Too Much, When a System Runs Its Course

Subsidize the project. Privatize the profit. Send the public the bill either way. The French have an older, blunter word for what that produces than burnout: ras-le-bol, full to the brim, past the point of arguing. It doesn’t protest. It just walks away.

Woman on a wheel, The Wholistic Center, All Rights Reserved, 2026-2030

I don’t know about you but the last few weeks have put me through the wringer when it comes to technology, or more to the point, the way technology is being implemented, advertised and sold. From realizing that Anthropic’s Claude is a special needs savant that requires constant hand-holding, to my podcast recording platform changing everything and downing my other podcast after a year and a half of hard work, to not being able to pay my phone bill because my service provider decided to no longer use debit cards and never mentioned this. I won’t go into details about how Google’s pernicious overreach got YouTube to flag a work acquaintance’s website as malicious despite the fact that she’s a retired Pentagon Colonel. I’m feeling a strong drive to reclaim my empowerment and how technology should work for me, not the other way around.

Chuang Tzu famously wrote:

When an archer is shooting for fun
He has all his skill.
If he shoots for a brass buckle
He is already nervous.
If he shoots for a prize of gold
He goes blind
Or sees two targets –
He is out of his mind.

His skill has not changed,
But the prize divides him.
He cares
He thinks more of winning
Than of shooting –
And the need to win
Drains him of power.

A few weeks ago, this series traced how empires end. Not in one dramatic break, but through a particular kind of leader who stops looking at what is beneath him: Yaldabaoth, the Gnostic craftsman sealed off from the light that built him, with Ahriman and Lucifer at his sides. We call it the interregnum.

The $1 Trillion Blind Spot and The Formula That Ate Itself laid out the data behind that pattern: Sam Altman’s trillion-dollar demand, a 285-to-1 CEO-to-worker pay ratio, 32 million empty bedrooms sitting unused while families can’t find homes, capital that moves in herds and leaves the wreckage for someone else to clean up.

It’s a lot to take in and can confuse anyone. Understanding that many civilizations have gone through this interregnum helps appreciate this passage in time as just what it is, a passage in time.

That was the view from the boardroom. There’s a second half to the story, and it’s visible from ground level. It showed up this year in a strange place: not in the complaints of technology’s critics, but in the quiet exhaustion of the people running it. People are squeezed and the burnout is being felt. Expect more forceful solutions before something finally snaps, or hopefully, people simply say, not think you, this doesn’t work me. I’m hoping for the latter.

The Fatigue Inside the Machine

AI your best friend, The Wholistic Center. All Rights Reserved, 2026 - 2030 — AI your best friend, The Wholistic Center. All Rights Reserved, 2026 – 2030

In June, a widely read essay on the newsletter Text Incubation put words to something a lot of people in tech had apparently been feeling but not saying out loud. The author described an “ambient negativity” settling over the industry, one that has nothing to do with the old techlash of outsiders criticizing Silicon Valley. This is coming from inside the building.

Even the people doing well, the essay argued, spend their energy defending or excusing what they do rather than believing in it. Some make a wry peace with the feeling and keep working anyway. The piece was later featured in the industry newsletter TL;DR Founders, which summarized its core line simply: “Aiming for the stars now feels more impersonal and lower-risk than ever.” In other words, as inflation continues to rise bringing up prices everywhere, most people not only struggle, but even what would be considered high salaries in many states start to curb their spending.

The essay’s sharpest observation is about risk. Tech likes to sell itself as the industry of moonshots: the iPhone, the self-driving car, the thing nobody asked for because nobody could picture it yet. It loves hype and all too often oversells, glorifies, and waits for updates to pacify the mass. This time, it’s gone a little too far. The actual daily work, the author writes, increasingly looks like private equity with a hoodie: buy intelligence wholesale from a foundation model, mark it up, sell a narrow tool into whatever sector still has money left to extract. “People (and companies) are simultaneously more ambitious than ever,” the essay says, “but more risk-averse than ever too. You aim for the stars, but only in order to dodge the permanent underclass.” You are doing even the boldest things in fear. Of time, of scale, of change, of competition.

That is a strange thing to hear from inside an industry that spent fifteen years selling itself as the future. But it lines up with what the data shows everywhere else. It hasn’t invented the future, but rehashed old 1990s ever-climbing profits theories in a new wrapper.

