"zihilism", and why young men are choosing the roulette wheel
1/several pieces on this.
Your college roommate just turned his Nvidia calls into a house. Your younger brother lives at home, scrolling TikTok between DoorDash deliveries. Your group chat is eight dudes who haven't seen each other in person since someone's wedding two years ago. The girl you matched with has four hundred other matches. Your salary qualifies you for a studio apartment forty minutes from where you work.
This is the water we swim in.
The old deal was simple: work hard, save money, buy house, find wife, raise kids, retire. That deal is dead. Not dying. Dead. When a median house costs eleven times the median salary instead of three, when entry-level jobs require five years of experience, when meeting someone requires competing with everyone in a fifty-mile radius on an app designed to make you pay for visibility, the system isn't slow. It's broken.
Young men aren't opting out because they're lazy. They're opting out because they can do math.
the old game vs. the new game
The Old Game: Climb ladders someone else built. Wait your turn. Follow rules designed before you were born. Trust that patience pays. Accept that the house always wins. Trade your time for tokens that buy less each year. Compete for scarce positions in hierarchies you didn't create.
The New Game: Build your own systems. Create asymmetric upside. Play games where being right compounds. Design status hierarchies based on competence not credentials. Form small cells that ship products not resumes. Replace extraction with creation.
The Old Game is zero-sum by design. Your gain requires someone else's loss. The ladder has limited rungs. The positions are scarce. The rewards diminish. The house always wins.
The New Game is positive-sum by construction. Your success makes the system stronger. Intelligence compounds. Reputation builds. Networks strengthen. Everyone who plays seriously wins differently.
Prediction markets aren't just another financial instrument. They're the prototype for New Games: systems where your intelligence compounds instead of being extracted.
why prediction markets matter more than you think
Traditional gambling extracts value. Sports books engineered for loss. Options designed to expire worthless. Crypto charts that only go up until they don't. These are Old Games dressed as opportunities.
Prediction markets create value. When thousands of people bet on whether something will happen, they generate intelligence worth more than money. Companies use these markets to predict completion dates better than any consultant. Governments watch them for signals. Traders hedge real risks against them.
But here's what everyone misses: prediction markets are teaching us how to build New Games.
In prediction markets, being consistently right matters more than being occasionally lucky. Research beats gambling. Patience beats excitement. Sharing information strengthens your position rather than weakening it. The best traders aren't degenerate gamblers but patient builders of track records.
This is the model: games where your intelligence compounds instead of being drained.
Every institution young men interact with today is an Old Game. Dating apps that extract attention while delivering loneliness. Jobs that extract productivity while preventing ownership. Social media that extracts content while destroying connection. Financial products that extract hope while guaranteeing loss.
The solution isn't to play these games better. It's to build New Games entirely.
the three new games worth playing
Game One: The Competence Game
Old version: Build a resume. Collect credentials. Wait for permission to matter.
New version: Pick one hard skill. Master it publicly. Ship proof monthly.
Three friends, one month, one shipped product. No excuses. No meetings about meetings. No permission seeking. Just building and shipping. After twelve months, you're not job seekers. You're founders with a track record.
The competence game rewards actual capability over credentialed incompetence. It's measurable, visible, and compounds. Every shipped product makes the next one easier. Every demonstrated skill makes the next one more believable.
Track your accuracy like prediction markets track probabilities. Be wrong publicly and correct quickly. Build a reputation for being right about what matters. Make your competence undeniable through repetition, not argument.
Game Two: The Ownership Game
Old version: Save for thirty years for a down payment. Rent until you're forty. Die with a mortgage.
New version: Pool resources. Buy together. Build equity now.
Five friends buy a duplex in a secondary city. Not your dream house. Not your forever home. Just a piece of equity that exists instead of a savings account that doesn't. Live cheap, build equity, leverage into individual properties later.
Rather than communism, this is game theory. When individual entry is impossible, collective entry becomes optimal. When traditional financing fails, alternative structures win. The groups doing this now will own property while solo grinders are still saving for deposits that inflation eats faster than they can earn.
Create ownership in everything. Revenue shares in projects. Equity in micro-companies. Stakes in outcomes. The Old Game keeps you permanently renting everything: houses, cars, software, entertainment. The New Game makes you an owner of something real, however small.
Game Three: The Status Game
Old version: Optimize your profile. Compete for likes. Measure yourself against everyone online.
New version: Build a dinner society. Make membership invite-only. Phones banned. Show up or get replaced.
Status games are inevitable. The question is whether you play ones that destroy you or ones that build you. Dating apps create status through rejection. Social media creates status through comparison. Traditional careers create status through scarcity.
