Author: DAN KOE

Compiled by: Yuliya, PANews

Editor's Note: If you believe the panic on social media, you might think "all jobs are about to be replaced by AI." Many people label themselves "anti-AI," using online outrage to mask their own unwillingness to change and refusal to grow.

However, AI is not the biggest threat; the real crisis lies in placing your survival and happiness entirely in the hands of others. When technological change arrives, if you naively believe others are responsible for your future, you are destined for profound disappointment.

You can't control the AI behemoth by complaining. Posting on social media about how much you hate AI won't stop jobs from being replaced, and it absolutely won't stop the core skills needed for success from changing in this era of constant technological evolution. This article explores how to escape the "wage slave" worker's fate and find meaningful ways to work. Below is the original article:

1. How to Escape the Worker's Fate

To put it bluntly, "wage slavery" (the worker's fate) is being forced to do meaningless drudgery you never wanted to do for others, just to make a living.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not against having a job.

I think a job is a pretty good springboard, allowing you to accumulate real-world experience and learn genuine skills.

But every time I say something "bad" about work, a wave of people jumps out to attack me: "What do you know! I actually quite like my job!"

That's great. I'm not talking to you (and deep down, I kind of feel you're probably lying to yourself, just to avoid exploring your own potential, and you haven't realized it yet).

I'm talking to those who truly understand the "psychology of enjoyment." Because they simply cannot endure this life script: spending a third of your life doing work you didn't choose, a third mentally drained to the point of being unable to do anything meaningful, and the remaining third sleeping... and doing this for over 40 years.

You see, true enjoyment, meaning, and fulfillment are actually hidden at the edge of your abilities. There's scientific evidence for this. Don't expect me to cite sources here. Enjoyment comes from grappling with challenges that are just slightly above your current skill level. Not too hard, or you'll get anxious; not too easy, or you'll get bored. Video games have mastered this. The quests you take are always "just the right difficulty," because if a level 1 newbie fights a level 100 boss, they'll get one-shotted and delete the game. This is the strongest driver for entering a flow state. If you can design your life to easily trigger flow, there will naturally be plenty of enjoyment.

But the problem with a job is that after a few months, you've learned everything there is to know. Every day is clock in, work, clock out. You start feeling utterly bored. This goes against your nature, and you feel it inside. Your attention is no longer focused on work but starts wondering: "What else can I do?" For the vast majority of people, this "something else" is definitely not some grand meaningful goal, but pulling out their phone and starting to scroll through short videos, letting their brain rot. Very few jobs require you to constantly level up and face greater challenges.

Career advancement is certainly beneficial, but again, you can't control the difficulty of the challenges. After all, you're not working on your own project. The five engines driving flow—curiosity, passion, purpose, autonomy, and mastery—are destined to run low on fuel for you.

So what does this have to do with wage slavery?

Essentially, human civilization is built on tribes enslaving tribes. This underlying logic has never disappeared; it just changed its guise into the current employment relationships, laws, and culture. Today's society, to put it bluntly, is a giant pyramid scheme. There are always more people at the bottom than at the top; mathematically, not everyone can be the boss. One boss leads a group of employees, and to survive, the employees can only cling tightly to the boss's coattails.

Most of our generation were mass-produced by assembly-line education: you must become a specialist, you must master a single craft, you must find a high-paying job, so your parents can save face in front of relatives and friends. Precisely because you obediently followed orders, you are completely in the dark about how the entire business operates. You only mastered the craft of tightening a specific screw but never figured out how the system that pays your salary works. You didn't spend time in other areas, so you have no idea how to start your own thing. The only thing you know how to do is play the role of a good employee in someone else's enterprise.

Unknowingly, your ability to think independently was crippled, even if you are recognized as a "smart person" in your field. You earn a decent salary, but you just feel insecure and financially unfree, thus you are swept into an anxious, stressful dead loop. Stress narrows your vision, making it increasingly hard to imagine a life where you strike out on your own.

You have no startup capital to chase your dreams, no time for self-improvement. You're probably already exhausted (mentally, not physically), with no energy to re-enrich yourself, because most of your waking hours are spent helping others realize their dreams.

By the way, the only way to survive the coming wave of comprehensive AI replacement is: to run your own business.

