Why is making money getting harder? | 【Jingwei Low‑key Share】

Why is making money getting harder and harder? | 【Jingwei Low-Key Share】

An increasingly obvious paradox is why, as technology advances and productivity rises, ordinary people feel that making money is getting harder. Why does society’s ability to create wealth keep growing, while the difficulty for individuals to acquire wealth is actually increasing?

Behind this may lie a deeper shift in economic paradigms. Over the past millennium, the growth of human wealth has primarily depended on the ownership, processing, and distribution of material resources; in the Internet era, software, information, and network connectivity began to become new engines of wealth; in the AI era, even the production of knowledge and the processing of information themselves are being massively replaced by machines.

When wealth creation shifts from “arranging atoms” to “arranging bits,” and economic growth increasingly relies on network effects and scale advantages, the relationship between individual effort and economic return is being redefined.

When knowledge is no longer scarce and intelligence becomes cheaper, what will truly be scarce in the future? Where will wealth flow? How should ordinary people reposition themselves?

This article attempts to understand current economic anxiety by starting from the evolution of a millennium of wealth history, and the new survival rules forming in the AI era. Enjoy:

Source | Not Understanding Classics

Create, labor, discover yourself——We say this to the workers. The words in the journal, please rethink them, see with your own eyes……Only what you fight for yourself has value; this is especially true for social struggle and intellectual life.

——“Chronicle of the New Order” Vol 1 Issue 10 (July 19, 1919)

Almost everyone feels that money is getting harder to earn.

In the past twenty years, you didn’t need to be outstanding, just bold,willing to experiment,and you could soar by standing in the wind tunnel. Real estate, the internet, and foreign trade—the three major wealth‑creating engines—took turns to launch. Now the engines have slowed down, and we have entered an era of competing over existing stock.

Every penny you earn could be someone else’s loss. This means the demands on personal ability, information channels, and resource integration are rising exponentially, and most people feel that making money is getting harder and harder.

This feeling is not just whining without cause, it has been validated by countless real experiences: it appears in Douban’s “Work Matters” group, where a 35‑year‑old employee of a big tech company, after being laid off, sighs late at night over mortgage and car loan payments; it shows up on Xiaohongshu, where a Shanghai migrant earning 8,000 yuan a month, through meticulous budgeting, manages to earn a sliver of security; it is also on Weibo, where a small‑to‑medium business owner, faced with a cliff‑like drop in orders in the post‑pandemic era, helplessly goes out of business.

This anxiety is so widespread that terms like “consumption downgrade”, “side‑hustle necessity”, “downward compatibility”, and even “choosing incense between work and ambition” have turned from jokes into the lived reality of countless people.

Facing the challenges of this era,many profound analyses point the finger at macro structures: we are shifting from“incremental markets” into “stock markets”, previously relying onthe abovethree major wealth‑creating machines’modelshave already ended, and the pain of industrial upgrading has brought structural unemployment. Many people find that it’s not a lack of effort on their part, but the field they are working hard in,“the floor is disappearing”.

These insights are undoubtedly precise, but indeed, these explanations and understandings, only describe the storm’s trajectory, not the meteorological principles that drive the storm.

What we feel and experience is not merely an economic cyclical storm, but a profound tectonic plate shift, a historic, structural paradigm revolution. We stand on a massive fault line, where the old world and the new world diverge.

We think money is hard to earn because most of us still carry the old‑world map, trying to find treasure on the new‑world land. We are still using an “arrange atoms” mindset to play a game of “arrange bits” whose rules have been completely changed.

01

Echoes of the Old World: The Epic of Arranging Atoms

To understand where we are, we must trace back where we came from. A thousand years ago, the logic of wealth was simple and cruel.

Take Mahmud of Ghazni as an example, hishometown was located in the mountainous region of present‑day Afghanistan,this11th‑century conquerorwas a man as robust as an ox. Once a visitor spoke thoughtlessly, which greatly angered him; he slapped the man, and the blow caused the victim to lose his hearing for the rest of his life.

Through large-scale plundering, Mahmud amassed world-class wealth. His palace is resplendent with gold and jade, and his crown must be suspended by a chain above his head because the encrusted jewels are too heavy.

