The System Was Never Built For Us

I want to be upfront about what this post is. 

This is not a fitness post in the traditional sense. There's no training tip here, no programming advice. But it might be the most important thing I've written on this blog because it's about the context that everything else lives inside of. The world you're trying to build a body, a business, a life in. And once I understood that context clearly, it changed how my approach to life

I've been sitting with this for years. It started as a feeling that something didn't add up. It became a framework. And now it's just my perspective.

The School System Prepared You For Something. Just Not What They Said.

College and career ready. 

The one consistent message I heard throughout my K-12 Education.

My entire educational life. It was the goal, the benchmark, the thing the whole system was supposedly oriented around. And I believed it for a long time, because why wouldn't you? You're inside it. You don't have a reference point for what's outside it. Can't question things you don't even know.

Here's how I think of that phrase now: Be Prepared to enter the machine and be another cog. Prepared to be an employee. Prepared to consume. Prepare to let someone make the hard decisions in life. 

Twelve years of mandatory education and most people come out unable to read a financial statement, effectively unable to file taxes in a way that benefits THEM. The reading level of the general public is abysmal, unable to read and process information at a high school level. They don't understand how compound interest works against them on a loan, or for their savings. But they might be able to tell you the three branches of government and pass a standardized test.

I'm not saying every teacher was complicit in something deliberate. Most teachers I've known actually care. They do a wonderful job of educating and connecting with the students. The issue isn't the people inside the system. It's the inputs, the actual material, the standardized testing, which chases a statistic rather then a goal, a mission. . And what it produces, individuals trained to meet standards, not owners. Consumers, not producers.

Starting to believe these things aren't accidents. It's just not the conversation anyone has with the public.

In my humble opinion I'm starting to believe, The Financial System Works Exactly as Designed.

This is the part I had to sit with. For a long time, like literal years. I thought something was broken, that it was failing people by accident, that it was doing a bad job at its stated mission.

But hear me out, if something is broken do you not try to fix it? While millions suffer from its disrepair. Why would you let it sit and fester and continue for decades?

Because It's not broken. 

Take a normal 30 year mortgage. People never actually do the math. You borrow $300,000. Over 30 years at a standard rate (7% currently), you pay somewhere between $600,000 and $718,000 total. You paid for the house twice and then some. The bank collected fees at origination, sold the loan, and moved on. Now don't get me wrong home ownership is amazing and everyone should experience it. But you know what they say? the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

You're paying almost double, while the bank created that money out of thin air (look up 10% rule for banking [actually been lowered to 0% in 2020 during Covid still is 0%]) Now who's really benefitting? Figure out a way to finance a home that benefits you as well.

The retirement account that charges a 1-2% fee on your balance to manage your money, when most cannot beat the S& P 500. What about regular savings and checking accounts with rates so low, the bank borrows your money for free, while loaning out more then they ever earned. 

All while inflation eats 3-4% of your purchasing power annually (ON A GOOD YEAR).

You're charged, you're losing ground before the fee even applies. The only escape offered is to invest yourself, moving your own capital into markets and instruments that the same institutions manage and profit from.

This information isn't hidden, just not explicit. It's just not what gets taught in school, in most financial media, or by the average advisor. The system rewards people who understand how it works and extracts from people who don't.

The question isn't whether this is fair. The question is whether you understand it clearly enough to make decisions on your own terms.

The Job Is the Part Nobody Wants to Say Out Loud

People will argue about politics all day. They won't say the obvious thing about employment.

A job is a trade: your time in exchange for a fixed amount of money. Not some noble task you should be proud to spend all day at. That money is always less than the value you create, because the difference between what you produce and what you're paid is the employer's profit. That's not cynicism. That's just math. The business model of employment requires that gap to exist.

In exchange for that arrangement, you get, if you're lucky, health insurance with deductibles that ensure you're still paying out of pocket for real emergencies, two weeks of paid vacation, and a 401(k) with a match that can't actually fund your retirement at median income if you run the numbers.

