Introduction: A Guide for Adults of Every Age—Navigating a Geological Revolution in Civilization
I know many people have little patience for a long essay. Before scrolling away, spend three minutes with a cold possibility: I fear that many social arrangements premised on stable employment are coming under mounting pressure.
We need to understand a serious, unfolding risk. It does not originate with an impassioned political faction across the ocean, the volatile situation in Northeast Asia or the Taiwan Strait, or the visible conflicts we routinely debate over dinner. The deeper crisis lies in a vast silence: we are entering, unprotected, what I regard as one of civilization's harshest “geological” revolutions.
This is change on the metaphorical scale of restructuring the Earth's core. While many follow old habits and repair their comfortable beds on drifting plates, the fractures below have already reformatted the landscape ahead. At the threshold of widely accessible intelligence, professional dignity and even the definition of striving are undergoing irreversible collapse.
It is not that society cannot cope. It is that you may soon be unable to.
If you do not want to become “fuel” discarded by the system amid this upheaval, find your age below and claim your “survival gift.” These are suggestions for action, not guarantees of success:
At 20: Stop “skill suicide”; build cognitive sovereignty. Do not stake all learning on operating one tool. Particular tasks will change, but foundational skills, professional judgment and verification still matter. Nor should long-term security depend entirely on one employer. Maintain legally required coverage, understand transfer and individual-contribution options, and develop portable capabilities. Your central task is to build a mind capable of sustaining you outside an organization.
At 30: Stop believing in borrowed titles; build additional personal safeguards. Institutional and corporate titles are rented. Losing a job may interrupt employer contributions, but does not instantly erase accumulated pension rights. Check local rules for continued coverage, transfers and unemployment protection before exploring supplementary income within affordable risk. Automated businesses carry maintenance, platform and market risks; they are not guaranteed substitutes for pensions.
At 40: Stop exhausting your body; build an Anti-G Core. You are witnessing rapid erosion in traditional wealth and security structures. If you still trade physical exhaustion for wages or benefits that may stop flowing, you will be among the first to break when distribution is reorganized. Move from doing everything yourself toward coordinating systems. Your value is not the hours you work, but your ability to use AI to offset risk.
At 50: Stop treating retirement as an automatic promise; turn experience into an advantage. Continue understanding and maintaining pension rights while combining experience with new tools. Future security should have several sources, rather than depend entirely on continued ability to work. Your fifties can be a prime period for using AI to lower technical barriers and challenge younger competitors. Keep renewing your thinking: become the seasoned player equipped with new materials and resources of your own.
At 60–70 and beyond: Reject the mindset of obsolescence; pursue intellectual longevity. Retirement reflects an industrial-era logic of “retiring worn-out components.” If a productivity revolution invalidates old dependency ratios, society will be unable to support vast numbers of people solely as consumers. Continued learning and participation can bring meaning, but dignity must not depend on continued employment. As long as your reasoning remains intact and you can wield this metaphorical “steel,” society need not erase you.
The geological revolution has begun. The crust is moving; mass extinction is the metaphor before us. This is not a debate about whether society can cope. It is a question of whether you will reconstruct yourself into a form capable of surviving cycles before being buried by them.
1. The High-G Era
We are living through an intensely compressed civilizational process. A metaphor can describe what I feel: many career plans once treated the environment as a relatively stable background. A technology cycle often outlasted a career. Today, that premise has broken down.
If civilization were a flight, we would have switched from steady cruising to a frightening centrifuge. This is the overload of a “high-G era.” The half-life of opportunity is shrinking rapidly, especially in Chinese narratives of wealth:
The property boom lasted roughly twenty years, giving enough people time to move between social classes.
The internet boom that followed compressed opportunity into ten years, or even five.
In the AI era, the unit of iteration has contracted from years to months.
Cycles no longer run by generations. They seem to contract at the speed of physical collapse. Passing through them so frequently produces a bodily dizziness, perhaps one source of employment anxiety. Many say “society is failing,” but this can be psychological evasion. It may be your capacity to cope that is failing: a body trained for 1G trying to withstand 10G. In this flight metaphor, imbalance becomes more likely when change exceeds existing adaptive capacity. This is not a physical law governing human destiny.
“Dizziness does not mean you are ill. It means the world is accelerating toward escape velocity.”
2. Reconstructing Productivity
In the steady-speed era, our model of productivity was a wooden waterwheel. Skills were carefully polished wooden components, extracting power from an even stream. The logic was simple: greater mastery built a deeper moat.
