Nothing is Real Anymore: The Ethereum Bull Case

Rent seekers reading this: please close the tab and go back to dollar cost averaging into your index funds.

1. The Job Market Is Theater

Youth unemployment is around 28%. But that number actually understates the problem. Look at the people who are employed. What are they doing? A huge chunk of the workforce appears to be occupying desks, attending meetings, producing activity reports about activity, and generating zero tangible value. Government budgets subsidise headcount to keep the unemployment number from looking catastrophic. The result is what you might call adult daycare. And most of the people in it don't even seem to realise that's what it is.

The Generational Lock-In

The boomer generation will hold onto their positions as long as humanly possible. They have to. They leveraged themselves to the tits with 80% mortgages on the promise that house prices always go up. If they lose their jobs, they can't service the debt. If they can't service the debt, the housing market implodes. If the housing market implodes, the younger generation (many of whom still live at home) become homeless. So the entire system is structured to protect boomers' bags. Youth gets sacrificed first. Always.

Case Study: Synsam

You need glasses. You walk into Synsam. A receptionist greets you. Their job is to... point you towards a room. You sit down. A machine measures your eyes. A human (optiker) asks you to read characters off a screen. Be honest: a Python script calling even the worst AI model could do this. So what are the 20+ employees per store actually for?

Selling. That's it. The only thing a human does better than a machine in retail is convince you to buy something you didn't need. They've read the sales books. They build rapport. They get you nodding along. And then whoops, you've signed a two-year contract on a "great deal" recommended by someone whose income is literally commission on how much product they move. They are not acting in your interest. A machine would be. But a machine doesn't generate upsell revenue, so here we are.

Case Study: Ericsson / Volvo

Take a company like Ericsson. Anyone who has spent time in one of those offices knows the deal. The only people producing clear value are the engineers fixing bugs in the networking software, which is the actual product generating revenue. The rest of the building? Working on projects like building AI models to analyse the air quality inside the building. Not joking. With tools like Claude Code now able to one-shot most bug fixes, you could realistically fire 99% of that building, keep 1 to 3 engineers, and run the entire value-generating operation. Volvo, same situation.

Case Study: Grocery (ICA / Willys)

Still cannot figure out what most grocery store employees actually do that couldn't be automated tomorrow. Or better yet: why do we even need the stores? Order directly from the farmer. From the producer. The middlemen are rent seekers. What service do they provide? They're friendly faces you visit because you're lonely? They don't solve your hunger. The farmer does. The cow does.

Side thought: some stores now put security locks on meat. Locks. On meat. You can't even trust people not to steal food anymore. But honestly, can you blame them? The system created this behaviour.

2. Maslow's Hierarchy in a Broken System

Steps 1 & 2: Physiological Needs and Safety

You obviously don't want to be homeless. So you need housing. Here's what that actually requires:

A housing queue that ideally your parents joined on your behalf years ago (hope you have a time machine).
Income of roughly 3x the monthly rent (Konsumentkreditlagen). No income, no apartment.
Want to buy? Two years of continuous salaried employment for mortgage approval. Even if you have the cash to pay outright.

Got 2 million SEK in your ISK and want a mortgage on a 1 million apartment? Sorry, you need an anställningsbevis. The regulations don't care about your actual financial situation. Hard-coded lines. Everyone is the same.

So to meet your most basic human needs, you first need to become an actor. You need to get scary good at pretending you provide value. Nail the auditions (internships). Play the role long enough to get the permanent contract. Then, and only then, does the system grant you permission to have a roof over your head.

The Mental Health Fallout

And then people wonder why depression and anxiety are through the roof. Something like 1 in 3 people are on SSRIs as of this writing. You could walk into any ICA Maxi, throw a rock, and hit someone on max dose antidepressants. Who could have possibly predicted that forcing people to play a meaningless role in a broken machine would make them depressed?

The system's solution: medicate it away. Go to therapy. The therapist is there to help YOU, right? Not the system? One quick look at who funds their operation tells you who they're really serving.

3. The Manipulation Engine

People are being psychologically manipulated every single second of their day. And the irony is that the people doing the manipulating are the ones actually "providing value" at their jobs. Entire teams working full time on figuring out how to get you to think a certain way, vote a certain way, buy a certain product.

You wake up. Scroll TikTok. Scroll Instagram. Nothing real. But it feels real. Look at this guy. Looks are everything bro. Just get on finasteride and retinoids and you too will make it. Just do this one more thing. There's always one more thing. Once you've looksmaxxed to oblivion, they find your next goalpost and push it forward. You chase it like a dog.

The reason you're unemployed? You just haven't grinded LeetCode hard enough. You don't know everything about computer networking. Or concurrent programming. You don't know the differences between C++11 and C++20, and THAT is why you're a loser. There is always one more hoop, and always someone selling you a course to jump through it.

4. Love and Belonging in the Digital Age

As of 2024, 61% of couples meet online. 14% through friends. 9% through coworkers. The online number is almost certainly higher by now.

The Dating App Humiliation Ritual

You want love? Cool. Step one: time travel and record every peak moment of your life. Upload those photos to Instagram. Make sure you have pictures in social settings. If you're a guy, you better have photos with women. You need to signal to strangers on an app that you're not a psycho. You need the right height, the right background, the right job title. You need to become a master salesman of yourself.

