Peter Thiel recently did an interview with the Free Press about his 2020 email to Mark Zuckerberg. The title of the piece is “Capitalism isn’t Working for Young People”. He has benefited from capitalism more than almost anyone alive. If he admits something has failed, we need to pay attention to it. It echoes something I’ve heard everywhere this year: people feel like the system isn’t working for them anymore. Housing, student debt, AI, trust in institutions - all of it is converging into a very real sense that prosperity has gone missing.
So I spent 30 days on the road to see what prosperity looks like up close. DC, Berkeley, Baltimore, New Hampshire, New York, two cities in Florida, then Prague and Kilkenny, Ireland. The same theme surfaced: people don’t feel the prosperity that’s supposedly surrounding them. They feel the physical friction.
What became clear almost immediately is that the prosperity is real, it’s just not showing up in the places people actually live. It exists in balance sheets, in stock portfolios, in data centers behind chain-link fences. But in daily life like in commutes, in childcare costs, in housing, in safety, in community, people are feeling decay. I kept running into the same contradiction: a wealthy country where everything visible seems to be slowly breaking while everything invisible keeps getting richer.
That tension shows up everywhere, even in the way people talk about politics and culture. Thiel ties the broader culture war to economics - the rise of the groyper, angry young men, as detailed by Rod Dreher, is rooted in the economy. As Rob writes:
I asked one astute Zoomer what the Groypers actually wanted (meaning, what were their demands). He said, “They don’t have any. They just want to tear everything down.” […] The problems are mostly economic and material, in his view (and this is something echoed by other conversations). They don’t have good career prospects, they’ll probably never be able to buy a home, many are heavily indebted with student loans that they were advised by authorities to take out, and the idea that they are likely to marry and start families seems increasingly remote.
I’ve written about the economic situation facing young people before. It does seem like same cluster of things: housing costs and the American Dream, the way social media turns everyone into a comparison engine, and the tech industry’s constant threat that you’re about to be replaced by an AI robot cyborg. Demographic shifts too - Americans aged 70 and older own almost 40% of all stocks in the US and those 55 and older own over half of all homes. It’s invisible prosperity and visible decay.
If you’re making decent money but your boss keeps hinting that AI might replace your job, and you can’t afford to buy a house in the city where you work, and the train you take doesn’t run on time (or you’re in 55 minutes of traffic or the bus never shows up or you feel unsafe or without community - you get it), you’re not going to feel prosperous. You’re going to feel like you’re treading water in a system that’s slowly giving up on you.
James Madison called institutional safeguards “auxiliary precautions” - backup systems for when civic virtue failed. But auxiliary systems only work if you can see them - if they’re trusted and functional. What happens when those safeguards themselves become invisible? When wealth compounds in hidden ways, in dark data centers, in algorithmic feeds, while the visible world like housing, transit, safety, community… cracks?
Everywhere I went, people were trying to repair something - sometimes literal infrastructure, sometimes something more abstract like a sense of purpose or a reason to believe the future might accommodate them. This is what I learned.
Part 1: The United States of America
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