Dreams of Stability

The brag used to be the bet. Now the brag is the safety net.

Feb 16, 2026

Everyone says they hate the question: What do you do? It’s cliché and reductive. But nobody stops asking it, and nobody stops answering. Because the answer is never just about what you do. It’s about what people think you’re worth, and what you want people to think you’re worth.

A few years ago, as far as the tech world is concerned, the cool answer sounded like ‘I’m starting something’ or ‘We just closed a $1M seed round’ or ‘I’m all in on crypto.’ The unifying brag: I take risks. I don’t need a safety net.

Now the cool answer sounds a lot more like ‘I’m at OpenAI’ or ‘I’m building something new at Stripe’ or ‘We just raised a $20M seed round.’ The brag used to be the bet; now the brag is the safety net — the best one you can get.

Dreams of Stability

The original American Dream was faith in work ethic. The second was faith in acceleration, made real by the internet era. The smartest or luckiest people got in early and rode the wave of new technology, platforms, and markets. Infinite impact, riches, and recognition were the seduction triple threat.

If it worked, you’d skip the 40-year career grind. The unspoken sacrifice was going all-in on a single asset — the bet worked best when you equated career with self. For a long time, that logic looked sound. Platforms benefited more than the creators who built on them. Investors more than founders. Founders more than employees. People accepted lopsided terms because the dream The Social Network sold us was that compelling: kids became kings.

Now AI is infiltrating every corner of society. The path calls again: get in early, launch the products, build the networks. But it feels different this time. The meme is the message: only a few years left to “make it” before you’re relegated to the “permanent underclass” — poor, low status, and locked out because the final world order will be set and socioeconomic mobility will be gone forever.

The “permanent underclass” isn’t a fringe fear anymore. It’s become a mainstream talking point. Vinod Khosla is cosigning posts about the K-shaped economy. Tech influencers are analogizing the AI inflection to COVID. Others are telling you to stop freaking out about a status quo that’s dead and climb the abstraction ladder. Ray Dalio is declaring the world order officially broken.

The collective frenzy looks less like a gold rush and more like everyone’s taking shelter. That anyone can do anything now sounds democratizing, but it’s also a sign that your edge is shrinking. Skills that took years to build are suddenly cheap or obsolete. Companies can do more with fewer people, and their headcounts are showing it. If you’re truly the best in the world at something, everyone still wants to hire you, but if you’re just very good, soon that might not be good enough.

The second dream made us the assets, and the assets are repricing in real time. The problem is there’s little else in our portfolio to bear the weight. We neglected everything else while chasing acceleration. We’re discovering that the world is unstable, and so are we. And now, everyone feels provisional. That’s the panic.

There's no shortage of essays telling you what comes next. On one end, it's over — AI has already won, the job market has collapsed, you're running out of time to position yourself. On the other end, utopia — AGI will solve everything, abundance is coming, just ride it out. The reality is less cinematic. I’ve written about what human work looks like on a longer timeline, but this essay is about the near-term impulse — people figuring out where stability is and aligning themselves with it. Unless you've already permanently ascended to the post-economic class, in which case, ignore all this.

What’s actually scarce now isn’t opportunity or independence. It’s stability. When the calculus you planned your life around starts cracking and time feels short, all hell breaks loose. You stop optimizing for upside and start optimizing for more time, continuity, and a path that won’t keep resetting.

The upside used to be upside. Now, the upside is stability. Ambition is quietly reorienting from limitless ascension to finding solid ground first.1

New Corporate, or boarding the ships.

The obvious place to find stability is inside the biggest ships. The frontier AI labs are building the new FAANG right in front of us. For the top researchers making TBPN trade headlines, getting hired by a top lab is like being drafted to the pro league. Fame and fortune are on the table. For everyone else, these leading AI megalabs are the prestige retirement homes of the frontier. You expect solid comp packages and solid status. It’s the second coming of big tech ‘rest and vest.’

The realest reason to join an OpenAI or Anthropic right now is proximity — to information, money, power, and whatever comes next. When nobody knows what’s happening, there’s value in being first to find out. You’re boarding a ship that everyone expects will weather the storm. You’re aligning with Goliath when it’s impossible to tell who David is. (Choose the Goliath that fits your brand.)

Which is why corporate is back — just with new aesthetics. New Corporate is closer to the frontier and more glamorous, but ultimately assumes the same trade-offs prior generations took: stability over upside, team over individual, steady compounding over lottery tickets. New Corporate is being the median staff member at one of the big AI companies, the popular application companies, the durable winners selling picks and shovels to the GPU class. The next tier of New Corporate is working at a Stripe or Figma or Notion — the adaptable safe havens with the perfect cocktail of stability and status and still some hope for upside.