What the Data Says About Everyone Else

Emergence AI experiment, The Wholistic Center, All Rights Reserved 2025-2026

Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace report, released this spring, found that global employee engagement fell to 20%, its lowest point since 2020. That is the first time engagement has dropped for two straight years since Gallup began tracking it. No region of the world improved. Gallup put a number on what that costs: roughly $10 trillion in lost productivity, worldwide, in a single year.

20% Global employee engagement, its lowest level since 2020 (Gallup, 2026)

43% Of employees report feeling stressed on a given day (Gallup, 2026)

22% Report loneliness as a daily emotion at work (Gallup, 2026)

Cigna’s most recent workplace research, tracking what it calls its Loneliness Index, puts a price tag on the same feeling: $154 billion a year in stress-related absenteeism, borne by employers, tied to workers who report feeling isolated even while surrounded by colleagues. More than half of employees surveyed said they felt lonely at work. Lonely employees, Cigna found, are roughly twice as likely to say they’re considering leaving their job and at the very least will produce poor results.

It reaches all the way into the boardrooms where the trillion-dollar valuations get discussed. The fatigue the Text Incubation essay describes among tech’s true believers and the burnout Gallup and Cigna are measuring among everyone else are, very plausibly, the same signal measured from two different floors of the same building.

The Walk Away

Kid in school dreaming big, The Wholistic Center, Copyright 2026-2030

What’s new this year is not the exhaustion. It’s what people are doing about it.

Deloitte’s most recent Digital Consumer Trends survey found that Gen Z’s average daily screen time reached 7 hours and 43 minutes in 2025, up nearly 5% from the year before, the highest of any generation. And yet, in the same survey, 76% of Gen Z respondents said they spend too much time on their phones, the highest share of any age group. They know. They keep doing it anyway. That contradiction is the whole story of this moment.

But a countertrend is showing up in the same data. Deloitte found that almost one in three Gen Z respondents (29%) had deleted a social media app in the past year, and about a quarter of all consumers had set screen time limits on their phones. Gen Z adults are now nearly twice as likely as the general population to say they’re interested in buying a stripped-down, low-feature phone on purpose.

7h 43m Average daily Gen Z screen time in 2025, up 4.8% year over year (Deloitte)

76% Of Gen Z say they personally spend too much time on their phone (Deloitte)

29% Of Gen Z deleted a social media app in the past 12 months (Deloitte)

Fortune reported this spring that the resulting market, phone-free retreats, analog hobbies, deliberately “dumb” devices, has become what it called a real analog economy, worth an estimated $5 billion and growing. Axios has been tracking the same shift from a different angle: phone-free physical spaces, restaurants, retreats, grassroots meetup groups, expanding largely because Gen Z itself is organizing them.

It’s closer to something a body does when it’s been fed too much of one thing for too long: it stops being hungry for it.

The Price Tag Says Everything

Thinking it Through, The Wholistic Center, Copyright 2026-2030

Which brings the story back to where Part 1 of this series started.

Leaked but widely corroborated financial documents, reported in June by multiple outlets, show OpenAI’s 2025 revenue reaching about $13 billion, tripled from the year before, against total costs of roughly $34 billion. The operating loss for the year came to about $21 billion. The net loss, after accounting for charges tied to OpenAI’s conversion from a nonprofit to a for-profit structure, widened to $38.5 billion. Of its expenses, OpenAI paid Microsoft alone more than $17 billion over the year.

$13B OpenAI’s 2025 revenue (leaked financials, reported June 2026)

$38.5B OpenAI’s 2025 net loss, after nonprofit conversion charges

$1T+ The valuation Sam Altman has called a “nonstarter” to go below

Against that backdrop, OpenAI confirmed in a blog post that it had confidentially submitted IPO paperwork to the SEC in May. Advisors reportedly gave Altman a choice: list this year at a lower price, or hold out for the trillion-dollar figure and wait until 2027. He chose to wait. Reuters and several outlets reported that a rocky stock debut from SpaceX, another Musk-linked company aiming for a similar valuation, has since made that trillion-dollar target look shakier still.

A company can be genuinely useful and still be priced like a myth. Those aren’t opposed facts. OpenAI’s products are real and widely used. Its valuation demand is also, even if artificially inflated. And on the numbers, can be disconnected from anything the business currently earns. The same essay on Text Incubation named the mechanism underneath the newest wave of AI startups directly: pay OpenAI a dollar, wrap it in a narrow tool for one sector of the economy, charge two. It’s resale dressed as innovation, stacked on top of a foundation that is itself burning far more cash than it takes in. Overvaluation is the business model of this moment. The caveat is that all of this works well in an economy that is sustainable, not the current one that is endemic with inflation.

