The world is forever trying to replace and make quick and easy the default way. Because forward is the way. Not pausing, or thinking if it can be built, "should" it be built?

The slot machine system is the default system today, where you pull the lever and you get quick food, quick entertainment, quick education, and more.

Selling quick and easy over painful, chaotic and unpredictable wins every. single. time. And the world knows it.

Of late, the quick and easy resource being threatened is you.

The great corporate revolution is happening before our eyes.

The Great Corpo Revolution: The value of no one

The Industrial Revolution started with a shift from agrarian to craft-based, mechanized production, which replaced the need for human hard labor. Things that could be better off mechanized so people didn't burn themselves in metal factories, die of starvation due to a lack of proper food distribution from the farm to the dinner table.

Humanity moved from the need for relentless hard physical labor to utilizing energy as an advancement of the species and making things comfortable, so more people could find a quality of life.

Up next, in the early 1990s, the dot-com boom began, where the commercialization of the real world took a more scalable and online form. This demonstrated how any business or individual could share and scale things online, rather than relying on traditional brick-and-mortar stores. It was a nice change to bring comfort to a lot of people, but also to have access to everything at a click.

Today, you're sold the concept that no one will need jobs, and money will mean nothing, you won't need to do any intellectual work. Well, what are you supposed to do then? Live right? But what is life really? It sure as hell wasn't working 40 hours in a cubicle, and it would be awesome to get rid of that concept forever. I'm going to be exploring this concept in a future piece because this needs fleshing out.

We went wrong somewhere with the introduction of social media.

From connecting people and bringing people closer with more than phone, but connecting businesses to people, businesses to each other, and more, something went wrong.

Like I've discussed many times before about the story of Zuckerberg starting Facebook with the concept of connection, but moving it to a greedy-capitalist form, today's "AI" holds a similar candle.

Both ideas started with a "whoa, that's cool" feeling to "what if? We could squeeze money" out of this concept. And then they took a life of their own. Becoming mega corps which both Facebook (Meta), and ChatGPT (OpenAI).

Both started with a cool concept that morphed into a mean capitalistic hunger. And no, this isn't a socialist vs capitalist vs communism debate place.

Somewhere, the value of life and human values lost their way because attention and showing up on the slot machine feed became the primary goal.

We pick up this slot machine and hope we get lucky or find something amazing. They're designed to be that way. And in that very process, you start losing your value like old people playing in Vegas' slot machines with no thought or reason behind it.

Social media-linked value

The value of a human drops each day they're playing this slot machine, and they dictate the rules. Since you're not in control of the algorithm, try as hard as marketers or anyone else may.

Whether you try to share value-driven posts, perspectives, stories, or templates, unless it connects with a human who then shares your "thing" with more, your value remains in question.

Till the time your "thing" doesn't connect, your value remains in question as a marketing KPI. More conversions, click-through rates, and more three-letter words that dictate how "good" you may be at your job as a marketer or a human. All dictated by slaves of the algorithm, the pyramid structure of corporations, and the hierarchy of drones in them.

Today, information is readily available to anyone through LLMs, Social media, streaming platforms, and more. But information you can "use" and hammer into your brain is definitely and rightfully preserved where you need to spend time and effort. In books, courses, podcasts, dare I say even RPGs? Anyone?

However, with all this information and its access, the value of you as a human remains in question until your "thing" takes off. Your "thing" is your message amplified in books, your presence, your social media, everything where you can express yourself meaningfully and authentically instead of adding more sludge to the corpo gears that power humanity today.

Social media today feels like a popularity contest, a farmers' market, and a slot machine all-in-one. So "making it" without pleasing the algorithms is a challenge for anyone who is trying to do their own thing, trying to see if the promise of "anyone can make it" is true or a big fat lie. Yes, looks matter, but your words, your actions matter more than the slot-machine-generated words today. The mere act of showing up and doing what you say means you believe in the message you're trying to sell or help others with. Because no amount of good copy can help where actions and value fail.

Age-based value: You don't matter until….

From birth, we're taught in most human cultures that our value as a person starts taking shape at age 18 or 21. How nothing you do matters before then, because you're not ready for the great corporate ripening just yet.

I could go on, but early or late, one thing was clear: the ability to believe and start doing their own thing. Beginning their life's work, no matter how many rejections and how many skeptics they faced.

Today, at age 17, most of humanity is conditioned into the belief that they don't matter and can't make anything of their life until they get a job, then get married, then have kids, and other conditioning is set up by society.

All this conditioning to be laid off, be in forever feast or famine as a freelancer, be a starving artist, or another part of the great societal and corpo machinery. All this to perpetuate the cycle further.

Not sure if you're aware or have watched the movie "3 Idiots", but one point the main character raises is, why would the head of the college use one number to assess someone's worth, and the same analogy may not apply to measuring his own waist size or intelligence.

It's the same thing today, the movie made a powerful point, but it didn't survive in most of society, which takes it as just fiction and learned nothing from it because you can't teach someone who's not willing to learn.

Believing in yourself one day at a time

There's one thing you can be absolutely sure of: if you lack something, the world will try to fill that gap with its own will. And surprise surprise, it won't be for your best!

→ If you lack passion, you will be sold products that simulate passion. You will be sold someone else's passion. Simply told to look up to fulfil someone else's dreams and passions and silence your own. Cue the song: What's the most high-income skill or hobby to learn in 2025?

→ If you're lonely, you'll be the free product sold to others who haven't fixed the root cause of their loneliness. Cue the song of AI: AI chatbots, AI therapists, and now even AI girlfriends. True Dystopian nightmare.

The secret was always effort mixed with belief. Belief in yourself, belief in the effort put in by a human therapist, counsellor, teacher, or writer. But where teachers were the most criminally underpaid profession, therapists the most misunderstood and dealing with skeptics, and writing the most useful skill, is all taken for granted and thought of as anyone can be good at it.

The same people never believed in therapy. The same people didn't pay much for education, and they put in the time and effort to apply what a writer or a thought leader talks about.

And now, everyone needs one for an insanely low cost of a 20$ slot machine pull away.

This same interpretation for knowledge work starts all the way from the bottom to the top of the ladder in business. Where you're sold that an AI agent, or an N8N automation, or some other Middleman object or tool can do what you can do quicker, faster, without adding complexity to the process.

All this would make anyone lose heart and value in carrying on with what they love.

But there is hope. And light at the end of the tunnel, too!

The issue was never about your value in question. You could do what any human could, but the hammering of beliefs, conditioning from the environment, dictated everything you would be in adulthood. And you can still make that change, because for the AI-doom scenario that's constantly sold to you, you'll have to do it all over again. Except this time, for yourself.

The best way to do so?

SHOW YOUR WORK to your audience and hammer the "thing" you're good at as often as possible from a place of dedication, passion, and effort. Because AI slop or AI slot machines are here to stay, since the genie is out of the bottle, and you can't wait for nature to restore balance. But you can choose your way of life, and choosing to believe you're not worthless without a job, without a family, or without even a purpose if you've not found one yet.

I'm working on something really cool, and hope to show you all really soon. Because words don't matter today till actions follow suit!

Till next time,

Ankit | mark. it. | And I market