In the era of Mahamoud, war and wealth, the god of war and the god of wealth always arise together. The essence of wealth is the physical possession of rare atoms (gold, gems, land).

The way to acquire wealth is violentArrangement— moving atoms from others’ territories into one’s own treasury by force. This is the most primitive, bare form of the “arranged atoms” economy.

The advent of the Industrial Revolution made this arrangement civilized and efficient. The roar of steam engines, railways, and factories heralded the arrival of a new era. Wealth no longer stems solely from land ownership, but also from control over large‑scale means of production.

The core value of this era is to build massive physical systems, and through standardized processes, efficiently arrange basic atoms such as iron ore, coal, and cotton into trains, skyscrapers, and fabrics. Henry Ford’s assembly line is the artistic pinnacle of “arranging atoms”.

Industrialera’s rule for success: control tangible assets:Own mines, factories, railways, and you control the source of value.

Optimize linear processes:Increase efficiency, reduce costs, and arrange more atoms in the physical world with less consumption.

Establish a hierarchy: use a pyramid-shaped management structure to ensure the precise operation of large physical systems. This is a “cathedral”-style, top‑down creation model.

Profit through scarcity and exclusivity:Whether it’s patent protection or scale barriers, the core is to lock in value by creating scarcity.

This set of practices has profoundly shaped our social structure and notions of success over the past two centuries. “Working hard,” “getting promotions and raises,” “buying a house and a car,” the life maxims we hold as gospel are essentially game guides for the “atom‑arranging” economy.

It rewards those who can efficiently participate in physical production and management, and offers tangible material wealth as a reward. We are all products of this era, and deep within our minds is etched the muscle memory of arranging atoms.

02

The Laws of the New World: The Magic of Arranging Bits

However, just as the “atomic economy” reaches perfection, a brand‑new form of value is quietly emerging.Its carrier is not atoms but bits—the fundamental units of information.

Finance is the earliest “profession of arranging bits”. It does not produce any tangible goods, yet by arranging abstract symbols of risk, time, and value, it mobilizes the world’s material resources. This is the first rehearsal of a new world.

Since the second half of the 20th century,with the proliferation of personal computers and the Internet, this preview turned into a reality sweeping the globe. We have officially entered the“arranged bits” era, an era driven by the “networked information economy”.

This new world follows physical laws that are completely different from those of the old world:

First principle: Information is a non‑rivalrous good. This is the key to understanding the differences between the old and new worlds. If I eat an apple (atom), it’s gone for you; but a piece of software (bit), a song, an idea can be copied infinitely, with near‑zero marginal cost.

In the atomic world, value stems from scarcity; in the bit world, value stems from sharing and connection. This characteristic of information completely overturns the business logic of the industrial age built on scarcity.

Democratization of means of production. In the industrial age, having a voice required owning a printing press or a TV station. In the network age,means of production such ascomputers and the internethave been widely distributed into the hands of billions.

This makes a brand-new production model possible:peer-to-peer production.

Take the Linux operating system and Wikipedia as examples. They are not produced by a single company with a rigid hierarchy; instead, they are created by tens of thousands of volunteers worldwide through socially coordinated collaboration, without market transactions or bureaucratic orders. This “marketplace”‑style, bottom‑up creation model achieves efficiency and quality that even surpass those of the most powerful commercial giants.

However, this brings a paradox of knowledge assets: the more useful knowledge is (i.e., the easier it is to encode, disseminate, and “arrange”), the harder it is for any single entity to monopolize and control it.

In the new world, trying to lock knowledge away in a safe like atoms is not only difficult but also foolish. Because the value of knowledge lies precisely in its flow, collision, and recombination.

03

Paradigm Conflict: Yesterday’s Success, Today’s Failure

The reason we feel that making money is getting harder is precisely because these two paradigms are clashing violently. We are navigating the digital frontier with an outdated map of atomic arrangements, and we have lost our direction.

1. Scarcity Mindset vs. Abundant Reality

The core of atomic thinking is to create and maintain scarcity. Therefore, in the world of bits, we see a crazy“second enclosure movement”: copyright terms are extended indefinitely, software patents are abused, and everything that can be encoded is being privatized. This approach is like trying to package and sell air; it runs counter to the inherent nature of the bit world where “the cost of copying is zero”.

