I carry a computer in my pocket more powerful than the machines that sent humans to the moon, yet I feel more trapped by financial limitations than my grandfather did with his modest factory wages and simple savings account.
The contradiction lives in my daily life like a splinter I can’t remove. I can video call someone in Tokyo for free, stream unlimited music, access the sum of human knowledge instantly, yet I’m calculating whether I can afford the good cereal this month. My grandfather worked at a jute mill, earned a predictable salary, bought a house at thirty, supported four children, and retired with a pension. I have a master’s degree, work in the “knowledge economy,” can’t imagine buying property, worry about Arash’s future education costs, and have no idea what retirement means for my generation.
Technology has delivered the future that science fiction promised, but the economic structures remain frustratingly primitive. Artificial intelligence optimizes investment portfolios for people who already have wealth to invest. Student debt chains graduates to decades of payment before they can even think about building assets. Instant global communication connects markets, enabling money to flow across borders in milliseconds, while wage stagnation disconnects workers from the prosperity their productivity creates. The tools evolved radically, but the rules remained designed for scarcity that abundance should have eliminated.
I read articles about how automation and AI will revolutionize everything, and I believe them, but I also know that every technological revolution so far has made someone wealthy while making someone else obsolete. The printing press democratized knowledge and destroyed the scribes’ livelihood. The industrial revolution created unprecedented wealth and turned craftsmen into replaceable factory workers. The digital revolution connected the world and concentrated wealth in ways that make the robber barons look quaint.
Perhaps most disorienting is how digital innovation created new forms of financial anxiety rather than solving old ones. The gig economy that promised flexibility delivered instability—Farhan drives for Uber on weekends to supplement his office job, calls himself an “entrepreneur,” but he’s just working two jobs without benefits from either. The automation that should have freed workers from drudgery instead made workers obsolete, or at least made them feel perpetually on the edge of obsolescence. Every few years I read about how my profession will be automated, how AI will replace writers, how the skills I’ve spent decades building will become worthless.
The global connectivity that enabled wealth creation also enabled wealth concentration that leaves most people watching prosperity from a distance. I see twenty-five-year-old cryptocurrency millionaires on social media, tech entrepreneurs selling companies for billions, influencers making more from a single sponsored post than I make in months. The wealth exists—more wealth than at any point in human history—but it pools in places I can’t reach, flowing through channels I don’t have access to, accumulating according to rules that seem designed to keep people like me perpetually aspiring but never arriving.
The future we inhabit operates through past assumptions about money, work, and security that no longer match technological reality. The employment models designed for industrial economy persist in digital economy—I’m still trading time for money as if we’re in a factory, even though my work happens in the cloud and productivity has multiplied exponentially without salaries following. The financial institutions created for local commerce struggle with global transactions, charging fees that made sense when humans processed paperwork but seem absurd when algorithms complete transfers instantly. The educational systems preparing students for careers that might not exist in recognizable forms by the time they graduate—Arash is learning skills in school that may be automated before he’s twenty.
Meanwhile, our parents’ financial advice feels archaeological. My mother used to tell me to save in banks, but banks pay interest rates lower than inflation, meaning saving money actually loses value. My father advised getting a stable job with a good company, but companies offer no stability, no pensions, no guarantee that your position won’t be eliminated in the next restructuring. They told me to buy property as an investment, but property prices have increased four times faster than wages in Dhaka, making home ownership feel like a fantasy reserved for people who already owned homes.
The strategies that enabled previous generations’ prosperity prove inadequate for contemporary challenges. Work hard and you’ll be rewarded—except productivity has increased massively while wages stagnated. Get an education and you’ll have opportunities—except education became so expensive that the debt cancels out the earning potential. Save for retirement—except retirement requires accumulating resources that no ordinary salary can build anymore, not with rent consuming half of income, not with healthcare costs rising, not with the expectation that we’ll need to support our children longer and our parents longer and somehow also build wealth for a future that keeps receding.
Yet perhaps the feeling of being stuck reflects psychological rather than economic reality. I have to sit with this possibility, uncomfortable as it is. Maybe the abundance anxiety makes current prosperity feel insufficient compared to imagined future wealth. I have food, shelter, healthcare access, education for my child, occasional luxuries—by historical standards, even by global standards, I’m wealthy. But I don’t feel wealthy because I’m constantly measuring myself against an impossible standard of financial security that no middle-class person has ever actually achieved.
