What Survives Abundance
You Will Own Nothing
Huxley publishes Brave New World in 1932. He imagines a planet where nobody suffers because nobody remembers what suffering was. Soma to erase discomfort. Hedonic sex on schedule. Vacations distributed like medication. Castes biologically engineered so that the Epsilons feel grateful for scrubbing floors.
People are happy because they no longer know they could want anything else.
You read it in high school and it sounded like science fiction.
Look around.
Nobody in the West starves anymore. The “average poor” in any European capital carries in his pocket a smartphone with more compute than the Pentagon had in 1995. He flies to Cancún financed in installments. He has Netflix, Disney+, Spotify, Uber Eats, and a consumer loan approved in thirty seconds straight from his screen. He lives better (materially) than a nineteenth-century noble.
And the system tells him every day that he is free.
We’re heading toward abundance. Toward a world where everyone will have everything. Artificial intelligence is going to collapse the marginal cost of practically any cognitive service. Solar (and sooner or later, fusion) will collapse the cost of electricity. 3D printing and robotics will collapse the cost of manufacturing physical things. It’s a question of when, not if.
Then you ask the obvious question.
If everyone is going to have an iPhone, vacations, and a hot meal, why the hell are you still reading this newsletter? Why build a portfolio at all? Why fight with tax filings, holding company structures, margin loans, scarce-asset allocation?
Because between today’s world and the world of total abundance there is a bridge. And that bridge lasts decades. And on that bridge, the one we’re crossing right now, the gap between those who own assets and those who don’t is going to be the most brutal in human history.
This isn’t a metaphor. The in-between is where life is actually lived.
When consumption flattens, the only axis left is ownership. And almost nobody sees that.
The masses will have access to everything. And they will own nothing. Subscriptions. Rentals. Leasing. Streaming. Cloud. Cars on subscription. Homes on subscription. Digital identity on subscription. The new feudalism doesn’t demand land: it demands bandwidth, attention, and a recurring charge on your card. The medieval serf paid tithes to his lord. The twenty-first-century serf pays fourteen subscriptions to companies listed in New York.
They will tell him he is free. They will show him ads where people smile in airports. They will raise his credit limit every Christmas. They will sell him that success is the latest Apple gadget, the latest trip to Bali, the latest plate photographed in Lisbon.
Soma, 2026 edition.
Saylor sees it. Taleb sees it. Naval sees it. When everything can be replicated at zero marginal cost: content, code, even physical objects, the only premium left is on what cannot be replicated. What cannot be printed. What cannot be diluted. What cannot be manufactured by political decree or technological breakthrough.
There are only three certainties on that list. Three structural facts that will remain scarce for centuries. Maybe a fourth (the most interesting one) but I’ll get to that in a moment.
One. Land. Adjusted for demographic pressure and zoning, there is roughly the same amount of well-located habitable land as a hundred years ago. Every year there are more of us. Nobody is manufacturing more central Madrid, more Amalfi coast, more Manhattan. Well-located land is the only form of property that survives every political system (from monarchy to communism) because it cannot be confiscated without exposing the regime that does it.
Two. Gold. Five thousand years working as a store of value across every human civilization. Unalterable, indestructible, beyond the reach of any central bank. It takes billions of years to form in the cores of exploding stars. There is no technological shortcut to manufacturing it. That’s why central banks are buying it at record pace. Not out of tradition. Because they know.
Three. Bitcoin. The first genuinely neutral monetary network. Twenty-one million units. Period. No decree, no bailout, no print button, no central bank that can dilute you. It is the only form of absolute digital property that exists. When material abundance arrives, Bitcoin will be the gold of a civilization that no longer operates with atoms.
And then there’s the fourth. The one almost nobody names.
Your sovereignty.
Your capacity not to participate. Not to be connected. Not to consume the content that pushes you to feel what they want you to feel. To live off the yield of your own assets instead of the paycheck that disciplines you. Not to need the system’s approval to decide what you do with your own time.
In a world where the system will want you plugged in twenty-four hours a day, entertaining you, selling to you, measuring you, conditioning you, the final luxury will be unplugging. Living from your own capital. Making decisions the algorithm hasn’t predicted. Holding a horizon of decades while everyone else thinks in two-week paychecks.
That’s not bought. That’s built. Slowly, over years, through discipline, through scarce assets, through your own cashflow.
That’s why this newsletter is not about getting rich. That’s the cheap marketing for the ones who will be Epsilons in the happy world to come, the ones who will sprint toward the next bonus, the next car on subscription, the next series on streaming, until one day they realize they’ve spent thirty years renting everything.
This newsletter is about not being that one.
It’s about crossing the bridge with your head intact. About using the in-between phasem, where asymmetry will be the most violent in history, to build a portfolio in assets no technologist, no politician, and no artificial intelligence can dilute.
Land. Gold. Bitcoin. And the sovereignty built on top of the three.
The rest is noise.
While Huxley was writing the novel, most of his contemporaries were worried about the next dance. Your job, right now, is not to be that contemporary.