The Future of Human Agency
Why Young Men will gamble it all in the next decade and why It doesn’t have to be that way
I wanted to write this essay as a year‑end reflection and a way to clarify my focus for the year ahead.
My attempt to condense the thoughts I had over the past year: why I decided to move to San Francisco, why I started TalentOS, and making what feels like an unconventional bet on positive agency.
The Rise of Negative Agency
More people are starting to notice a trend that feels uncomfortable to say out loud: the dominant social economics pattern of the coming decade may look like degeneracy, or what I’d call negative agency.
By negative agency, I mean people taking morally decaying or self‑destructive actions in hope of status, money, or a sense of control.
A recent article, The Prison of Financial Mediocrity, which reached over 15 million people on X, laid out the current setup of why the world is heading this way clearly.
1. The traditional path to wealth accumulation is closing
Boomers own over 50% of nation’s wealth while making up a fraction of the population. Millennials, despite being a similar size, own a 10% share. Housing costs doubled while wages barely moved. Inflation spiked living costs.
The old formula of work hard, stay loyal to a job, buy a house no longer works for a large part of the population.
2. AI is coming for white‑collar work
For the last century, the deal was simple: get college educated, become a knowledge worker, and you’ll be valuable. That deal is breaking. AI already outperforms most white‑collar workers, it’s improving fast and everybody knows it’s a matter of when before they all get automated away.
3. The perception of underclass has shifted
In the last century, being underclass meant trying not to die: from starvation, disease, or war. For much of the world today, basic needs are met. The underclass has shifted from survival to stagnation.
It now looks like being stuck in a 9‑to‑5, making enough to survive but never enough to advance. Working hard with no clear path forward. Wanting more freedom, movement, and meaning, but not seeing a realistic way to get there.
To be fair, social media amplifies this gap. You’re constantly shown people who appear to have “escaped”. As a result, the fight of the new underclass isn’t for survival anymore. It’s to feel like your life is going somewhere. And for many, the traditional path no longer offers that.
Symptoms
The symptoms of this negative agency shift are easy to see.
Young people are gambling at rates that look like a social movement. Legal sports betting grew from $248M in 2017 to $13.7B in 2024 which young people now account for roughly three‑quarters of betting activity.
Crypto trading. Memecoins. Prediction markets. Lottery tickets. All grown 100x over the past decade.
Charlie Munger said, “Show me the incentives and I’ll show you the outcomes.”
Given these incentives, it’s not strange that young men are gambling everything to escape what feels like a permanent underclass. It becomes the logical choice. A 5% chance of escape starts to look better than a 100% chance of staying stuck.
Why This Is Happening
To understand why, we have to understand agency.
People don’t gamble because they love taking risks. They gamble because they want their actions to matter.
Negative agency is still agency. And humans innately crave agency.
The casino becomes the most obvious place people feel agency. Modern financial markets and speculative instruments often mimic this same dynamic. Most people know the house always wins yet they still play. Because even in a casino, your decisions matter. Your research matters. You get immediate feedback. Even if the edge is imaginary, it feels real.
That’s how much we, humans, need agency.
Humans are meant to go on hero’s journeys. It’s an innate path of positive self-growth that humans discover as a calling. That calling hasn’t disappeared. But the ways young people have been answering that calling have gone sideways.
But It doesn’t have to be this way. We can rebuild positive agency. And we have to.
Rebuilding Positive Agency
I don’t think a future dominated by negative agency is inevitable.
At the end of the day, this is an incentive problem. And incentives can be redesigned.
If we want people to take positive agency, we need to build systems that make that path visible and rewarding.
There are a few tailwinds that make me optimistic.
First, Silicon Valley or American entrepreneurship more broadly still acts as a shining beacon of positive agency. Build something valuable, and become rich. It’s one of the few places where your positive effort can directly turn into leverage.
Second, AI. Yes AI replaces jobs but it also enables entrepreneurship at scale. Anyone with an idea can now prompt their thoughts into reality. AI is a perfect medium for expressing positive agency — apps, art works, services, automation.
Third, TalentOS. Yes, I do have personal bias because it’s my own company. But I genuinely believe our thesis: creating gamified environments that encourage positive agency is the right approach, and can enable positive agency at massive scale.
Reality is Broken
My thesis is AI tools and inspirations alone aren’t enough to shift this wave. Giving people AI without structure won’t fix the problem. What we need are environments where positive agency is the default and guided in a gamified way.
Famous author, Jane McGonigal wrote about this similar theisis years ago in Reality Is Broken.
She realized games are agency machines.
Games allow individuals to tap into their best selves—more curious, optimistic, resilient in the face of failure, and collaborative. She asserts that reality often feels disorganized and uncooperative in comparison to the structured and rewarding environments of games.
Her core question was simple: what if we could design reality this way?
What if instead of pushing people toward casinos, we built systems that gave the same feeling of agency in positive‑sum ways? What if we could shift that energy from betting into building?
These questions are what I’m pursuing with TalentOS.
The Focus for the New Year
Casinos are popular because they make you feel agency. You make decisions. You see immediate results. You feel in control even when you’re not.
My New year’s focus is what if we could create that same engagement loop for building real skills? What if we could design environments that makes upskilling or completing real life challenges felt as satisfying as winning a bet?
This year, I want to prove that. I want to prove that we can build Infrastructure that makes positive agency accessible and scalable. And I know I can do that.
If positive agency can scale, instead of betting markets growing, we could see an explosion of capable people working on real problems—solving cancer, new material breakthroughs, rebuilding nations and much more.
The world is still massively positive‑sum. There’s more to build and more frontiers to discover.
Degeneracy doesn’t need to be fought. It just need stops being attractive.
That’s the path I’m building.
And it’s what I want to spend the next decade building toward.
May everyone be well,
James
For this year what are the takes that you will build towards your vision? I'm highly curious mate. love the piece :) looking forward to seeing what you'll be building and what we can build together! HNY
Interesting. AI takes some jobs and provides others. My experience with searching jobs is that online jobs are saturated each with over 1000 applicants but jobs where I go and work in-person are not only easily available but actually frustrated for lack of applicants. In the USA, where you can volunteer (work for free) and thus earn the experience needed for a well paid job is surely a plus. But I agree that certain sectors (regardless of pay or even volunteering opportunities) are harder to access than others. Selecting the right sector, getting a relevant degree, and being open to volunteering/internship experience has been helpful to me.