What you said has been my lived experience since I graduated from college in 1999.

I'm coming up on 25 years of living month to month, with nearly all of my hopes and dreams dashed by the necessity of having to pull the yoke in the workaday world. I was one of the gifted kids who probably should have worked at NASA, but nobody warned me that I'd grow up to be a people-pleaser due to ADHD symptoms. I didn't know how important it was to set boundaries to protect my mind and body, because as a geek, I didn't value my own time and had no real need of money if I could just be left alone.

But see, that's the thing: poor people can't get left alone. Borrowing money makes one a slave. Working as a wage slave at a low-paying job makes one a slave. Not having the money to afford to live alone, much less date or travel or do middle class things - destroys mental health and makes one a slave. Despite periodic financial stability and healthy relationships, I know deep down that I've mostly lived as a slave.

The big epiphany came for me during the pandemic. I hit such a rock-bottom low after developing food sensitivities and chronic fatigue from stress that rendered me unable to work for 6 months in 2019, that I left logic-based reality when COVID hit in 2020. I had to shift laterally through meditation into a neighboring reality where magic returned (where we are now at the time of this writing), in order for my soul to want to continue in this incarnation. TikTok was the gateway drug to Alan Watts, Terence McKenna and Dolores Cannon (among a great many others).

Now I view Big Tech as a clear and present danger to world peace, especially with the arrival of AI. All creative work will lose its value within 5 years. Even the security of our programming jobs isn't something that can be counted on, as AI will perform better than us at all problem solving within 10 years. Nearly all projections for environmental health, wealth inequality, the rise of authoritarianism, etc etc etc predict collapse between 2040 and 2050. We're either going to defeat the status quo or all be enslaved.

The fix is so easy and obvious that most people can't see it: tax the uber rich. Start undoing all of the trickle-down legislation passed since Reagan and put the new tax revenue towards automating the work that slaves must perform to acquire the resources to survive. Specifically: fund universal healthcare, affordable college, low-cost housing/staple foods/natural monopolies like internet service, and most importantly - UBI.

Unfortunately about half of thought leaders have either never been poor, or been poor but arrived at a pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps worldview through survivorship bias (why billionaires usually subscribe to right-wing ideology). A vanishingly small number of people go on a healing and growth journey, eventually experiencing a spiritual awakening and arriving at a leftist or trans-political worldview based on the dignity of all living things, valuing conscious awareness most of all.

I've let go of expectation that things will get better through practical application of logic, as it's probably too late for that. But I've put conscious effort into manifestation and witnessed how outer reality improves as inner reality heals. Now I lead a life of service, often sacrificing what might have been in this life to improve the lives of others, in recognition that I may be them in my next life, because we are all one. As above, so below. And so it is.

Edit: I forgot to make my point: it only takes 1% of the population waking up to cause a shift towards world peace. That's why the wealthiest 1% wield ego-based tools like fintech to suppress awakening and build empire. But the rise of the dark side is always balanced by the rise of the light side through natural law. So I believe that the meekest among us - the poor, the infirm, the light workers - are our best hope for healing and eventual peace as we transition into the New Age.