There's a lot of accessible potential but the market today is so fast that I feel like it amounts to something like a random casino. The window for any particul

There's a lot of accessible potential but the market today is so fast that I feel like it amounts to something like a random casino. The window for any particular hustle sometimes lasts as little as six months to a year. Nobody can actually do anything in that time frame, so who ends up winning the big bounties attached to these windows ends up being whomever just happened to be working on this or that thing for some random serendipitous reason or happened to be in the right place at the right time. The canonical example would be someone who mined a bit of Bitcoin in 2010 and archived it and forgot about it for six or seven years. That's an extreme one but to varying degrees the whole economy seems to look like that. I think this is a problem because it completely decouples reward from sustained focus and planning. If you pick something of value and apply yourself to it, chances are it will take too long and you'll miss the window. You have to be there before there is any rational reason to think something will be valuable, otherwise you miss out to the people who randomly happened to be standing there when money fell on them. As such it ends up reducing to a lotto or a bad MMORPG where you run around and loot kind of randomly materializes here and there. The roles that do require sustained focus and rational planning are careers, and now you're in the early 21st century real estate hyperinflation trap. Most of the career jobs that pay well are in places where the rent or mortgage costs are so high you'll never accumulate wealth, and most of the places with affordable housing are places where there are no good upwardly mobile jobs. If you follow a rational career path your choice is between two different ways of going nowhere. The only way to get ahead is to win one of those random hustle lotteries and vault out ahead of real estate's unstoppable inflation. (Certain other necessities like tuition and health care are inflating without bound too, but I picked on real estate for being the worst offender.)