Anthem!

Young men are abandoning the workforce not because jobs disappeared, but because virtual communities offer something the real economy no longer does. Meanwhile, central banks have engineered a stock market boom that made the wealthy wealthier while leaving everyone else behind. The more policy succeeds on paper, the more people withdraw from the system itself.

• Video games and job abandonment reveal a trade. Time spent on computers by unemployed young men quintupled between 2007 and 2014. They're not desperate. They're choosing digital community over economic participation because it delivers something authentic.
• The wealth bubble looks nothing like the last one. The housing crisis made homeowners rich. This time, only people who owned stocks in 2009 got wealthy. The distributional difference is reshaping politics in ways not seen since the 1850s.
• Central bank omnipotence has become a tinny song. The narrative of Fed power doesn't match American political culture. It's European, top-down, and mechanistic. Previous bubbles came with stories people actually believed in. This one just generates suspicion.
• Alienation spreads from work into everything. When labor becomes a separate beast we resent, we stop believing in voting, markets, or patriotism. We perform these roles because we're paid to, not because we own them. The skin gets ripped away twice and we see what's underneath.
• Without a new anthem, the reset will shape us instead of the other way around. Fascism and totalitarianism are waiting in the wings with louder songs. The question isn't whether a reset comes, but whether we'll write our own narrative or let someone else write it for us.