Imagine you're the last wave of millennials. You were never really into computers. You didn't dream in code. You didn't take apart the family PC at nine and reassemble it before anyone got home. You took one personality quiz, looked at one salary chart, listened to one uncle at one Thanksgiving, and made the responsible decision. Doctor, pharmacist, lawyer, software engineer — the four food groups of the safe, comfortable, predictable life. You picked software because the line on the chart went up the steepest, and the word FANG glittered at the top of it like the ad it was.
So you paid. Four years. A hundred, two hundred thousand dollars of debt — money you didn't have, borrowed against a future you were assured was waiting for you, gift-wrapped, at the end of the conveyor belt. And here is the detail that matters: because it was never your passion, you did exactly what the curriculum asked and not one keystroke more. You didn't build anything on the side. You didn't have a weird little project that kept you up at 3 AM. There was no 3 AM. You memorized the sorting algorithms. You ground the LeetCode. You learned to reverse a binary tree on a whiteboard — a skill with the real-world utility of competitive flag folding — because that was the secret handshake the temple demanded. You weren't investing in knowledge. You were investing in paper. The knowledge was just the shipping material the paper came packed in.
And then AI hit, and the entire cargo went below the waterline in an afternoon.
Everything you bought — the intro courses, the data structures, the interview algorithms, the syntax, the entire four-year inventory of entry-level knowledge — is now generated, instantly, by a text box, for twenty dollars a month, at a quality level that embarrasses your transcript. The exact slice of the profession you purchased was the junior slice, the apprentice slice, the "we'll train you up from here" slice — and that is precisely the slice the machine ate first. Not the architects. Not the people with scar tissue and judgment and fifteen years of production incidents in their nervous system. The bottom rung. Your rung. The rung you spent two hundred thousand dollars reserving in advance, like a parking spot in a building that was demolished while you were still walking to it.
So inventory what's left in your hands. A degree: which is to say, a notarized certificate of attendance. A loyalty pledge to a system that dissolved before it could pay out. An obedience stamp confirming you sat where you were told, memorized what you were assigned, and asked nothing inconvenient for four consecutive years — which, in a brutal irony, is now the least marketable personality trait on Earth, because sitting quietly and executing assigned instructions is the one job description AI fills perfectly, infinitely, for free. And the debt. The debt survived. The debt is doing great. The debt is the only party in this story whose business model was AI-proof, because it was never attached to your skills — it was attached to your future labor, whatever form that takes. The student loan doesn't care that the curriculum sank. It will follow you to the warehouse job. It is, legally speaking, the most loyal thing you own.
The people who chose the "risky" path — the obsessives, the dropouts with the weird side projects, the ones who built things nobody asked for because they couldn't physically stop themselves — they're mostly fine. Annoyingly fine. Their value was never the paper; it was the judgment, the taste, the ten thousand hours of self-assigned problems, and AI made them faster, not obsolete. The risk and the safety swapped name tags somewhere around 2023 and nobody sent out a memo. The safe choice turned out to be a leveraged bet on the proposition that the world of 2019 would persist forever — placed, with maximum debt, at the exact historical moment it stopped persisting. The passion choice turned out to be diversified. Nobody is more blindsided than the person who did everything right.
This is the part nobody wants to say at the reunion: the shit pyramid has an express lane. The fastest descent isn't reserved for the lazy, or the reckless, or the ones who never tried. It's reserved for the ones who bought the official map, followed it precisely, arrived at the marked destination, and found a hole in the ground where the treasure room used to be. The cynics had no expectations to liquidate. The obsessives had assets the flood couldn't touch. But the diligent, debt-financed, passion-free professional — the one who traded curiosity for a salary chart at seventeen — slid down face-first, full speed, holding a diploma overhead like a boarding pass for a flight that already left.
The lesson, carved in granite over the rubble: there is no such thing as a safe choice. There are only bets. The "safe" bet was a bet that the future would resemble the brochure — and the brochure was written by people selling the seats. The only positions that survived were the ones nobody could have sold you, because they couldn't be bought: obsession, judgment, the strange compounding interest of building things for free in the dark. The market never crashed on those. There was never any paper to burn.