The world is at an inflection point now as 2026 approaches its holiday end. It’s not something that is understood by most people yet, although elements of it have been overlaid and misinterpreted in certain contexts like political revolution.
For just under 100 years now, the world has—with some narrow exceptions—been operating under a credible pretence of open-endedness in how people are able to conduct their lives. People who spent most of their lives in this world lived lives of great luxury – not necessarily in the vein of good fortune, but rather that the door to it was always open with enough personal growth, introspection, and chance-seeking. Those of Generation Z are the first alive to have never inhabited this world, and the Millennials that preceded them have partially been thrown out of it too. For these younger people, no amount of personal development or dumb luck can make a difference in the odds they have towards whole life satisfaction.
The fact of the remainder is, every loss and learning experience they had was either self-imposed or self-inflicted. They chose to go out and ‘raw dog’ gruelling work for short stints to save back money, and parlay that into better things, bragging about it and even holding it over younger people as if it never occurred to them to try so they would automatically succeed as they once did. This conceit of theirs is the central animus of politics around the world today, and it’s exacerbated by their deafening silence in the face of the retort, “I tried that, and it didn’t work.”
This stuntedness of everyone of conventional political age is the primary driver of the destruction of societies that we are bearing witness to every day. Deeper than the talking heads, deeper the tech mob, deeper even than Jeffrey Epstein, the rotten core of our bad times is a legion of people over the age of about 40 who have never experienced the aspect of adulthood called failure at loss. Many of them will likely live out the rest of their lives never knowing it either, resigned to simply being a burden of immaturity on those around them, who must compartmentalise and put up with their stupidity about this until they die.
But when you understand this—when you really get it in your bones what it means to make mistakes and pay through the nose for it, losing months to years of progress on your life that up to that point you believed you were making—you learn something very important: relationships matter. This is not clear to someone whose entire adult life has been a self-prescribed heroman’s Odyssey, nor someone whose entire repertoire of adult trauma is 100% self-inflicted. It’s much clearer to someone who lost a limb to a missed phone call, or someone whose career was torpedoed overnight by a clerical mistake of theirs. It gives us a lot of depth and nuance to reexamine our kindergarten morality when it comes to questions of guilt, blame, harm, trust and respect. You may be growing as a person if you’ve been pressed to confront those things by your experiences and come out of it with no satisfactory answer to any of it. You may soon see that the only way out is through someone else.
This difference in moral maturity between generational segments of the population is the paramount factor in all real politics from here on. It’s a top contender in the realm of personal development as well. The idiot box that so many are attached to, the constructed worlds and made-up narratives so many others have applied to themselves or others, and the vapidity and bloodlessness of every interaction and relationship is going away, and fast. It’s a monster that is killing everyone, and a growing number have every intention of killing it before it kills them first. If you’re down with that, ask yourself where you want to be for that event. If that notion confuses or even scares you, ask yourself what you’re going to do when it happens.