[!IMPORTANT]
This post reflects my personal opinion. I respect and welcome all perspectives.
It is not intended to harm or criticize any individual, group, or institution.
For feedback, feel free to contact me.
I used to believe the world was complicated. Now I realize it’s something else entirely — it’s profitable.
We’ve built systems where friction earns a living. Every new approval, every added rule, every piece of paperwork becomes someone’s source of income. Complexity isn’t the cost of doing business anymore; it is the business.
The people who keep things running — the engineers, the technicians, the ones who solve real problems — are outnumbered. Around them grows an entire ecosystem of oversight, process, and justification. We call that structure “efficiency,” but it’s more like ritual maintenance of a system that no longer questions its own purpose. And as long as the ritual pays, it continues.
We keep blaming “the rich” as if that describes a single type of person. But the issue isn’t wealth — it’s where it comes from.
There’s a difference between those who create value and those who extract it. The true drain on progress isn’t found in the factories or startups but at the bottlenecks — the licenses, the fees, the permissions, the intermediaries. They build nothing, yet they collect the toll.
A few years ago, I spoke with a factory director outside Shenzhen. They were expanding — another hundred machines on order. No marketing slogans, no secrets, no buzzwords. Just work. When I asked about competitors, he smiled:
“We can tell you exactly what we do,” he said. “You can copy it, and we’ll still move faster.”
That mindset is rare — confidence built not on talk, but on execution.
A month later, I sat in on a meeting about “innovation management.” Twelve participants, four slides, and nothing to deliver. That’s how many industries function now — closed loops of discussion that sustain themselves through the appearance of movement. We’ve reached a point where describing productivity earns more than practicing it.
Democracy doesn’t collapse because people stop believing in it. It collapses when enough people discover they can live off it. When stability becomes an income stream, reform no longer pays.
Bureaucracy turns into an employer. Each new regulation creates its own defenders. And the system tightens, one well-meaning rule at a time.
You don’t need corruption to see decline — incentives alone will do it. Most of the people upholding this machinery are sincere. They think they’re protecting order, but really they’re protecting the illusion of progress. Movement without change becomes its own decay.
History rarely ends with an explosion; it fades out through neglect. Buildings don’t burn because they’re hated — they burn because no one repairs them. Once builders can’t win and rent-seekers can’t lose, collapse is only a matter of patience.
The solution isn’t complicated. Stop rewarding what adds layers instead of value. Stop shielding those who extract more than they contribute. Support the people who build, repair, and move things forward.
Let what’s obsolete fall apart naturally instead of preserving it with subsidies. That’s easy to write, but hard to live — too many depend on keeping the maze intact. And so it keeps expanding, quietly, until the fire reaches the gate.
Cheers!