The comparison trap makes present circumstances seem limited compared to curated online presentations of others’ success. I scroll through social media and see friends (or people I think are friends) buying cars, taking international vacations, renovating homes, and I feel like I’m falling behind. But I’m comparing my full reality—with all its bills and anxieties and limitations—to their highlight reel. I’m comparing my internal experience of financial stress to their external presentation of financial success, forgetting that everyone is probably as anxious as I am, just better at hiding it online.
The perfectionism prevents action until ideal conditions arrive. I’ve delayed investing because I’m waiting to fully understand the market. I’ve postponed starting a business because I’m waiting for financial security first. I’ve avoided making career changes because I’m waiting for the perfect opportunity. But waiting for ideal conditions means never acting, and never acting means staying exactly where I am, feeling stuck not because I am stuck but because I’ve chosen stuckness over uncertainty.
The temporal displacement might also reflect how completely our financial systems have been financialized beyond human comprehension. The markets driven by algorithmic trading that executes millions of transactions per second based on patterns no human can recognize. The cryptocurrencies created from digital speculation, backed by nothing except collective belief and consuming enough electricity to power entire countries. The investment vehicles that seem designed to benefit institutions rather than individuals—the hedge funds, the derivatives, the complex instruments that even the people trading them don’t fully understand until they collapse and destroy economies.
My grandfather understood money because money was simple. He earned taka, saved taka, spent taka. The relationship between work and reward was direct. Now I earn money that’s simultaneously physical and digital, invested in retirement accounts I can’t access, tied to currency values that fluctuate, exposed to market risks I don’t control. I work in an economy where value is abstract, where companies can be worth billions without making profit, where the connection between labor and compensation has been severed by so many intermediary layers that it’s impossible to know if I’m being paid fairly.
We live in the future but cannot understand its economic operating system. The future was supposed to be transparent, democratized, accessible. Instead, it’s opaque, concentrated, gatekept. The tools exist to create unprecedented equality—we can educate anyone anywhere, we can connect workers directly to opportunities, we can distribute resources efficiently. But we haven’t used the tools for equality. We’ve used them to make inequality more efficient, more invisible, more algorithmic.
There’s a particular cruelty to being stuck in a future that was supposed to liberate us. The promises were explicit: technology would free us from drudgery, increase leisure time, distribute prosperity widely. Instead, we work more hours than our grandparents, have less job security, and watch prosperity concentrate in fewer hands while being told we’re living in an age of unprecedented opportunity. The opportunity exists, technically, the way winning the lottery is technically possible. But possibility without probability is just another word for false hope.
Tonight I’ll practice present-tense prosperity—appreciating the financial tools and opportunities that do exist now rather than waiting for the perfect financial future that might never arrive. I have stable work, even if it’s not perfectly secure. I have savings, even if they’re modest. I have the ability to learn new skills, even if I’m not sure which skills will matter. I have time with Arash, which is wealth that can’t be measured in taka or invested in markets.
Understanding that feeling stuck might reflect perspective more than circumstances doesn’t make the feeling disappear, but it creates space around it. Maybe I’m not actually stuck. Maybe I’m just moving in ways I don’t recognize as movement because I’m measuring progress by outdated metrics. Maybe the digital age requires an industrial wallet because we’re in transition, caught between economic systems, and the real challenge is learning to build wealth according to rules that haven’t been fully written yet.
Or maybe I am stuck, and the system is broken, and acknowledging the brokenness is the first step toward demanding something better. Maybe both things are true. Maybe I can appreciate what I have while also recognizing that what I have isn’t what was promised, that the future delivered its benefits unequally, that carrying a supercomputer in my pocket doesn’t matter much when I can’t afford the basics that should have become cheaper as technology improved.
The moon landing cost less than a modern iPhone to develop, adjusted for inflation. We have the technology. We’ve always had the technology. What we lack is the imagination to build economic systems as advanced as our tools, the political will to distribute prosperity as efficiently as we distribute information. Until then, I’ll carry my powerful computer and my inadequate wallet, living in the future while trapped in the past, trying to figure out how to thrive in a world that hasn’t caught up to itself.