In the high-G era of AI, the stream becomes supersonic airflow. Heavy waterwheel skills not only fail to generate power; they break first. The central shift is that AI offers elemental capabilities like “steel.” It makes the “how” remarkably cheap: with the right logic, steel can be cast into almost any shape. This means:
Execution is losing value. Skills definable in an instruction manual are being industrialized into “steel” at scale. Remaining a manual executor means competing with industrial output through human labor alone.
Architecture is gaining value. The core opportunity belongs to those who can build complex systems from these steel modules.
At this stage, blindly collecting certificates and courses to “reinforce the waterwheel” is a self-defeating resistance. The real task is to train your ability to define problems and coordinate resources: move from lumberjack to steel architect.
“Stop reinforcing your waterwheel. When the flood becomes a tsunami, only recasting yourself in steel offers a chance of surviving the impact.”
3. Institutional Pain: Distribution Falls Behind and Loses Its Bearings
As the “steel” of productivity replaces the “waterwheel” of labor, aggregate wealth may expand rapidly while jobs—the ordinary person's admission ticket to that wealth—disappear in batches.
The underlying contract of the past century linked labor to wages, social insurance and consumption. AI's logic can dismantle that loop.
A consumption gap from substituting cognitive labor: imagine that a class of tasks needs dramatically fewer people. If new work does not absorb them in time, where does their living income come from? This hypothetical scenario highlights the lag between job transitions and replacement income.
The disappearing safety net: some protections depend heavily on formal employment and payroll contributions, so unstable jobs can weaken coverage and financing. But public protection has other channels, including unemployment benefits, resident-based insurance and fiscal support; these must not be erased from the picture. Trusting one “good job” to guarantee lasting security nevertheless means hanging your future on weathered timber.
Digital enclosures—from inequality to exclusion: if AI's “steel” is held by very few, it can become the material used to build digital fences.
This weightlessness makes striving feel like a marathon with no reachable finish. The underlying problem is that the old distribution system cannot carry high-G productivity, while a new contract has yet to form.
“When algorithms no longer need your sweat, yesterday's diligence may become an inefficient struggle.”
4. Building an Anti-G Core
Under high acceleration, heavy fixed assets—positions, credentials and old experience—can become burdens. An Anti-G Core means shifting from seeking a stable job to building a personal system of reasoning.
Abstract the logic: move from operator to commander. Learn to break the world into its components. With the underlying mold of reasoning, your capabilities can transfer even when tools change.
Digitize and automate assets: build a digital counterpart. During gaps in distribution arrangements, individuals need supplementary safeguards. Package experience into automated workflows and develop output that does not depend entirely on bodily labor.
Make organization modular: become the architect of a one-person company. Striving need not mean winning a cubicle in a large firm. It can mean building a plug-and-play personal operating system that coordinates advanced computing to solve specific problems.
Broaden access to computing: learn to handle the new fire. Understand open-source models and protect personal data assets. This can reduce dependence on one platform, though it still requires money, security maintenance and professional judgment.
“An Anti-G Core is the ability to coordinate AI and rebuild a world even after every title is gone.”
5. Redefining Striving: Across the Folds, Toward Lasting Vitality
We must acknowledge that the era in which following the prescribed steps was enough to win has ended.
The essence of striving moves from endurance to a second development of cognition. Machines can endure more than you. The contest now concerns the rate at which thinking renews itself. It requires courage to discard accumulated knowledge when necessary and design the underlying machine of reasoning.
Escape the fuel trap; remain a lifelong beginner. Refusing to build a core risks becoming inexpensive fuel. Yet the cruelty of monthly reinvention also gives us a forced youthfulness. Under 10G acceleration, continued evolution can preserve a beginner's openness across time.
The final admission ticket is “steel-like tenderness.” The future may divide people by their relationship to machines: those managed as fuel and those steering the designs. Once steel resolves survival's repetitive burdens, time for family, love and unique human lives becomes the strongest form of tenderness.
Conclusion: The Privilege of Being Here
This is not merely exile into cold logic. However dizzy you feel, recognize the privilege: we are among the first generation to hold this new “steel” fire in our own hands.
The privilege of pioneering is rare. Violent change presses deeper folds into life. The vitality within those geological folds gives our generation's experience its depth.
In the new year, bring your Anti-G Core and grasp the steel control stick. Let us keep moving and growing throughout life amid civilization's geological revolution.
Happy Lunar New Year. May you live as fully as possible.
“In this era, mediocre effort is the greatest waste of life.”