A recent piece in the Frankfurter Allgemeine framed the current economic crisis as a "downturn" that resilient founders are somehow defying[cite: 15, 16]. But calling this a simple downturn misses the point entirely. It implies we're just waiting out another business cycle before returning to growth as usual.
We are watching the beginning of the end of neoliberalism. The era of cheap oil—the fundamental fuel powering the machine of infinite corporate growth—is coming to a hard physical limit. As the foundation weakens, the traditional wage-labor model is collapsing right along with it.
As David Graeber pointed out in Bullshit Jobs, millions of people already feel the fundamental absurdity of what they do. They are tired of sacrificing their mental health and waking hours to fuel an economic model that actively destroys planet earth and burns through non-renewable resources.
