The whole idea is not to sell an asset, but to rent or lease it so you get a stream of recurring revenues. From Joshua Stylman at stylman.substack.com:
A video trending on social media this week shows a woman breaking down over her student loans:
[see article for video]
This isn’t a failure of personal responsibility. This is the designed outcome of a system built to drain your wallet.
After I published my previous essay, readers shared their own moments of realization. Mine came years ago at a car dealership when I tried to pay cash and they looked horrified. I was proud I’d saved enough to pay in full, but that pride turned to confusion when they treated my cash like a problem to be solved. The salesman spent ten minutes trying to convince me to finance at some absurd rate, and I left confused. That’s when I understood – they don’t want transactions anymore, they want relationships. Permanent, extractive relationships.
The woman in the video – her 17% student loans and my confused car dealer are the same system – built to keep us paying forever. Both scenarios reveal the same truth: the economy has been restructured to prefer debt over ownership, subscription over purchase, permanent extraction over finite transactions. She’s paying $1,500 monthly on loans that only grow. She’s not failing the system – the system is rigged against her.
Not that long ago, I genuinely believed fractional ownership could democratize access to assets. Coming from tech, I was naive about who would control these systems and how they’d be weaponized. What I documented in The Boomer Mirage (which showed how ownership was systematically priced out of reach) was just the setup. Today I want to show you the punchline: how the people promising “you’ll own nothing and be happy” engineered a world where they own everything and get rich.
Grampa paid for house with cash saved up from auto assembly plant.
The dollar was worth more back then.
College needs to do away with luxury boutique degrees that have no use in the real world.
“Communism doesn’t work because people like to own stuff.”
― Frank Zappa