But New Corporate doesn’t come with guarantees. Companies are building the things that will replace us while preparing for layoffs, pre-drafting the apology and the severance. Dario’s essays read like corporate eschatology — seeding the idea of welfare programs for employees made obsolete by the things they helped build. When higher-ups at the company make it a point to tell you the machines are building themselves now (see Claude Code), it’s some indication of the future.

Not surprisingly, the incentives between founders and their teams are diverging, and this rift will get bigger. In other industries, workers may have formed labor unions and gone on strike by now, but that hasn’t been the culture of Silicon Valley. People who believe in meritocracy and markets aren’t quick to reach for unions. This also seems like last-resort tactics, and most tech workers haven’t felt the pain of having no other options; if they didn’t like the terms of employment, they’d take their skills elsewhere. But with skill being commoditized, fallbacks will be fewer. Don’t be surprised when tech workers start acting like workers.

All this considered, people will keep joining anyway. It helps that the safety story and the impact story point to the same place right now. The biggest ships are also where the most important work is arguably happening. You get to feel safe and righteous at the same time. That’s a hard combination to walk away from. For now at least, being inside the thing that will replace you still feels better than being outside it. The organizations that win the next era will be the ones that figure out how to make people feel safe enough to do dangerous work.

Founding, with a safety net.

People are saying the VC-backed path is low-status now. I’d agree that it was for a minute. But the fragility of every other route is bringing some of that status back. VC used to be high status for its signal — for the stamp, the unicorn potential, the dorm-to-empire myth. Now it’s high status more for what it tangibly gives you: time and shelter. Time because you get five to ten years of belief and a full bank account while everyone else’s timelines and budgets are shrinking. Shelter because it’s membership in an ecosystem that looks like it’ll survive.

The status shifted from “I’m a risk-taker” to “I’m protected.” And that’s recursive — because stability is what’s scarce now, so stability is the new status.2

VC always came with a safety net, but now the safety net is the real selling point. Founding a company is still a noble calling, and VC is still one of the best places to take a real shot from. People just want more safety hatches now — raise more, bank more runway, take money off the table, engineer the soft landing early.

Make something on the frontier that the big AI labs haven’t figured out, get a lot of attention and reach, and let them buy you for a big check before they crush you.

The middle road of raising a seed, building SaaS, and hoping for an exit has hollowed out. The middle of everything is hollowing. Mid-tier startups, mid-tier talent, mid-tier creative careers. You’re either at the frontier or you’re local.

The middle is the trap. Two types of founders will survive. Small and profitable. And moonshot-takers going after atoms, not bits — research labs, deep tech, biotech, regulated sectors. Hard problems where the friction is the moat. If you’re going to risk it all, risk it on something hard and worth it.

Indie, but not naïve.

I’m still bullish on Silicon Valley Small Businesses, now supercharged by AI. But the indie path has gotten noisy … because anyone can make anything now. Vibe coding means what once required a technical team now just needs one person with good prompts and good taste. I’ve been calling this the software creator moment. The market is real. But how much of what’s being made now is serious? How much is just a shot at viral content or a job application masquerading as a company? How much of vibe coding is just adults playing with their new legos?

In one way or another, everyone will now “write” software — whether by making apps or art or something else. But the vast majority won’t do it as a career. Solopreneurs and three-person teams armed with agents are coming for legacy software companies, but that’s still a narrow lane. They won’t swallow the whole game. We live inside the tech bubble, so we forget that most people don’t want to make their own apps, let alone anything else they use, if they can avoid it. Even if personalization is sexy, the gold standard of every kind of thing will still build fandoms; that pull will be both an edge and an incentive to keep improving it.

For years I’ve been building products mostly in small teams, and so much has changed. I can do more faster now, which is both exciting and boring. If I was lightly technical before, I’m moderately technical now. I’ve made at least a dozen products. I’ve shipped a few. But I only maintain a couple of them, as it should be.

Building is the easy part now. Taste is the differentiator. Maintenance is the filter. An audience is the pull. And fun is the lasting competitive advantage.3

Power laws still rule. Even in a world where anyone can build, most of what gets built won’t matter. And people still want teammates. We still want to belong to missions larger than ourselves. The person with taste and a laptop was the hero of 2020-2025. By 2027, that person builds a tribe or joins one — big or small — or gets eaten by one. You can start solo, but you can’t stay solo.

Serving the Frontier, not owning it.

Serving the frontier instead of trying to own it is sexy now. More people seem to be building around tech rather than inside it. Most of my friends in tech used to be founders or operators or investors. Now so many are fractional operators, freelancers, writers, podcasters, filmmakers. Instead of joining the race, people are proudly selling shovels for the gold rush, and selling the gold polish too.

