The wagecuck as the antithesis of both FIRE and NEET

Change begins from acceptance

This post is an offshoot of “The era of empty, secular mass consumption is over”, discussing the fundamental difference between slaves and free men in the modern world.

Wagecuck = the act of working a dead-end job with little or no opportunity for ever exiting the rat race.

I basically never go on Twitter/X because I consider it a cesspool, pushing short soundbytes in order for the author to receive micro-dopamine hits from an assorted coterie of nerds and losers many of whom are trying to do the same thing. The whole place reeks of desperation, a cry of “Listen to me! I have interesting things to say!” even though it’s a complete waste of time. That isn’t to say Substack doesn’t have an element of that too, but the focus on long-form content and a Subscription instead of advertising model does away with the worst of it, I think. Anyway, I checked out

John Carter

’s Twitter in a moment of weakness and while the micro-takes still hurt my brain, there was something that caught my eye (images below are clickable):

Now, I don’t like Matt Walsh; he works for Ben Shapiro, and as we’ve seen from Shapiro’s leaked contracts he muzzles his employees with extremely onerous provisions that silence their ability to actually state their minds, plus Walsh is engaged in exactly the stupid culture war stuff which is without question destined to lose. But I also don’t like to feud with others as it’s a waste of time.

But these Tweets highlight a point I’ve made regularly: slavery never ended, instead it expanded from a direct, formalized slave-whipping model to an indirect financial-control model that expanded to almost all of humanity and sucked up all of their free time. The Rothschilds and their allies put this system in place via the privately owned central bank system, while simultaneously filling the masses’s heads with nonsense about how everyone is free under “democracy”. Even the average commute to work both ways is an hour/day. If you have two hours a day that you can direct to your own interests and the weekends are spent on the chores that fell behind during the week, are you your own master? How is your position any different from that from a slave except the lack of physical whipping?

This is the essence of neoliberal feudalism.

It’s actually much worse now than in prior feudalism, because under feudalism if you were a landlocked serf you would work sunrise to dusk during harvesting season, and you would be in danger of being called up for military duty, but generally speaking you would have vast months of downtime where your time was your own and you could read, hunt, focus on your hobbies, the community etc. During that time your time was your own and you had much greater freedoms that you have today. This is part of the reason why architecture of this period was so beautiful; local artisans had lots of time to devote to their craft.

Today, there is really only two ways to escape the rat race: either ascend it via passive income or drop out from it entirely. Because only from escaping the rat race can a person really be free; if you are not in charge of your time you are a slave.

In the former, you grind away within the rat race hoping to make enough money and investments so that the passive income from the investments eventually exceed your expenses, plus allowances for inflation and reinvestment. This is the financial independence and retiring early (FIRE) community. There are ways of doing this both for the rich and less rich by adjusting the expenses one lives on but the basic idea is the same. If you have enough “passive income” (I hate that term, as it never really is passive) coming in, you then have time to focus on your hobbies or whatever else you want to do. Although, to be fair, people are so zombified today by unrelenting propaganda that I don’t think most people would know what to do with themselves in retirement other than play Canasta and listen to “It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere”. Their creative spirit has been completely crushed.

A great game teaching the principle of escaping the rat-race through “passive” income is Cashflow the game by the Rich Dad/Poor Dad author (stupidly high pricing; you can find it cheaper used on Ebay. There’s also a free electronic version here). You start out as a wagecuck and have to work until you have enough investments until you can escape the rat race. Play it if you havn’t; it’s fun and very educational, much more so than Monopoly.

Unfortunately most people have dead-end jobs which makes FIRE difficult or impossible even with limited spending. Home ownership rates are at an all-time low, retirement savings for most is minimal, people have huge amounts of credit card and other debt and even for those families who aren’t divorced, tax rates are choking and both husband and wife need to work to barely scrape by (and they rarely see their children). Social security is a bankrupt zombie and who knows when it will collapse.

The other way out is via the NEET community (Not in Employment, Education, or Training) - just drop out of society, live at home with the parents (and/or get on disability and Section 8), don’t get married or have kids, and waste one’s life away on (usually empty) hobbies.

A waste of a NEET life

I would argue that the distinction between being in the rat race or being out of it is the fundamental distinction in society today economically. Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, a retired guy watching his wealth with $5 million and a NEET are all more similar to each other than to a wagecuck - even if the wagecuck makes $5 million a year, as unless one is careful one’s expenses generally rise with one’s income - in the sense they are in charge of their time, even if the reach of their options may be different. What does Gates or Bezos have in terms of their daily living over a retired guy with $5 million? More homes, private planes, sex slaves (Bezos’s old plastic surgery’s fiance is gross and proves that money isn’t everything)? Everyone has internet access, computers, electricity, refrigerators, television, shopping at the same grocery stores, most have AC and heating, etc. The difference between the rich and poor in this age is far less than in past ages…

The sad thing is technology was not supposed to evolve in this manner. Technology was supposed to free up our free time and allow us the ability to pursue our interests. After all, fewer and fewer people are needed in agriculture or industrial production to produce the same or higher output than in generations past:

However, a combination of unlimited open borders and infinite Federal Reserved printed loldollars causing vast inflation sucks up the wealth created by technology. AI is not going to change this paradigm; globohomo will just let in even more illegal immigrants and print even more money, as

Peter St Onge

explains eloquently here.

The other aspect is that the amount of money needed to escape the rat race becomes higher and higher over time, the number of people who can afford to escape the rat race lessens and lessens, and more and more people are cast into the Thunderdome over time filled with crime and homelessness, even for those who carefully watch their expenses. Our overlords want everyone but themselves working as slaves; after all, if everyone middle class or above has more or less comparable lifestyles if they’re not working, how do our elites get to virtue signal their superiority? The gap between rich and poor must grow until the differences between the elites and everyone else is obvious to all. And people feel this on a subconscious level, absorbed via osmosis; the sense of desperation is growing, everyone is chasing ridiculous Ponzi schemes like cryptocurrency in the hopes of winning, lottery-like, the escape from the rat race.

So what’s the point of all this? Like most of my posts, it’s about reframing ideas about society and living. Live beneath your means and try to escape the rat race. Expect things to become harder. Try to make time in your life for your hobbies. Acknowledge that if you are beholden to a 9/5 you are a slave just as most everyone is. It sucks to be a slave but that is base reality. Giving up like NEETs is a rational choice for many but feels wrong; life is struggle and giving up does a disservice to your millions of years of ancestors. Don’t be the one to break the chain of existence. Very few people frame things in this manner, but many more should. Changing things starts with a baseline of accepting reality for what it is. From there change becomes possible.

Thanks for reading.