Table of Contents Link to heading

1. Trading Time for Money Link to heading

On the surface, working a job means exchanging labor for income.
But in reality, it’s a form of systemic domestication.
You’re selling your time, your health, and your freedom.

  • Stop working, and the income stops.
  • The harder you push, the deeper you sink.
  • What’s called “stability” is often just a golden leash—
    It feels like security, but it’s the chain that holds you in place.

A high-paid tech worker and a factory-line worker aren’t fundamentally different.
They’re just different-priced time products.

The essence of wage work is this: your only source of income is entirely controlled by others—bosses, companies, clients, or platforms.
You’re not in charge of when, how long, how much, or how you’re paid. It only looks like you’re making money—but what you’ve really given up is the control over making money. In other words, you’re being harvested.

2. How You’re Being Mined Link to heading

You think you’re on the rise. In fact, you’re just perfectly qualified—
productive enough to be useful, obedient enough not to leave.

  • Education: From elementary school to grad school, we’ve been trained to follow rules in exchange for rewards. Beyond “skills,” education mostly conditions you to comply, fit in, and be a cog in someone else’s machine. Let’s be honest: the goal of mainstream education isn’t to make you free. It’s to make you employable.
  • Work: 996 work schedules, long commutes, office politics, KPI metrics—they drain your days and leave your nights filled with self-doubt.
  • Housing: A 30-year mortgage means you’re devoting one-third (or even half) of your life to repaying the system. If you bought a home between 2018–2023, let’s face it—you don’t really have much of a choice anymore.
  • Consumption: You shop to relieve your burnout, which keeps you broke, which keeps you trapped.

Your entire life has been mapped out inside a mature “ant farm” of labor. Education gives you the route, work drains you, housing locks you in, consumption bleeds you dry.

3. A System That Runs Too Well Link to heading

  • The system doesn’t care about your freedom—it runs on maximum efficiency.
    The more obedient, predictable, and overworked you are, the more the system thrives.
  • Herd mentality + path dependence make you afraid to “jump the tracks.”
    Step outside, and you’re labeled, marginalized, pushed back into line—by family, society, your algorithmic feed. Eventually, you even convince yourself: “This path sucks, but maybe I have no other option.”
  • Power and capital naturally concentrate upward.
    Ordinary people don’t own the game—they just try to work harder and get closer to the center.
    But the closer you get, the more you give up: more time, less freedom, higher risk.

4. Salary vs. Assets Link to heading

Many people think earning $4,000–5,000 a month or landing a big tech job means they’ve made it.

But ask yourself:
Can this income stop? Do I have any savings? Do I have anything that earns money without me working?

A salary is a price tag someone else sets—and it can be changed any time.

Real wealth isn’t how much you earn in a month.
It’s whether you have things that grow without your labor:

  • Stable cash-flow assets: rental income, stock dividends, bond interest
  • Reusable digital products: courses, templates, plugins, IP
  • Traffic you own: online communities, platforms, personal brand

Salary is passive pricing. Assets are active compounding.
One resets to zero at any moment; the other grows with time.

5. Script vs. Self Link to heading

Stop believing that working harder alone will change the game.

What truly crushes people isn’t laziness—
It’s being stuck inside a structure that only consumes but never compounds.

— Your time is priced.
— Your body is bound.
— Every dollar you earn is part of a system that has already decided how it wants to use you.

You see a paycheck.
The system sees: tax base, mortgage repayment, lifetime consumption.

The first step? See it for what it is.

When you start to doubt, you begin to truly think.
When you truly think, you begin to see clearly.
When you see clearly, you begin to break free.
When you break free, you begin to live as yourself.

But the truth is—
Most people, even after thinking,
Still choose to forget,
Or learn to compromise with grace,
Or simply never plan to leave the cage they can’t see.