I was there, or more accurately not there since I wasn't in Silicon Valley, when the Dot Bomb and 9/11 shifted us into this reality. Whatever all this is.

It all started on Friday September 29, 2000 when Apple/AAPL fell by roughly half in one day due to missing its quarterly earnings estimates by a few cents:

https://money.cnn.com/2000/09/29/markets/techwrap/

My business partner at the time and I were splitting $1200/mo on shareware game proceeds from our startup. My share of the rent was $250/mo on a $500/mo apartment and my student loans were $340/mo, so for just a month or two I made rent on my own venture. I just didn't know that it would be for the last time.

Because the next month we made $12. Not a typo. Our sales collapsed with no warning, and a few months later I started moving furniture to make rent, since I had done that for a summer in college.

I had also just spent a year working on my one and only game, hoping that it would make $12-24,000 the first year and roughly double our income so that I could get to the real work of designing languages and frameworks that would greatly simplify software development. But my game only made about $2000 total because of the Dot Bomb, so that work ending up being basically pointless.

Along with my thrown-away work in pretty much all of the failed ventures I'd be part of for the next 25 years. No winning the internet lottery, not even gaining traction and feeling what it's like to try and succeed and build on that success incrementally.

In the time since, as I've pulled myself up by my bootstraps over and over, or more accurately been pulled up by friends and family, I've learned a lot about manifestation. How our feelings co-create this reality we share. And a lot of lessons. The most important being:

Success isn't being able to support yourself, but being able to support others.

That's what went wrong with the world in the time since. Instead of Wikipedia and eBay and PayPal paving the road towards a merit-based, egalitarian society that pays excess economic wealth into the commons, we have billionaires and ensh@ttification vacuuming up all available capital into a black hole of greed.

Instead of automation leading the way towards UBI and self-actualization, we have the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world cancelling government services to subjugate us into neofeudalism, which will lead to the unnecessary deaths of millions of people worldwide.

I know now that my dreams of an early win leading to a lifetime of pioneering innovation were never meant to be. And more shockingly, that had I won, I would have ended up an empty husk like Elon, or a glazed-over caricature of myself like Jeff. I'm reminded of the Twilight Zone episode A Nice Place to Visit, where a man gets everything he dreamed of only to realize that he's in hell. The only thing that keeps me going is the hope that the opposite may also be true.

I've told this story too many times and now it feels like an old sweater that doesn't fit anymore. Truthfully, there's only now. I try to do a little each day to get closer in alignment to the free world that I glimpsed so briefly.

But in the meantime, surviving this garbage economy takes everything we've got. It's hard for me to see that so many people have bought into the status quo, especially young people. Born under the yoke but calling it liberty.

That denial is why the cost of living is 2-4 times higher now than it was in the 1990s, due to deregulated capitalism encouraging monopoly. Not saying that capitalism doesn't work, just that if it did and we had actual competition instead of wealth inequality, then the cost of living would be 2-4 times lower than it was, and 4-16 times lower than it is.

There's an expression: dirty hands clean money. By that principle, we see that all profit comes at a cost to others doing the work.

And by extension, that all power takes from some to give to others.

There's a movie called August set in 2001 about the struggle to stay afloat during the collapse, starring Josh Hartnett:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0470679/

The Dot Bomb never ended. If we want to escape it, we have to meditate on letting go of ego-based goals and outsmarting the systems of control that still perpetuate it.