Subsidize the Build, Privatize the Profit

This is probably the crux of the story and heart of the systematic problem with modern business models. There’s a mechanical reason the exhaustion runs this deep, and it isn’t just pace. It’s who gets asked to pay for the thing and who gets to keep what it earns.

JPMorgan’s Global Research desk estimates the AI buildout will need roughly $5.5 trillion in capital through 2030, with about $4.1 trillion of that debt-financed. The Bank for International Settlements and other watchdogs have flagged the obvious risk: if the boom sours, the losses land on taxpayers, pension funds, and retail investors, routed there through subsidies, loan guarantees, and circular financing arrangements between the same handful of companies. Analysts have started calling this pattern by its plain name: privatize the gains, socialize the losses.

The subsidies are already flowing, not hypothetically. OpenAI’s Stargate data center site in Abilene, Texas secured an 85% property tax abatement from local government, a public giveaway for a facility that will employ relatively few people once it’s running. OpenAI has separately pushed to expand the CHIPS Act tax credit so AI infrastructure would qualify for a federal credit worth up to 35%. Wouldn’t we all have to personally have a 35% tax break? But that is usually only available for companies, not tax payers.

Executive Order 14318 directs the Commerce Department to offer loans, loan guarantees, grants, and tax incentives for data center projects, and the Department of Energy has already selected sites, with the Air Force opening bases for private data center development. That’s federal de-risking of private infrastructure, not incidental support.

Demiurge and Archons, The Wholistic Center, All Rights Reserved 2026-2030

The electricity bill lands closer to home. U.S. utilities are planning roughly $1.4 trillion in AI-driven grid buildout, and residential ratepayers are projected to shoulder as much as $700 billion of that through rate hikes. Residential electricity prices are already up more than 36% since 2020. Public Citizen‘s energy program put the question plainly: whether a grandmother in rural Ohio should subsidize the power grid upgrades a Meta data center needs. Under public pressure, the White House secured a voluntary “Ratepayer Protection Pledge” from AI companies this year. It has no enforcement mechanism. New Jersey became the first state to legally separate AI data centers into their own ratepayer class, so the costs can’t be quietly folded into everyone else’s bill.

This is the same pattern from Part 1 of this series wearing a different disguise. The public underwrites the risk. The infrastructure gets built on subsidized land, subsidized tax terms, and subsidized power. And when the valuation gets set, the trillion dollars accrues to the people who put in the least of the actual capital. Yaldabaoth doesn’t pay full price for the materials he builds with.

What Ancient Wisdom Calls This

I spent twenty years watching a smaller version of this same imbalance form in transportation. And today, something like 85% of investment poured into future areal vehicles, almost nothing into where they will operate, such as the charging infrastructure and grid capacity those vehicles needed in the near future. The hype usually arrives years ahead of the plumbing. It’s the same architecture showing up again in AI we witnessed for the past 50 years. It’s happening faster and at a larger scale: capital racing toward the exciting layer, starving the boring layer that would make the exciting layer sustainable.

History reminds us that what is hoarded stops circulating. And what stops circulating becomes poison. A river that cannot flow becomes a swamp. That principle applies as much to attention and belief as it does to money. An industry that keeps demanding more conviction than it delivers value eventually runs out of believers, one quiet defection at a time. A Gen Z kid buying a dumb phone and a senior engineer feeling ambient dread about his own industry are, underneath it, doing the same arithmetic. And my generation, Gen X watches this is dismay and amusement knowing we’re equally at ease in woods camping or in front of an AI agent. We can make it work for us because we were raise like that, for the most part.

Vedics and sacred texts, The Wholistic Center, Copyright 2026-2030

None of this requires despair, of course. And it doesn’t require giving up on technology either. It requires the same thing ancient traditions have always asked for: awareness, presence, curiosity, and sufficiency instead of accumulation, circulation instead of extraction. The people already living that answer aren’t waiting for OpenAI’s IPO to resolve, or for a state legislature to pass the next ratepayer protection law. They’re deleting the app, buying the plain phone, closing the laptop at a reasonable hour, and going back outside. Many more are tackling with a mind frame of how do we make this work for us, not subsidize corporations and bend to their forced needs on us.

Call it ras-le-bol, the French word for having had enough that no longer bothers to argue about it. A system that keeps asking the public to fund the risk while a handful of people keep the reward will eventually run out of people willing to play along. Not because they organized against it. Because they got full, and walked off to build something smaller and closer to the ground instead. One brick at a time, same as always.