Sadly, slaves often don't know they are slaves. This matter has long transcended wage slavery. We are all slaves to some degree, usually trapped by various concepts and belief systems.

When people talk about slavery, they always imagine being forced at gunpoint. But the worker's slavery is financial. If missing a day of work makes your world collapse, and you have no other way to make money, then no matter how "good" you feel, you perfectly fit the definition of a slave.

What's worse, if you've etched "I am an employee" into your DNA, you might even feel I'm insulting you with these words. You'll instinctively put up defense mechanisms, you'll want to argue with me, which is fine, but it precisely proves my point is correct.

I think you get my point. It's indeed harsh; I feel sick just thinking about it. So let's talk about what solutions exist now and what you can do.

2. The Five Core Elements of Success

If you don't design your own life's rhythm, others will force theirs upon you.

The vast majority of people, for most of their lives, are forced to learn things they never wanted to learn, to find a job they don't care about, and to work daily with people they absolutely wouldn't want to associate with privately.

While I think AI, technology, and social media have indeed accelerated our awakening, making us realize that school and employment aren't the only ways to live, I also think people are simply worn out by the overwhelming sense of meaninglessness in the world around them.

For those long tired of the conventional path, to build "resilience" and continue doing meaningful things even if all jobs disappear, you need to master these five core ingredients:

1. Agency: The ability to "just do it" without needing permission from others. That is, when an opportunity presents itself, you can seize it even if no one gives the order.

2. Taste: That intuitive experience of "I can tell at a glance if this thing is worth showing in public."

3. Persuasion: The ability to make others willingly pay for your thing, and this isn't about cheating or swindling.

4. Persistence: Understanding that making mistakes isn't the end of the world, and that trial and error is a necessary process.

5. Iteration: The process of continuously correcting errors based on feedback and moving closer to the goal (if it doesn't work, learn and adjust direction until it succeeds).

Everyone is now obsessed with becoming a "high-agency" person. I get it, it's important. All the tech bigwigs mimic each other, talking about how important high agency is, which ironically exposes their own lack of agency.

Yes, you do need the drive to proactively pursue goals. This is one of the most fundamental differences between a boss and a worker. So-called entrepreneurs are those who create things no one asked them to create.

But this is just one piece of the entrepreneurial puzzle.

The five elements above can actually be boiled down to two skills: problem-solving ability, and the accumulated experience of knowing what to do.

So far, AI is excellent at asset creation, but creating a hit is not the same as asset creation. Asset creation is a necessary but insufficient condition for creating a hit.

"Just like 5 years ago, anyone could make a video game last week. The technology is available, it's been completely commoditized. Do you know how many mobile games are released every year? Thousands. Do you know how many become hits each year? Zero to five."

—— Strauss Zelnick

Now anyone can build anything, which means the barrier to entrepreneurship (the antidote to escaping the wage trap) is still plummeting, but so what:

You can go develop an app right now. Not to build the next Notion, but to develop an app or tool of manageable scale, focused on an expected outcome that people genuinely benefit from. Something that doesn't necessarily have to be a blockbuster to generate value.

I actually highly recommend doing this; I think software is the next era's "knowledge-paid product." What I mean is, developing software will become the default choice for creators, solo entrepreneurs, and other single-person businesses. The reason knowledge-paid products thrived for so long was the low barrier to entry—anyone could do it—but that didn't mean anyone could make money doing it.

The diagram above illustrates the first problem.

You can make anything, but that doesn't mean (1) it's worth making; (2) people will care; (3) you have the ability to persist and iterate based on market feedback, refining it into something good that is worth making and people care about.

If you truly understand this sentence, you will absolutely thrive.

The second problem is: agency, taste, persuasion, persistence, and iteration are not "high-value skills" you can learn by watching a few YouTube tutorials. Reading motivational posts online every day about how to improve agency won't give you an ounce more agency.

The only way to practice is to immediately start doing your own thing.

3. The Antidote to Employment is Making Yourself "Unemployable"

I still remember the day I took on my first web design freelance project.

I remember they gave me $300 to hand-code a tacky website. The client was a mattress seller, and they just wanted a place where people could see their mattresses online.

It was that simple.

$300.

