Against Managed Decline

its called NEET employim pic.twitter.com/DaFMzg8pZS

— neetguy (@theneetguy) July 7, 2026

I wanted to do a whole post on how Pakistan, India, Afghanistan and Bangladesh are running out of water and people are going to be fighting each other over it, but it will have to wait. Right now, I can’t really get over how stupid life really is when you think about it. Mostly, I can’t really escape the realization that we’re just in managed decline. Once you see it, it’s everywhere. Here’s what the CEO of Palantir, a real autist who points out what you’re not supposed to mention in polite company, had to say on it:

Palantir CEO Alex Karp:

“America seems to be the only western country that believes we will be around in 900-1000 years.”

“The problem in Europe is, none of the leaders believe they’re going to exist in 50 years.” https://t.co/bJ0tPFNSSg pic.twitter.com/jHJ4uBztP5

— Jawwwn (@jawwwn_) July 7, 2026

Karp is right of course. No person is completely evil, not even Karp, everyone has some virtue. Nothing here in Europe is really designed with the prospect of a genuine future in mind. It’s all just managed decline. Politicians without children, building an electricity grid that everyone can see is going to fail during the winter. Two tier policing, where crime by minorities is essentially tolerated, while the most acute priority is to combat “racism” by the natives. A whole society that seems basically just designed around the question: How do we maintain the appearance of normality until the last babyboomer has died in a nursing home?

I think there is this growing trend of young people who see what actually lies ahead of us and they just look for any possible way out of it. I think we see a huge trend of young people who try to enjoy the here and now and I’m all for it. For the boys that generally means speculating on fake Internet money, for the girls it means getting guys to pay you for posting your holes on the Internet.

I think with every year that passes, as everything gets more depressing and hopeless, we get more and more young people who realize they were born at the effective end of a pyramid scheme and they’re just going to quit trying to keep the scheme going. My recommendation would be: Try to enjoy your youth and live as if the world won’t be there in twenty years.

But it’s not just Europe, let’s look at Pakistan and India for a bit. The Indians withdrew from the Indus water treaty, they’re now saying Pakistan will not get a drop of water. So let’s say you’re a young man today and you live in Pakistan. You live in a country of 260 million people. Your population increased tenfold in a century. Your country’s population won’t peak until 2070. You look around you. There is no water coming from the tap. You have to buy your water from the local water mafia.

The country gets so hot that people sleep on their roofs. The aquifers are depleting, there will soon be no water to feed the crops. And India has said that they’re building infrastructure to make sure you don’t get a drop of water. You’re just part of a generation brought into existence at the end of a pyramid scheme. Same in Bangladesh, where thousands of villages are now getting government orders prohibiting them from pumping up any groundwater for their crops. It’s the end of a pyramid scheme.

In Europe, we always had the kind of realization since the 70’s that we won’t be youthful forever, that we can’t just keep growing. Hence the Club of Rome. European society just kind of adjusted to those insights, so we moved towards a kind of managed decline. In countries like Pakistan, that realization just never quite landed. There the pyramid scheme just continued.

If you live in Pakistan, your society won’t tell you: Hey this is the end of the pyramid scheme. No, the whole thing was built on the basis of people delaying gratification in exchange for a promise of greater future pleasure that never arrives. And that’s the message the whole thing will continue sending as it slips into its death bed.

They’re always going to keep encouraging you to delay gratification. But just imagine living in any of these countries, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan. In the summer it gets so hot at night that you sleep on your roof or on the street. You have to buy your water from the local water mafia. How long do you remain invested in your society? When do you just say: “Alright I get it, I see where this is going. I’m going to get out of here before the rest of you do.”

In the United States they never quite embraced the managed decline the way we did in Europe. Rather, they just plaster over reality with this techno-babble of this glorious future that is going to emerge somehow, an image only the dumbest of their peasants still manage to believe in. Imagine you work for Amazon, you have to piss in a bottle to meet your targets, but your CEO has a yacht worth half a billion. The fact that people put up with that bullshit, almost suggests to me that people just deserve it. The best argument against Marxism is still how much the average proletarian is willing to put up with.

But what depresses me, is when young people are just successfully strung along for the ride. When the adults manage to convince their children, to spend their best years of their lives, studying for a glorious future that won’t arrive. It’s essentially what Derrida and Fisher described as “Hauntology”: If you grow up as a young person in today’s society, you’re constantly observing ghosts all around you, imagery from the past of glorious futures that were canceled. And the glorious futures you’re still being promised, the promises that are still alive, one day you will recognize them as ghosts as well.

This whole cybertruck-cryptocurrency-nazi meme aesthetic of a future that young disenfranchised males are being sold today on the Internet is just transforming into another ghost in its own right, a kind of aesthetic that will linger on long after it has ceased to be believable: “Imagine being a Zoomer, believing in this autistic guy called Elon Musk who’s going to save the West and build a colony on Mars. You could literally just make a living as a guy in India by posing as a white nationalist on Elon Musk’s social media platform. I wish I was young in that era, it seems so cool!”

New generations will look back at our era with fondness, in the same way my generation looks back fondly at the late 90’s when we were kids, even though the people who were adults then were making movies like The Matrix, Office Space and Fight Club: The peak in aesthetics of 1999 revolved around how miserable and existentially empty the present actually was.

I think in a sense, it’s noble of the Americans that they’re unwilling to accept a future of managed decline. They don’t accept it at a collective level, but they hardly accept it at an individual level too, as the opioid overdoses suggested. They really are a people, who need a future they can believe in.

The problem of course, is that there isn’t one. The myths they’re promised about the future become increasingly ridiculous as time goes on. They were once promised flying cars, but now Jeff Bezos is promising them that humans will live in outer space and Earth will become a kind of global museum. Meanwhile, in the real world, the proles struggle to keep their air conditioning working. The discrepancy between what they’re promised and what they’re actually dealing with grows every year.

I think what I’m really hoping for, is for today’s generation of young people to really settle on a third option, beyond American denial and European resignation. I wish I would see them rage against the dying of the light. I don’t want these delusional Americans who think they’ll still be around in 900 years, nor these defeated Europeans who are trying to manage a dignified exit over the next fifty years. No, I hope to see a kind of wholesale refusal to accept that this is it.