Something is deeply off, and it’s bigger than tech prices or another “everything got expensive” rant. What we’re watching right now is a shift in how the world is priced and who it’s priced for. If you feel like no matter how hard you work you’re constantly paying more just to stay in the same place, that’s not a personal failure. That’s a system doing exactly what it was optimized to do. This isn’t about one product or one industry. It’s about power, supply, and who gets to matter when money moves at scale.
I’m done pretending this is some unfortunate side effect of “the market”. What we’re living in right now is not a free market correcting itself. It’s a system deliberately tilted in favor of a very small group of people who already have more money than they could ever meaningfully use. Prices aren’t going up because things are getting better. They’re going up because supply is being choked, priorities are being shifted, and regular users are no longer considered worth caring about. The end user isn’t the customer anymore. The real customer is the billion-dollar deal. Everything else is collateral.
You can see this pattern everywhere once you stop looking at individual products and start looking at incentives. In tech, core components like RAM and SSDs suddenly triple in price without any technological reason. In food, quality drops while prices rise. In entertainment, subscriptions stack on top of each other until access becomes fragmented and expensive. In housing, supply is treated like an investment lever instead of a human necessity. In medicine, the same logic decides who gets access and who gets priced out. This isn’t coincidence. It’s the same playbook repeated across industries: restrict supply, normalize higher prices, let people fight each other over scraps while the real money moves at a scale where individual humans don’t even register.
What makes this especially infuriating is that end users are the easiest group to abuse. We don’t negotiate billion-dollar contracts. We don’t get volume discounts. We don’t have leverage. We just need things to live, work, create, and function. So we’re squeezed. Slowly, quietly, constantly. And when we complain, we’re told it’s just how things are now. Inflation. Market forces. Be patient. Adapt. Work harder. Meanwhile, the same handful of players keep reporting record profits. Their wealth grows precisely because we’re stuck on the hamster wheel, forced to keep paying more just to stand still.
The idea that the market will magically regulate itself under these conditions is a fantasy. A market cannot be “free” when one side holds all the cards. When supply, capital, and political influence are concentrated at the top, there is no balance. And without balance, there is no fairness. This is exactly the point where intervention, pressure, and collective pushback are not radical ideas but necessary ones. Talking about this matters. Naming it matters. Refusing to normalize it matters. Because if we don’t level the playing field, this system will keep extracting more from the many to enrich the few, and call it efficiency while doing so.
I’m not angry because I want cheaper toys. I’m angry because a system that depends on constant imbalance is not sustainable, not humane, and not something we should accept as normal. And the longer we stay quiet, the more expensive that silence becomes.