That was the moment of my epiphany. I knew deep down that if I could repeat the process I had just gone through, optimize it, iterate a few more times, and make money from it, I would be able to firmly take control of my lifestyle and future direction. This completely turned me into someone who "can't hold a regular job." A persistent thought took root in my mind: I will never work for someone else again in this life; I want to carve out my own path—though it might sound a bit adolescent.

But that 300 yuan doesn't cover all the groundwork that led to that moment—like the shift in my identity, and how I initially coaxed and tricked myself into believing this could work. Even less does it represent what I learned through seven years of trial and hardship afterward.

I want to give you two things: one is to guide you through a shift in identity perspective, turning you into an "unemployable person" to your very core, not just someone who thinks it sounds cool; the other is an action plan that anyone can implement in their own way.

1) Throw yourself into an environment that forces you to grow

The fastest shortcut to changing your life is to uproot yourself from your existing environment (whether in real life or the online world). Overnight, transform yourself. The places you go, the bloggers you follow, the content you watch... change it all. It's painful, but it's incredibly effective.

Changing behavior = Changing identity.

It's like saying you want to diet and lose 30 pounds, but if deep down you don't care about health and can't stand that bland lifestyle, you'll always feel like you're swimming against the current. In the end, like the vast majority of people, you'll gain back all the weight you worked so hard to lose, unless you become a completely new person from the inside out.

So how exactly do you do it?

First, it helps to understand how you became the person you are today.

• From birth, you were thrown into a family and cultural circle with specific values.

• You were subtly indoctrinated with these values, even if your parents didn't force you at gunpoint.

• You went to schools with specific values and were brainwashed by teachers carrying specific values.

• You are bombarded daily by massive amounts of information, which might lead you down the rabbit holes of rebellion, lying flat, or a victim mentality.

• Once you got a phone, this brainwashing process accelerated dramatically due to social media feeds and our primitive, uncontrollable brains.

There's certainly more nuance here, but you get my point.

This isn't entirely a bad thing; sometimes it's quite necessary. I've heard a bunch of gurus who constantly talk about "being your authentic self," saying how much they hate "imitation" and copying. But what's the result? They still walk on two legs and speak English. Why? Because that's human society. You are imitating. It's called learning.

But things get bad when your actions run counter to the life you truly desire deep down. There's a voice inside you always whispering: "I was born to do something big."

To reformat yourself, you must start by overhauling your environment.

You must be absolutely vigilant about all stimuli around you, because they are shaping you every single moment.

Here's what you need to do: Sleep tonight, and tomorrow, flip the switch completely.

When you wake up tomorrow morning, absolutely do not repeat yesterday's path, even if just for one day. Set your alarm for a different time. Plan out every single thing you'll do after waking up. Eat something different. Talk to people you usually ignore. Watch content you'd never have watched before. A total overhaul.

As you learn more, you'll gradually figure out the direction in which to tailor your new environment.

2) Choose a medium that gives you the most honest feedback

The most dangerous lifestyle is hiding in a greenhouse where you never have to test your ideas.

Once you stop experiencing the process of making mistakes, it means you're detached from challenge, exploration, and the wisdom earned through hardship—the very path leading to growth and fulfillment.

This doesn't just apply to jobs where the challenge level plateaus once you're familiar with the tasks. It also applies to doing business and entrepreneurship, and even to those who, despite being the boss, can't shake the employee mindset: always needing someone to tell them what to do, or always needing a manual to feel confident in their steps.

Let me ask you a question:

Before the internet, before the massive amount of "how-to guides" and step-by-step processes, how did people figure things out? How was the first rocket built?

They tried. They failed. They didn't let failure convince them it was impossible, nor did they give up and scroll through short videos for a dopamine hit when they hit a wall. They set a new course based on the feedback reality gave them. Eventually, they found the needle in the haystack.

They were the truly smart ones.

Because the most defining characteristic of an intelligent system is the ability to correct its course based on feedback. They had a lighthouse in their hearts, and when blown off course by the wind, they didn't choose to give up.

When I talk to you about entrepreneurship, this is what I mean.

I mean embracing your most primal nature. To create. To chase unknown goals that you absolutely cannot achieve without taking a few hard falls.

This is the single common trait among almost all high achievers.

For them, failure isn't a derogatory term at all, but an indispensable part of living an extraordinary life.

Sounds inspiring, but in today's society, how do you actually put this into practice?