You spend more time at your job than with the people who matter to you. You spend more of your productive hours building someone else's asset than your own. And the culture around this, the idea that this is just what adults do, that it's honorable without question, that asking whether it makes sense is somehow ungrateful that's the part that pisses me off.

Why should I go waste my day to be treated poorly, barely make enough to survive and fund a future? We live in a country that rewards ownership and assets not employment.

2020 made this visible in a way that was hard to deny, I think for everyone at least for a brief amount of time. People went home. Output more or less stayed the same. The Zoom calls worked. And it became clear that the commute, the office presence, the performance of being seen working was a facade. That was never primarily about productivity. It was about control. About keeping you inside a structure that requires your consistent physical presence to feel secure about having you.

What you actually need is income. Not a job specifically. The job is just the most controlled, lowest leverage, most time intensive way to produce it.

Both Political Parties Are Part of the Same Pattern

I' m going to say this once and I don't want to get into a debate about it because I'm not interested in which team you're on.

These two parties have been in power for over 200 years. They are the one consistent across that entire timeline in this country. They are the structural problems the wealth gap, the deterioration of real wages, the offshoring of productive capacity, the increasing cost of healthcare and housing relative to income these things have not gotten better. They've compounded. Under both parties, in different combinations of Congressional and executive control.

Democrats campaign on working people and govern for donor class. Republicans campaign on fiscal responsibility and traditional values and deliver neither. The theater of opposition keeps you emotionally invested in outcomes that don't change the fundamental architecture regardless of who wins.

There is footage of a lobbyist, on camera, explaining that they pay politicians to argue. Not to solve problems. To argue. To perform opposition while nothing that threatens institutional money gets through. This is not a conspiracy theory. This is documented, admitted, on record.

youtube.com/watch?v=LHX-dHgh4RQ&start=0

I'm not saying don't participate in the process. Not saying to give up, because the right individuals putting up a direct fight is what has always worked. I'm saying understand what the process actually is before you make it the primary place you direct your energy and frustration. Because they are playing You, I, and everyone else.

The Moment It Clicked 

It didn't happen all at once for me. It was a slow accumulation of things that individually didn't quite add up, and eventually the pattern became impossible to ignore.

Both parties producing the same outcomes over time was early. Then understanding the Federal Reserve and what the gold standard removal actually meant and why it happened when it did, took longer and more context. Then learning enough about the 401(k) architecture to see who it actually serves, was apart of my financial Journey (Money Master The Game by Tony Robbins). Then watching someone like Zuckerberg liquidate more on a Tuesday than most people will accumulate in a lifetime and realizing, they are not playing the same game. The instruments are different. The rules are different. The entire framework of how wealth works at that level is different from what gets taught as personal finance.

And the response to that can't be resentment. Resentment keeps you in the position of reacting to the system, defined by it, consumed by it. That's still being a consumer. Just of the anger instead of the product. Blame fixes nothing.

The only response that changes anything is to produce your own architecture. To stop being someone the system extracts from and start being someone who builds on their own terms. One person isn't bigger then the program, but you can take steps against it. To protect yourself from the fallout.

What This Has to Do With Training

Everything.

We aren't just training to avoid sky high medical bills, a life of terminal illness, or constantly buying clothes. We're natural investors, we make daily deposits into our future.

The same impulse that makes someone refuse to accept a body built by default, trains deliberately,  builds genuine capacity, who takes the long view on what their body is capable of. That longevity view is the same impulse that looks at the financial default and says " No, I can do better".

The Outlaw Mindset is not about the gym. It's about refusing to accept what other people decided your life should look like. That applies to your body. It applies to your money. It applies to how you spend your time and who controls your day.

I am an investor. I am a producer. Not a consumer.

That's not a motivational line. Motivation is garbage. It's a practical identity. Actually build and produce content, or value to society, consume less because do you actually need it or just been tricked into wanting it? Will it actually improve your life to consume that item?

Every decision I make gets filtered through that lens, Every dollar you make is an investment in yourself or others.

What would you build, Spend your money on?, How much can you tolerate?, What will you walk away from?

You can wait and see how the system plays out for you. Or you can start building something the system doesn't control.

That's the whole point.