New Games create status through contribution. The workshop where building something earns respect. The fight club where showing up earns membership. The dinner society where interesting conversation earns invites.
Pick something hard. Compete weekly. Track leaderboards. Post them publicly. Not for engagement but for accountability. Make excellence visible. Create hierarchies based on performance not politics. Design games where improvement is mandatory and measurement is transparent.
kill the cope, build the alternative
The blackpill narrative says it's over. Society collapsed. Women have impossible standards. The economy is rigged. Your only hope is getting lucky on trades or giving up entirely.
This narrative is cope.
Yes, the Old Games are rigged. Dating apps created sexual markets where five percent of men get eighty percent of matches. Corporate careers became tournaments where ninety percent of players can't even qualify. Housing became a casino where only inherited wealth can play.
But claiming it's over is just an excuse to avoid building what's next.
The men thriving now didn't get better at Old Games. They started playing New Games entirely. Built companies when jobs failed. Created communities when institutions collapsed. Formed bonds when atomization peaked. Designed better games with better odds.
They stopped asking permission to begin.
the social infrastructure revolution
Forget dating apps. They're Old Games where the house always wins and players always lose. The solution isn't better photos or smoother text game. It's building infrastructure where connection happens naturally through competence and presence.
The Weekly Build: Rent a garage. Every Tuesday, people build projects. No phones. No small talk. Just creation and competence made visible. After three months, you know who's reliable, who's skilled, who's worth knowing.
The Morning War: Saturday mornings, same field, flag football or capture the flag or ultimate frisbee. Keep score. Track wins. Post rankings. Make excellence public and competition respectful. Heroes and villains emerge. Stories get created. Bonds get formed.
The Dinner Society: Eight people, weekly dinner, rotating hosts. Miss twice and you're out. Someone's always waiting to join. No phones visible. No work talk. Just presence, wit, and connection. The best conversations you'll have all week.
These aren't revolutionary ideas. They're ancient patterns: small groups of humans doing hard things together repeatedly. We just forgot they were necessary because institutions used to provide them. The institutions are gone. Time to build our own.
from extraction to creation
Every system young men touch today extracts value while promising creation. College extracts tuition while promising knowledge. Jobs extract time while promising careers. Apps extract attention while promising connection. Finance extracts hope while promising wealth.
The shift from Old Games to New Games is fundamentally about reversing this flow. Instead of being extracted from, you create. Instead of being mined for value, you compound it.
This is what prediction markets hint at: systems where participation makes everyone smarter rather than someone richer. Where your intelligence strengthens rather than weakens through use. Where being right consistently matters more than being loud occasionally.
Build systems with these physics. Create games with these mechanics. Form groups with these dynamics. The infrastructure won't be rebuilt by institutions or apps or government programs. It will be rebuilt by small groups playing New Games until Old Games become irrelevant.
what winning actually looks like
Success in New Games looks nothing like success in Old Games.
You won't have a prestigious job at a famous company. You'll have equity in something you built with friends. You won't have a perfect dating app profile. You'll have a crew that vouches for your character through experience. You won't have credentials from expensive institutions. You'll have competence proven through shipped products.
You own property with friends, building equity while living cheaply. Your micro-company ships monthly, generating income from systems you built rather than time you sold. Your training group pushes you toward physical goals you couldn't achieve alone. Your social circle meets weekly in person, creating the connections that apps never could.
This isn't fantasy. Thousands of young men are building this now. They're just not posting about it because they're too busy building.
intelligence compound effect
The choice is binary. Keep playing Old Games where your intelligence gets extracted, your attention gets harvested, and your hope gets monetized. Or start playing New Games where your intelligence compounds.
In five years, the difference is existential. The Old Game player has stories about almost hitting it big, deep knowledge of systems designed to drain him, and a sense that life is happening elsewhere. The New Game builder has equity, reputation, relationships, and capabilities that compound rather than decay.
Both paths require effort. Only one produces lasting value. Both involve risk. Only one has asymmetric upside. Both demand intelligence. Only one lets it compound.
Prediction markets are just the beginning. They show us what becomes possible when we build systems where being right matters, where intelligence compounds, where collective wisdom emerges from individual choices.
The future belongs to whoever builds the next generation of such systems.
the call
The Old Game is over. Not ending. Over. The ladders are pulled up. The positions are filled. The house always wins. And that's the best thing that could have happened.
As an aside, great theses on these are
's
https://a16z.com/announcement/investing-in-flow/
~ and in my opinion, a far better thesis on this issue is:
Because now we get to build New Games. Games where competence matters more than credentials. Where ownership beats renting. Where small groups outperform large institutions. Where being consistently right compounds into being occasionally wealthy.