3) If you want to thrive in the future, you must master at least one of these two skills

"Code and media are super-leverages that require no one's permission. They are the secret weapons behind the nouveau riche's sudden wealth. You just write software or create content, and they silently work for you while you sleep soundly."

— Naval Ravikant

As a beginner, as an individual, you have no idea what terrifying leverage resources you hold in your hands, especially in the age of AI.

And I'm not talking about low-level players who use ChatGPT like a search engine, or artists who rage because AI "plagiarized" their work.

The level I'm talking about is this epiphany: you realize you can actually build anything, because AI has forcefully pushed you into the fast lane of trial and error. Yes, the stuff generated initially will definitely be an eyesore, but as long as you have initiative, can iterate, know how to persist, and casually cultivate your taste along the way, you are virtually omnipotent, and this trend will only get stronger in the future. Then, if you also have some skill in persuading others, the system you've built can count money for you while you dream.

Of course, this was possible before AI too. The core issue is that most people simply don't understand this principle: as long as you gather the 5 key ingredients for success and stretch the timeline long enough, there's nothing in this world you can't achieve. AI just gives you an accelerator, allowing you to do more, faster, and hands you a bunch of privileges you never dared to imagine before—like the superpower to write code, and a turbocharged efficiency for learning and research.

That being said, I genuinely believe that understanding media (content) is more advantageous than understanding code.

When we talk about media, it essentially means creating content.

Text and images, videos, podcasts, or articles—once you publish them, they can be seen by thousands or even millions of people. In my view, this is the most valuable iron rice bowl of the future, especially now when the entire internet is hoping to generate content with one click using AI.

Because to create content, you need the eye to know what is "good stuff."

You still need to accumulate the kind of insight AI can't give you, because you simply haven't endured the trials of making mistakes yet. You don't even know what prompts to feed the AI.

The value of content is highly subjective. A thousand readers see a thousand different Hamlets. In other words, there is no "standard answer" in content creation.

In contrast, the value of code is too objective. As long as the program runs, nobody cares how you wrote it. As we discussed earlier, there are more apps in the app store now than ever before, but downloads and usage rates are plummeting.

Why?

Because they simply don't understand distribution! They know nothing about media and content. They can't even convince people to download, let alone make them feel the app is good enough to pay for.

As a side note, the content creation I'm talking about isn't what the gimmick-peddlers on Instagram boast: "I handed my account over to Claude and woke up with 100k followers." That kind of traffic is worthless except for looking good, unless you're connecting with followers by telling stories and building authority. Of course, you can use Eden for this, but only if you're clear about what game you're playing.

Like JK Molina said: Likes don't pay the bills.

Advanced content creation is definitely not about posting a few risqué pictures or rage-bait posts to trick people into following.

Oh, and if you haven't realized it yet: the new environment you force yourself into to reshape your identity should be packed with people, circles, and habit triggers related to your ideal life. Creating content is also a part of this game.

4. How to Start: Carve out 15 minutes a day to rewrite your life's trajectory

You've already ruthlessly overhauled your environment. You've chosen the medium you want to master. You understand that creating content is more valuable than coding, because the value of content lies entirely in the eye of the beholder. This subjectivity will quickly cause mass-produced AI articles to become worthless, thereby leaving a vast private plot of land for real creators—whether you use AI assistance or not, because again, AI was never the core issue.

Now, there's only one most critical question left for you to answer: What exactly do you want to accomplish in this life? (i.e., your life's work)

This is the stage we're going to build together. What we're aiming for is a life's work, not a flashy "personal brand."

Peterson, Huberman, Watts—these big names indeed have "personal brands," but these labels are tightly bound to their ultimate goals. They know what they want, and then conveniently use social media as a tool to get things done. Because this approach, combined with AI, is currently the biggest ultimate move you can unleash as a solo individual. After all, if you're starting from zero, you're unlikely to find much success with television, radio, or traditional publishers.

*Note:

• Jordan Peterson is a Canadian clinical psychologist, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, and a renowned cultural critic. He has immense global influence due to his insights in personality psychology and his public speeches on the internet regarding personal growth and social trends.

• Andrew Huberman is a famous American neuroscientist and currently a professor in the Department of Neurobiology at Stanford University School of Medicine. He has made several important contributions to fields like brain development and neuroplasticity.