Selling shovels to an industry swimming in capital is a great business. It's the same portfolio logic as venture capital, diversified bets on the ecosystem instead of one concentrated shot. Or you take your talents in-house, as Creative Director at a derisked startup or a VC fund — and trade freedom for stability and scale.

Would you rather join the founder track or the new media fellowship? Would you rather work for A16Z or A24? These questions would have sounded absurd a decade ago. Not now. This is one of the clearest cultural turns in tech right now.

Prestige and price are catching up too. Creative talent used to be an afterthought expense but now it commands real respect and money. Attention is what's scarce, so the people who can get you attention set the price. As I wrote in Media and Machines: attention guys are the new engineers and engineers have become the skilled tradesmen. Builders can build, but they often struggle to make you feel.

You can see the shadow artists inside tech — designers in product roles, writers as content marketers — starting to step out. And you see the outside creatives plugging in to tech — selling taste, creative, and distribution as a service.

The corporate-artist straddle is the new creator bet. The day job now needs its own day job. Serve the industry while you build your own name. It looks like a hedge and plays like a shot. Worst case, you have work. Best case, you earn fans and feed your life’s work.4

Of course selling shovels has its own ceiling. You're always one layer removed from the core of the business, and you're dependent on the industry staying hot. Service businesses are hard to scale and hard to exit. And the taste economy has its own power law: a few people become known, most stay invisible.

Betting it all.

The other way to bet it all doesn’t involve founding or even building anything.

All it requires is leaning into the casino-ification of everything. Crypto cycles, memecoins, sports betting, the blistering pace of the prediction market economy. When traditional paths start feeling like lotteries, actual lotteries start looking rational. We used to gamble to escape the stable class; now we gamble to secure a place in it. The real jackpot is an exit from playing other people’s games.

Some people respond to instability by seeking shelter. Others respond by rolling the dice. The difference is mostly a function of how much you have left to protect.

There’s no leaving tech.

Even if “tech” feels like it’s falling out of favor — if it’s less stable, aspirational, or righteous than it once was, you can’t “leave” tech in any meaningful sense now. Everything is tech. Culture itself has become intertwined with technology. Even if you’re not building software, you’re building on top of it, feeding it, or both. Tech has infiltrated media, entertainment, sports, health. Now it’s pushing into industrials, manufacturing, medicine, energy, the physical world. I’ve been in academia, art, medicine, and tech. They all converge around technology now.

For the past two decades, tech was in large part a closed white-collar economy — software people building for software people, intellectuals selling to intellectuals. It only interfaced with “normal” people through scaling social networks and two-sided platforms. Now it’s reintegrating with the rest of the world: physical things and places that aren’t SF. So even as AI threatens white-collar jobs en masse, the ecosystem will still need more founders, engineers, and operators to build — and more creatives to make it tastefully legible, to itself and to the rest of the world.

The upside is stability.

For the last two decades, we’ve been spoiled by the feeling that rising tides would lift all boats. You could forgo the structured paths of the past and ride the wave up. That dream has plateaued. Now we’re looking for new structures that keep us near the frontier while giving us stability and a tribe that will weather the storm. Every path in this essay is that search.

Every hedger and every gambler is seeking solid ground. And every stakeholder is selling something — the accelerationists, trad propagandists, hustle culture holdouts, VC millenarians. Every shout is an agenda. None of them are selling stability. They’re selling a promise that their incentive path will save you.

This instinct goes beyond career strategy. The so-called “trad” return — homesteading, reasserting gender roles, renewed interest in faith — has a dozen political explanations. But I think it’s simpler than that. The trad return is emblematic of our increasingly urgent search for stability outside the internet era of careers. It’s a search for things that compound even when systems fail. Home, family, faith, body. Fitness, biohacking, longevity. All of these fit the pattern. Call it trad, wellness, faith, homebody-maxxing. New aesthetics, same instinct.

Everyone needs minimum viable stability. And it’s best built as a portfolio — work, health, relationships, identity. Stability isn’t just money in the bank. It’s whether your life can absorb shocks. The divide isn’t between people with more or less. It’s between those who feel too close to freefall and those who don’t.

We’re all just dreaming of stability right now. This isn’t retreat from ambition. People still want to take shots, maybe even bigger ones. They just want to take them from stable ground. But we can’t truly find stability in a credential, career ladder, or industry. We will find it in ourselves, our craft, and our people.

Stability is the new status symbol. Almost everyone is optimizing for a version of the same thing right now, even if they’d never admit it at a dinner party.

Consider this part 1 on this theme. If you enjoyed it, share it with a friend or community that might enjoy it too. You can reply to this email or DM via Substack or Twitter / X.

Art: 1) movie still from Frances Ha (2012), 2) Andy Warhol’s Untitled (~1960)

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