This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “To which degree is not having enough time, and being relatively busy, contribute to most people not being able to come up with new ground breaking ideas, make new inventions, or even making novels, manga etc.?”

Many answers are the typical soporifics based on the presumption that today’s economics are “normal.” There is no accommodation for the dysfunctional state of economic affairs people live with today.

People can conceptualize how one income earner per family was the norm 50 years ago. Still, they can’t imagine the math well enough to understand the differences between then adequately and now when a two-income family can barely make ends meet.

During the heyday of the middle class and the economics of a time we’ve lost, blue-collar labourer dad could earn enough from his low-skilled job to afford a mortgage, a relatively new vehicle, and an annual vacation for himself, his wife, and their two-and-a-half kids.

That’s just a pipe dream which no longer exists for the average citizen, particularly not when a large contingent of full-time employees can’t afford stable housing.

Unskilled labour means being unable to afford to live. In the U.S., one needs two full-time jobs to afford to rent a cheap private suite. Shared accommodation is the only way to make ends meet. Consolidating incomes to meet basic survival needs has become the norm.

One job is no longer enough to survive on.

Forget investing in one’s future.

Income mobility has all but vanished.

Everyone today has been living with a supplemental income in a gig economy while learning to monetize every waking moment to feed and clothe themselves for so long that it’s become a normalized existence.

There’s no time left for a social life, let alone any entrepreneurial initiative. Topping that challenge off, no disposable income exists to permit investments in education or capital purchases to allow expansion. One must scrimp and save while sacrificing meeting sleep and nutritional requirements to cobble together something of a hope for building a better future.

It’s insane, and no one knows any better because the period in which trillions have been stolen from the working class has happened so slowly that one would have to understand what starting from scratch then was like compared to what starting from scratch today is like.

How unfortunate for me but fortunate for those who will listen. The difference between then and now is nightmare and day.

Getting a job that would not only pay for living expenses and a social life while having plenty left over to bank and save for an education was a matter of a decent paying labour job during summer break from school and a part-time job during the academic year. Even with those financial burdens, there was still plenty of disposable income to afford a very healthy social life. A concert back then, for example, didn’t cost a week’s worth of pay but half of a shift for one night’s work — a movie cost less than one hour’s worth of labour. A movie night out now is an entire day’s worth of labour.

I think it’s essential to stop counting numbers on the level of an abstraction like money and start counting the increasing costs we’ve been enduring based on our time because that’s the most valuable commodity each of us has.

It’s much easier to ignore the costs we’ve been increasingly enduring without matching increases in our income when they’re treated like abstractions. If we were to look at how much time has been stolen from our lives, I’m pretty sure the guillotines would be out in full force right now.

The problem with factoring economic changes based on dollar figures is that it allows the victim-shaming mindset we see displayed by so many sycophants for the wealthy to assert their nonsense positions with righteous indignity.

They can remain utterly oblivious to reality and the delusional nature of presumptions autonomically adjusted to a dysfunctional economy while failing to account for the severe impact on one’s time that has been stolen from the working class.

It’s been slightly over ten years ago now that I had my life destroyed by a nuclear bomb being dropped on it, not because of anything I did but because others assumed their fraudulent righteousness permitted the devastating assault. That was a severe lesson in the extent to which overcompensating behaviour can become a destructive force in society — that I intend to share in more detail but not here because it’s a distraction from the point of this answer.

At any rate, I can unequivocally state that if that had happened to me when I first started carving out my niche for a professional future almost 50 years ago, it would have been a relatively minor event in my life. I would have recovered within a couple of years and been well on my way to having put that traumatic nightmare in my rearview mirror.

Instead, I’ve struggled to regain my footing for over ten years. The life I had is gone and unrecoverable.

Instead of making small bits of progress on the road to recovery, I’ve been enduring an increasing degradation in my quality of life as I find bits of it and my dignity being slowly stripped from me every day, not because of my bad decisions or because of anything I’ve done to warrant this nightmare, but because others choose to pile on their abuses atop the mountain that weighs me down.