But here's the thing nobody talks about. Who owns this identity you've built? Instagram does. Say the wrong thing, step out of line, and they ban you. That identity you spent years curating? Gone. You don't own it. You've outsourced your entire social existence to a corporation. The same corporation that uses every psychological trick in the book to keep you scrolling, posting, and performing.

The people who cope by saying "just get a job and you'll find your wife at the workplace" are looping right back into the same trap: become an actor first, then hope for love inside the performance.

Why Is Any of This Centralised?

This is where Ethereum becomes directly relevant. With blockchain-based identity (think ENS, soulbound tokens, decentralised social graphs), nobody owns your digital identity except you. No Instagram ban hammers. No corporate censorship. Your identity becomes portable across apps, platforms, and protocols. Completely decentralised. This isn't theoretical. The infrastructure exists today on Ethereum.

5. Identity, Division, and the Case for Exit

Nobody Likes Their Neighbours

People are more divided than ever. Men and women hold increasingly opposite viewpoints. People hate their colleagues, their classmates, their neighbours. And honestly, it makes sense. If you hate yourself for being an actor in a broken system, and everyone around you is doing the same thing, you're going to hate them too. Everyone watches the same shows, sees the same algorithmically curated content, and somehow still thinks they're unique.

Thought experiment: there's a button. Press it and you instantly receive 100,000 USD, but a random neighbour dies. In our current society? I'm 99% confident every single person presses that button. In a real community, where people share goals and genuinely know each other? Nobody presses it. That gap tells you everything about where we are.

The Political Divide

Person 1 hates that their country is filling up with immigrants. Blames them for housing costs, interest rates, job scarcity. Person 2 hates Person 1. Welcomes everyone. Operates from feelings over facts (nothing wrong with that per Carl Jung's Big Five, but feeling good doesn't stop your country from being overrun). Person 3 is somewhere in between.

Here's the question nobody asks: if these people fundamentally cannot coexist, why are we forcing them to live in the same system?

6. Ethereum and Network States: The Exit

This is where everything converges. The job market is theater. Housing is a rigged game. Relationships are mediated by corporations. Identity is rented, not owned. Politics is a zero-sum war between people who will never agree. The common thread in all of this: centralised systems controlled by rent seekers who profit from keeping you trapped.

Decentralised Identity (Now, on Ethereum)

Ethereum already provides the tooling for self-sovereign identity. ENS names, soulbound tokens, decentralised social protocols. Your reputation, your credentials, your social graph — all on-chain, all portable, all owned by you. No platform can delete you. No corporation can revoke your identity. This alone reshapes dating, hiring, commerce, and social interaction from the ground up.

Network States (The Bigger Picture)

A network state (as defined by Balaji Srinivasan) is a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states.

More concretely: a social network with a moral innovation, a recognised founder, a sense of national consciousness, an integrated cryptocurrency, a consensual government limited by a social smart contract, an archipelago of crowdfunded physical territories, a virtual capital, and an on-chain census that proves a large enough population, income, and real estate footprint to gain diplomatic recognition.

Built on Ethereum. Governed by smart contracts. Funded by the community. Not by politicians, not by corporations, not by the rent seekers who have a vested interest in keeping the current machine running.

The idea is dead simple. If Person 1 and Person 2 hate each other and will never agree, stop forcing them to share a system. Let Person 1 join a network state aligned with their values. Let Person 2 do the same. Let the people in between choose freely. No more fighting. No more convincing. Just opt out and build something better.

7. How to Play It

If you buy the thesis that centralised systems are failing and decentralised alternatives are inevitable, the allocation is straightforward:

50% Ethereum (ETH). The backbone of everything discussed above. Decentralised identity, smart contract governance, network state infrastructure, DeFi. Ethereum is the settlement layer for the new internet. If even a fraction of the use cases outlined here play out, ETH is grotesquely undervalued.

45% Bitcoin (BTC). The original exit from fiat. Digital gold. The monetary base layer that doesn't care about your government's fiscal policy or your central bank's printer. In a world where trust in institutions is collapsing, Bitcoin is the hardest asset humans have ever created. It's the hedge against everything described in this document.

5% Bittensor (TAO). The decentralised AI play. If AI is going to replace most of the useless jobs described above (and it will), the question becomes: who controls the AI? Centralised labs owned by the same rent seekers? Or an open, permissionless network where anyone can contribute and earn? TAO is a bet on the latter. Small allocation because it's earlier stage, but the upside is asymmetric.

Could be replaced with MSTR and BMNR. but then you have to enter slowly or you will get diluted to death in a downturn.

No index funds. No bonds. No "diversified portfolio" designed by the same financial system that needs you to stay a compliant wage slave. This is a concentrated bet that the future looks nothing like the present. Because if you've read this far, you already know it won't.

Conclusion

Every layer of the current system — work, housing, relationships, identity, governance — is built on centralised control and misaligned incentives. People are forced to act instead of create, to rent-seek instead of produce, and to hand their identities to corporations that exploit them.

Ethereum and the network state model offer a genuine exit. Decentralised identity means you own yourself. Smart contract governance means rules are transparent and consensual. Crowdfunded territory means communities form around shared values, not geographic accidents.

The technology exists. The thesis is sound. The only question is whether enough people will recognise the cage before they're convinced to stay in it.