When billions of people share music via P2P networks, they are not morally depraved “pirates,” but are unconsciously following a new physical law of the bit world—sharing maximizes value.

Gatekeepers of the old world wield legal batons, trying to preserve a business model based on physical scarcity, but this is destined to be a hard-fought clash against the currents of technology and humanity.

2. Bureaucracy vs. Networking (Formation of the Network Prison)

Atomic thinking values a stable, pyramid‑shaped hierarchy. The path to success is “climbing upward.” However, in the bit world, the creation and distribution of value are increasingly determined by your topological position in the network.

In the previously recommended “The Last Economy,” the concept of a “network prison” hits the nail on the head. The real‑world network is not a democratic grid but follows a “power‑law distribution.”

A few nodes hold massive numbers of connections, while the vast majority of nodes are sparsely connected. Success is no longer a bell‑shaped normal distribution but a steep ski slope.

The birth of Facebook is the best example. In 2003, there were thousands of people with programming skills superior to Zuckerberg’s, but he was at Harvard—a highly concentrated network node of future world power elites. When he needed funding, Peter Thiel was within reach; when he needed to scale, the Silicon Valley ecosystem was at his fingertips.

At the same time, a programmer in Mumbai who may be technically superior can only connect to local enterprises.Indian coderwrites better code, but his network location is worse. The results are worlds apart.

This explains why many people feel“effort is being devalued.” In a networked world, pure linear effort, without optimizing one’s network position, yields extremely limited returns. The old narrative that “hard work leads to success” is being replaced by the harsh topology that “connections matter more than effort.”

3. Linear Growth vs. Exponential Growth

French economist Thomas Piketty (Thomas Piketty) observed a core inequality: r > g, meaning the rate of return on capital (r) is persistently higher than the economic growth rate (g). This observation is dramatically amplified in the crypto world.

The economic activities that “arrange atoms” (such as traditional manufacturing and services) are essentiallylinear growth (corresponding to g). Your output is roughly proportional to your input (time, labor, physical resources).

The economic activities of “arranged bits” (such as software, platforms, AI) haveexponential growth potential (corresponding to r). A piece of software written once can serve a billion users; a platform built once can achieve self‑reinforcement through network effects.

When a society’s primary engine of wealth growth shifts from linear to exponential while the vast majority of people’s income models remain linear, the wealth gap will expand at an astonishing rate.

This is the reality we are experiencing: the wealth held by 0.001% of people is three times that of the bottom 50% of the world’s population. The few who occupy the exponential‑growth track and the many who are still running on a linear track are rapidly diverging. For the latter, money is, of course, becoming increasingly harder to earn.

4. Extracting Value vs. Creating Value

In the logic of “arranging atoms”, enterprises are “cathedrals”, extracting value through tight planning and control. While in the world of “arranging bits”, the truly thriving ecosystem is the “marketplace”, creating value through openness and connection.

IBM’s embrace of Linux is a classic case. IBM did not try to build a closed operating-system cathedral of its own, but chose to contribute resources and services to an open marketplace. It earns billions of dollars each year by selling “Linux-related services.” It does not “own” bits, but profits by facilitating the “flow” of bits.

This shift in mindset is fundamental.

The old mindset asks, “How do I build barriers, protect my assets, and make money from users?” The new mindset asks, “How do I create a platform that empowers my users, enabling them to generate value beyond my imagination, and share the benefits within this ecosystem?”

Enterprises and individuals still thinking on the former track will find that their moats are being overwhelmed by the network effects of new species.

04

The Final Ultimate Shock: When AI Starts Arranging Bits

If the shift from atoms to bits is an earthquake, then the arrival of artificial intelligence (AI) is a tsunami—because it is automating the very act of “arranging bits.” As Musk predicts, by the end of 2027 AI will be able to handle almost all digital personas, and knowledge workers will face an unprecedented disaster.

In the past, we transitioned from manual laborers to knowledge workers (“bit arrangers”). But now, AI is accomplishing these cognitive tasks with efficiency several orders of magnitude higher and cost several orders of magnitude lower than humans.

