The System Still Works – Just Not for You

How a functioning system taught you to blame yourself

You did what you were told, and for a while, the bargain more or less held. Work led to stability. Rules created predictability. Institutions at least pretended to have your back. What’s changed isn’t your effort or your expectations. It’s the system itself. Over time, incentives warped, guardrails eroded, and extraction replaced balance. Markets stopped serving life and began consuming it. Governance stopped correcting failures and began absorbing them. What now feels like chaos isn’t collapse so much as terminal drift: a system sliding into outcomes that were always possible, once its limits were removed. It still works. Just not for you.

We are still living under an outdated promise: that if you play by the rules long enough, the system will eventually reward you. That belief wasn’t naïve. It was situational. It depended on constraints that no longer exist and protections that have been quietly removed. Wages were once tied, however imperfectly, to productivity. Risk was once shared, at least in part, by institutions instead of pushed entirely onto individuals. When those conditions eroded, the promise remained, even as its terms were voided. What looks like personal failure in the new reality is often just residue of a bargain that no longer applies.

At this point, calling what we’re living through a “broken system” misses the mark. Broken systems fail inconsistently. This one doesn’t. Its outcomes are remarkably reliable. Wealth concentrates. Risk flows downward. Volatility is absorbed by households while insulation is reserved for institutions deemed essential. These are not malfunctions. They are results. When policies, markets, and governing norms are allowed to prioritize extraction over stability, they will do so every time. If the outcomes are consistent, they are not accidental. And if they are not accidental, then “failure” is the wrong diagnosis.

The reason this still feels like a personal shortcoming is not incidental. When risk is individualized, failure must be internalized. You are encouraged, subtly, and relentlessly, to interpret instability as a reflection of your choices rather than the environment you’re navigating. Burnout becomes a character flaw. Anxiety becomes poor resilience. Falling behind becomes evidence that you misplayed the game, not that the game was redesigned mid-round. This quiet self-blame is functional. It keeps people exhausted, isolated, and focused inward, expending energy on self-correction instead of asking why so much correction is suddenly required just to stay afloat.

Seeing this clearly matters, not because recognition fixes anything on its own, but because misdiagnosis drains people of agency. When you believe the problem is you, every response is smaller than the reality you’re facing. You optimize yourself for a system that no longer reciprocates. You grind harder inside conditions that are structurally misaligned with human limits. But when you understand that the system still works – just not for you – the emotional math changed. Anger becomes intelligible. Exhaustion becomes evidence. And the question shifts from “What am I doing wrong?” to “Why is so much being demanded for so little in return?”

This isn’t an argument for despair, and it isn’t a manifesto. This is a diagnosis. Something fundamental has shifted, and pretending otherwise has become its own form of self-harm. You are not imagining the instability. You are not failing some invisible test. You are living inside systems that have been allowed to slide into outcomes that reward extraction and punish resilience. Economically. Politically. Morally.

Systems like this depend on misrecognition to survive. As long as instability feels like an individual problem, it never becomes a collective one. This is why so much energy is spent telling people to adapt, recalibrate, and stay positive. They tell you that if you must blame someone else, blame the people who don’t look or sound like you. Anything but ask whether a society that demands constant resilience while withdrawing protection is still governing at all.

Naming that reality doesn’t solve it. But it does return something essential: the clarity to stop blaming yourself for conditions that were imposed, not chosen.