In Yellowjackets, people end up eating each other because they’re stranded in the wilderness.
In our world, we slowly eat away at each other’s lives so a few hundred people can hoard more than they could possibly consume in ten lifetimes. At least the Yellowjackets characters had the decency to admit what they were doing.
The system we’re in wasn’t designed for human thriving. It was built for human extraction.
Jobs?
Most are just time-theft arrangements that trade your irreplaceable hours for just enough money to keep you coming back. And the “good” jobs? They come with stress levels that destroy your body, your relationships, and your spirit.
We’re preparing kids for an economy that expired before they were even born. Twenty years in school to prepare them for jobs that either don’t exist or will exist for just long enough to automate them away. The world moves; our education doesn’t.
The Evolutionary Leap We’re Avoiding
• Work less, live more: AI, robotics, and changes in how work is organized could help shorten the workweek. Whether that preserves living standards depends on implementation and how the gains are shared.
• Land and resource sanity: A future where a handful of people own everything and everyone else rents life from them is not a future worth building.
• Education overhaul: Train children for adaptability, creativity, and collaboration, not rote memorization for an obsolete labor market.
We Need to Think Outside the Box We’re In
We keep slapping Band-Aids on a system that’s hemorrhaging meaning. FDR had the New Deal because the times demanded it. These times demand something even bigger: a New Deal² (or³, or⁴).
Not a patch. A rewrite.
Because if we don’t, we’re not just failing to adapt. We’re consenting to keep living like the slowest kind of horror story, one where you’re not stranded in the wilderness, but you’re starving anyway.
EDW•