For example, I’m currently scrimping to put together enough of a buffer in my economics to afford a minor upgrade to a graphics card that will allow me to become more efficient and competitive in the marketplace while allowing me to work at resolutions that can secure income. It’s funny how an obscure specification such as image resolution can hinder success, but that’s our world today. Forty years ago, such a minor upgrade would have been, at most, a couple of months of saving up spare cash to pay cash for the upgrade. I’m saving to afford an additional monthly payment for an 18-month commitment.

The world we live in today is characterized by a lifestyle I first became familiar with in art school with the dynamic of patrons. Relationships between artists and their patrons financed art production in the Middle Ages. Today’s equivalent to that in the high-tech world is an “incubator.” For general entrepreneurs, it means a guest appearance on Shark Tank to hope a capitalist can see a parasitic profit relationship from your initiative by doing nothing but assume control over your enterprise and collecting cash for your efforts.

The alternative for the little people is to turn to the government to find themselves herded through an infantilization process and vetted to identify the value to be extracted from them by financial enterprises that have developed relationships with pseudo-government entities called “Stewardship.” They are intended to provide business development services but don’t do anything beyond setting you up to be bilked by predatory lenders from whom they get a cut.

In my case, I went along with the puppy mill program with a naive attitude that I could trust a government-aligned agency to tell me the truth about my options. I went along with the program to develop a concrete plan for recovering my entrepreneurial income within a couple of years with a product idea and niche that would generate over $100 thousand per year working for myself without needing support staff.

A simple demand loan of less than $15,000 would have been sufficient to get my life back on track. I discovered early on that it wasn’t even on their radar for a support option. As it turned out, the $10,000 in financing I was promised was not even close to possible by the time I had completed their program.

I was informed at the outset that I was eligible for a grant that would have made financing possible. At the end of my programs for creating my business and financial planning documents, I asked what had happened to the grant. I received crickets as a response and then was insulted with condescension by someone who’s never been an entrepreneur and nothing more than a bookkeeper.

The fact that I had progressively managed to succeed on my terms for over 25 years and that I had proven I knew what I was doing when I provided an advanced business plan in greater detail than they expected or had ever seen through their program was irrelevant. (Most people I met in the rudimentary courses I was herded through were quite naive about business processes. I found myself contributing value on a level that augmented the instructors’ efforts — and in which they expressed a sincere appreciation because it increased class engagement).

Everything, every entity, and every stage in society is rigged at every level from a predatory perspective to drain value from anyone unlucky enough to have to rely on their “altruistic” roles in society. It’s become a game of indentured leveraging, not unlike the days of gladiators who would agree to a couple of years in the arena getting beaten and stabbed to get themselves out of debt.

Had I been living through the same economy as when I started, I would not have even needed to rely on external support. I would have had sufficient disposable income from a typical labour job to use my initiative to climb out of this nightmare of a hole I’ve been dumped into — within only a few years.

The short answer to the question posed after this long-winded rant is that it is to EVERY degree that the little people no longer have a hope of income mobility. The ideas, inventions, and initiatives still exist. It’s the resources we once had that have vanished from the landscape. It’s the disposable income that we could rely on to improve our lives that no longer exists.

That is the most motivationally destructive assault the wealthy have perpetrated upon us, and I would not be able to restrain myself in the presence of many of the sociopathic assholes who are playing games with our lives. While increasing their hoards to historic levels of obscenity, they parasitically drain our value from us.

The dynamics of today’s economy are enraging on a level I could never have imagined experiencing, but here we are. I’m now someone who, after a lifetime of being vehemently against capital punishment, endorses precisely that with guillotines for the 1% in our society if they don’t wake up and start taking economic restorations seriously and beginning with supporting UBI.

With UBI, all the repressed creativity withheld from society and human progress will be released into a new era to make our first Renaissance appear like a trial run. We are on the verge of a fully automated society. The only thing holding us back from an explosion of creativity and initiative is the sick competition among the most parasitic among us to become the world’s first trillionaire.