosaic of understanding. (Gluestick, as in, something partially adequate but relatively rudimentary for the real work.)

It’s Ok to Say It

I want to name what I think is actually happening, because I think younger generations already know it in their bones even if nobody in authority has said it plainly to them.

The training and preparation you received was not adequate for the moment you’ve inherited. And that was true before GPT, before LLMs went mainstream, before the last five years of technological acceleration made it impossible to ignore.

The problems were already there. Universities structured around disciplinary silos that fragment knowledge precisely when the world’s challenges demand integration. A job market increasingly disconnected from the credentials institutions sell: only 11% of business leaders reported strong agreement that graduating students have the skills their businesses need. An epidemic of loneliness that the U.S. Surgeon General declared a public health crisis in 2023, noting that roughly half of American adults were already experiencing it before the pandemic. A demographic enrollment cliff now arriving on schedule, exposing how many institutions were running on momentum rather than mission.

The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report projects a net 78 million new roles by 2030, even as 22% of current jobs undergo structural change, and 63% of employers cite skills gaps as their primary barrier. Entry-level job postings have declined 29% year-over-year. Gen Z is adapting; they’re resourceful, they’re building side hustles, they’re self-educating. But they shouldn’t have to be doing this much of the orienting on their own.

This wasn’t sprung on us. We watched these trends compound over decades.

Being negative vs. being sober

“…pessimism too will turn out to be one more cultural luxury that we shall have to dispense with in order to survive in these hard times.” - Alasdair MacIntyre

I know there’s an instinct to hear this as blatant negativity, or as a dismissal of the good and hard work many people are doing. I don’t mean it that way. I’m around many projects and groups working diligently to address these problems meaningfully. I’m working on them myself. And I’ve written about the need for community, leadership, and accompaniment in this kind of moment: the messy, honest, co-regulatory work of figuring things out alongside others whose worldviews are also shifting.

But I think it’s important to periodically just say it4: we are underprepared. What we have at the ready is, by and large, inadequate relative to the scope of the concerns younger generations are now facing. The tools, the institutions, the frameworks, the mentorship pipelines — they were built for a world that no longer exists, and we have not rebuilt them fast enough.

It’s somewhat uncouth to try to normalize this. People will hear defeatism, or deny the good work of many. But I’ll say it again here, because I think it deserves acknowledgement, and because I think younger folks deserve to hear it from someone with enough experience to say it without hedging:

You were given a difficult hand. The world you walked into was not well-prepared for you, and you were not well-prepared for it. That’s not your fault. It’s a collective failure of imagination, investment, and institutional will. And some of us see it clearly.

Building a community for those interested in working on what goes in that third frame. If you’re interested in more updates, consider following along on:

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Creating space for informed agency + constructive optimism

Many in the futures space, the big idea space, the tech space, are clinging to certain conclusions, as speaking with certainty is the intra-domain politically correct approach, or because there are simply poorly articulated alternative views that don’t descend to extreme positivity or negativity.

I’m less interested in those poles, or the reduced dimensionally of the problem space at large. What I’m interested in is what an honest accounting sounds like, and what it makes possible.

Because here’s the thing about the old man in the cave: the sword isn’t the point. The point is the acknowledgment. It’s dangerous to go alone. Someone saw the terrain, named the difficulty, and offered what they had. That act of honesty is itself a kind of preparation. Or more so, an earnest effort at continuity, shared responsibility, and acknowledgement of trans-generational skin in the game5.

If we can do more of that — name what we failed to build, name what the moment actually requires, and then get serious about building it together — then the acknowledgment becomes a foundation rather than a eulogy.

There’s a longer piece coming on what I’m calling “The Right to Be Unimpressed”; a deeper look at how much of what’s available genuinely isn’t meeting the demands of the moment, and what it would take to build things that do. For now, consider this a periodic reminder: some of us see it, some of us are saying it, and some of us are ready to act on it.

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