A 20‑page PPT that would take junior consultants several hours to complete can be generated by AI in minutes.A World Economic Forum research report shows that the typical “bit‑arrangement” industry is precisely the sector most impacted by AI, such as the finance and technology industries.

In “The Last Economics,” the author puts forward a somewhat chilling concept—the labor “Metabolic Rift”. Human workers are “metabolic engines,” requiring food, shelter, rest, and complex social support.

AI, however, is “non‑metabolic labor,” requiring only electricity. When a “worker” that doesn’t need to eat or sleep appears, humanity has no retreat in pure economic‑cost competition.

Therefore, we are facing the final “intelligent inversion” and the “ultimate great decoupling”: from land to labor, from capital to intelligence, the core carrier of value has completed its last leap. The thoroughness of this transformation far exceeds our imagination.

05

Our way forward: becoming “meaning engineers” of the new world

As the saying goes, the wheels of history roll over you without even a greeting.

However, the old rules of the game have indeed become obsolete, but that doesn’t mean the game is over—it means we need to learn an entirely new way to play. We can’t stop the shift in paradigms, but we can choose to be the “geometric engineers,” actively shaping the economic landscape of our future.

1. Say goodbye to the crazy single metric: Build a new value coordinate system

First, we must discardoutdated“dashboard”,for exampleGDP,such as housing prices, savings figures.GDPfails to measure the true value created by the bit economy (such as Wikipedia’s contribution to human knowledge) and instead counts many social negative externalities (like environmental pollution, family breakdown) as growth.

We need a brand‑new coordinate system, a MIND Dashboard that can measure system health.

Physical Capital (Material):Focus on sustainable physical foundations, including our health and environment.

Intelligent Capital (Intelligence):Lifelong learning, continuously updating one’s knowledge and skill base.

Network Capital (Network):Build and maintain trust, relationships, and connections. Your network position is your most valuable intangible asset.

Diversity Capital (Diversity):Refuse to lock yourself into a single track, develop multiple skills and identities, and build an antifragile survival structure.

It must be remembered that these four forms of capital have a multiplicative relationship. If any one of them is zero, your ability to survive in this era will approach zero.

2. Shift in Individual Strategy: From “Worker” to “Node”

From Extractor to Generator:Change the way you ask questions. Don’t keep asking“What can I get out of this?” but ask “What value can I create for which network?”. In a connection‑driven world, creating value for the network is the best path to enhancing your own value.

From atomic hoarder to bit flipper:Stop treating knowledge and skills as treasure that must be hidden away. Share them, contribute to open‑source projects, and publish your insights in the public domain. In the world of bits, your influence (network capital) is far more important than the intellectual property (overvalued smart capital) you “own.”

From employee to sovereign individual: Whether or not you have a full-time job, start thinking like an independent network node. Build your own “platform,” even if it’s just a professional blog or an active community account. Proactively connect with other nodes and create your own “weak‑tie” network.

Free your mind, embrace change:Finally, and most importantly, recognize the profound transformative nature of our era. As Gramsci warned a century ago, the greatest trap is “believing in the eternal existence of democratic institutions and their fundamental perfection”.

We must break free from this mindset, recognizing that all economic systems are historical products, not natural laws. We are living in an era where the rules are being rewritten, and the biggest obstacle is not the external environment but the outdated game guide in our own minds.

Conclusion

The reason money is becoming harder to earn isn’t that we aren’t working hard enough; it’s that the physical laws governing effort have changed.

The old world is irreversibly fading, and the new world is being born in chaos. Our generation stands on the bridge connecting the two worlds, pulled by the inertia of the past and drawn to the possibilities of the future. This is an era full of anxiety, and also an era full of opportunities.

Instead ofmourning the fading, atom‑based, predictable world,it’s better to choose to become one of the “first players” of the new world, learn the language of arranging bits, build new networks, and create new value.

Old economics is about how to allocate resources in a scarce world. The new rule of survival is about how to create meaning in an abundant, even surplus world.

The era of arranging atoms, frantic competition, and manufacturing artificial scarcity has ended, and the era belonging to everyone, where value is created and shared together by arranging bits, has just begun.

Create, work, discover yourself, exert influence.

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