Anon Noiré 🇺🇸

was doomscrolling on tiktok yesterday and came across this guy putting into words sth I increasingly hear from ambitious 20-somethings in high-paying professional jobs basically, what’s the point of spending your 20s/30s working your ass off, chasing promotions, saving aggressively, becoming insanely good at your job etc. when the expected payoff of all that is probably more uncertain than it’s been in generations? the whole traditional career game is built on the assumption that if you sacrifice enough today, compound your skills / earnings / savings for 20-30 years, you’ll eventually get rewarded with wealth, freedom, status etc. but if you genuinely believe AGI could completely transform the economy within the next 5-10 years, it’s pretty rational to start questioning that bargain. why not just enjoy your 20s/30s while the world still looks somewhat normal, before we potentially enter an era of infinite leisure? the interesting thing though is that I don’t think this necessarily makes ambitious ppl less ambitious. Most of them would probably find a life of pure leisure pretty meaningless after 6 months anyway if anything I could see the opposite happening. More and more ppl deciding that if the traditional 20-year compounding game no longer offers the same predictable returns, might as well take much bigger swings while they still can. Start companies, pursue weird projects, try to build sth enormous rather than spend another decade getting 10% better at a job that might not even exist feels like AGI could simultaneously make some ppl completely give up on ambition, and push others towards even more extreme forms of it