• Alan Watts was a British philosopher, writer, and speaker. He called himself a "philosophical entertainer" and dedicated his life to interpreting and popularizing Eastern philosophies like Zen Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism from China, Japan, and India for the Western world.

Their personal brand is simply who they are as a person.

It is their identity marker.

If you want to see what your own identity marker looks like with your own eyes, just go through Eden's onboarding guide. It will directly generate a relationship graph for you to explore freely.

Most people love this concept, but they quickly hit a wall. They all run off chasing dopamine hits, searching all day for things like "which niche of short videos is easiest to make 100k a month," yet they stubbornly refuse to dig into the experiences and stories accumulated over years of trial and error—simply because they think these things are too ordinary to themselves and surely no one would watch.

The raw material for building your life's work is already buried in your mind. It's just been filled in over the years by what others taught you: "specialize in one skill," "be realistic," "don't ask so many whys." This process isn't about stuffing you with some novel idea. On the contrary, it's about showing you what you already possess.

Please take this seriously.

Close all your messy browser tabs. Open a blank document. Set a 15-minute timer. Write down every question below honestly. Don't skip any question that makes you uncomfortable.

Step 1: Unearth Your Raw Material

The things that could have made you shine were smoothed over long ago by acquired rules. Your curiosity was treated as not being serious about a proper career. Your desire to dabble in everything was scolded as being unfocused. Because this system only needs an obedient worker bee.

Your content will only attract an audience if it is squeezed from your own flesh and blood.

Answer the following questions. If you can't think of an answer, skip it and let the question simmer in your subconscious for a while:

• What knowledge do you possess so deeply that it absolutely cannot be an accident? What topic would you willingly spend years researching across dozens of sources, even if you never earned a penny from it?

• What problems have you solved that you assumed others had already figured out? What innate abilities do you have that seem to leave others helpless?

• What things got you into trouble as a child, but were actually just you expressing your interests prematurely? Before you were told something was impractical, what were you obsessed with?

Now, circle one answer. The one that stirs something within you. This is your raw material. Forget about niches, content pillars, and things like that. What you need to care about is the quality of your ideas, because that is what ultimately wins.

Step 2: Find Your "Anti-Consensus" Backbone

No one needs another person repackaging common sense. Your content needs a unique perspective that only you can see. This perspective comes from something you firmly believe, but which the mainstream gets wrong. Taste is not just about knowing what is good. It's more about seeing through what is broken and being unable to look away. Answer the following questions:

• Which piece of mainstream advice actually made your life worse? What old beliefs did you have to discard to restore normalcy to your life?

• Regarding your field, what do you firmly believe, even if experts would call you naive, that you will never waver on?

• In your industry, what is everyone pretending not to see?

Look at the answers from Step 1 and Step 2 together. Where they overlap is your direction. Your answers to these questions are your first batch of posts. The best brand is simply the public publishing of a person's inner world for people to explore.

Step 3: Post Your First Idea Tomorrow

This is a letter, not a course. I really wish I could cram 20 modules in here, but I can't; that's what bootcamps are for. The final step to breaking free from financial dependence on others is to actually take action, and real action starts with publishing your first post.

From the previous step, you've already written down ideas for posts. Pick one.

Think about how to make the opening grab attention.

Think about how to phrase the body text to create impact.

Embrace this reality: the first version will absolutely suck, but you can't improve something that doesn't exist.

If you want a little help, here is a prompt/trick to help you brainstorm different angles and draft different versions, giving you an intuitive feel for what "good" content is. These are built on proven methods. We discussed this previously in the letter "Growing on Social Media is Simple."

Your task is very simple.

Take one answer from Step 1 and one answer from Step 2. Combine them into a single sentence that only you could write. Then post it tomorrow as your first piece of content. A post, a video, a newsletter. The format doesn't matter yet.

Now, you finally have real feedback from facing reality.

If it doesn't perform well, great, you have something to learn. You must study, find a persuasion technique to try in the next post, and then the next, until you master this skill, because skill acquisition is the process of stacking techniques when you encounter problems.

If you are the type of person still saying right now, "I wish this were more hands-on," then you are truly blind. I have already given you the formula for doing anything. And you just received feedback from your own brain, but you failed to recognize it as an error needing correction.