From the perspective of cynic, the modern world is a big trap.
It’s not just about the cliche on the difficulty of moving up social stacks, but in every aspects of modern life.
As a typical working class person, you work for a cooperation, big or small, 9-5. Cooperate work drains the energy out of you and brings pressure and anxiety in return. After work, apps that make money on human attention serves you insts, reels, short videos, remarks, threads, or whatever they call it, as painkillers, temprorily numb you from the stress and anxiety. So you can carry on, day after day.
The trap is even bigger if you also work for an “attention” company. Badge in, your attention was spent on helping the company suck attention of other people to sell ads. Badge out, your attention was sucked by the same junk app you contributed to.
So you try to break out the trap, by starting something your own, something good, something useful. What would it be then?
Search, search, search. You watched a few videos, “How to start a business in 24hrs and make profit", “How to come up with ideas that have market fit”, then these pointed you to a few newletter subscriptions. OK, “bias towards action”. You decided to start building. Need to buy Cursor / Windsurf for AI-assisted fast coding. Launch. Why no users? Buy semrush and SEO. Install Posthog and analyze user activity.
In the end, you start to targetting on the dreamers, selling lessons or tools, teaching others to be successful yet you never did. If you’re lucky and persuading, you might build a business on teaching how to be successfuly to start business, while the only sucessful business you build is the teaching success business.
1% of success, 99% domestic circulation. Dreamer feed economy.