“Hey Look Over Here!”
“There’s a pigeon!”
The world feels fast now. Chaotic and overwhelming. Too much to read. Too many videos. Too many pictures. Content everywhere. You can’t keep up. It’s like walking into a bookstore or a library. Part of you is super excited, but another part is quietly depressed. You realize that you will never be able to consume all of this stuff. You will die never having read the Dave Grohl or Anthony Kiedis autobiographies, the comprehensive history of the banana, the 30th Jack Reacher novel, or How to Stop Overthinking: The 7-Step Plan to Control and Eliminate Negative Thoughts, Declutter Your Mind and Start Thinking Positively in 5 Minutes or Less (a real book).
We got here because of systems.
There’s a entire field called systems critique that studies this. It’s rooted in systems theory, which first emerged in fields like biology and engineering in the mid-20th century, with great thinkers like Ludwig von Bertalanffy and Norbert Wiener who tried to understand how complex organisms, machines, and ecosystems self-regulate, evolve, and interact with one another.
Later, systems theory branched out into sociology, economics, and philosophy to examine civilizations themselves as interlocking systems. People like Niklas Luhmann, Donella Meadows, and Gregory Bateson studied how feedback loops, incentives, culture, and information flows shape behavior at scale.
It’s the study of how invisible rules and dynamics guide outcomes.
If you read what I write, you know this is a core tenet of The Junteau.
To me, systems critique means stepping back and asking:
Why does this thing even exist?
What purpose does it serve?
And what happens when we no longer need it… but keep it around anyway?
A lot of my writing falls into this school of thought. I see it as part academic exercise, part philosophical reflection, and part tactical playbook for living with your eyes open and rewriting your “coding.”
When I think about the systems we live in, I often frame civilization and human progress as a story of "levels" … levels we beat… like in a video game. Each level represents a layer of economic activity:
Primary activities — mining, farming, logging
Secondary activities — processing, manufacturing, transporting
Tertiary — servicing those activities (barber shops, retail, repairs, construction)
Quaternary — knowledge work, finance, consulting, education
Quinary — entertainment, crafts, lifestyle luxuries, and perhaps most critically…marketing and advertising… stealing the attention of those still participating in the prior four
These levels overlap, of course. But only a tiny percentage of people today work in primary sectors. Just 100 years ago, over 40% of the US workforce was in agriculture. Today, it’s just 1-2% and this number holds in most wealthy countries. Globally, the share of people working in farming dropped from over 60% in 1950 to around 26% today. That’s hundreds of millions of people who once did “necessary” work... now doing… something else. Something more abstract or invented out of thin air.
So where are we now?
We're plunging deeper into the quinary layer where humans are no longer needed for mining or farming (primary), nor to process food, make clothes, or build cars (secondary). Even services (tertiary) are falling to robots, albeit more slowly — construction, barbers, repair techs. Knowledge work (quaternary) — consulting, data analysis, writing — is being squeezed by AI.
And now even human creativity itself… the 5th level… is under siege.
Which might explain why everything feels so loud. So chaotic. We are delirious and increasingly delusional.
It’s like society is collectively going through delirium tremens.. not the beer… the withdrawal syndrome. We know something is happening. Water seeks its level and so does human activity. And while all this civilizational progress unfolds, the core of human psychology hasn’t changed. We still want the same things: sex, salt, sugar, status, security. We want to feel useful. We want to win. To provide for others especially our families. To be seen as special in some way.
I used to play around with a “5 S’s” framework: sex, status, security, salt, and sugar. That’s what advertising appeals to and what most products and services are optimizing for.
But increasingly, the "things" being sold are no longer necessary. We don’t need adaptogenic mushroom hand cream. Or a SaaS subscription to send us emails summarizing all our other emails. Most of what’s sold today is performative — designed to keep people busy and the machine running.
Economic and technological progress is typically framed by economists and talking heads as healthy over the long-term even if destructive short-term. The Luddites were short-sighted, emotional, and wrong. We lose old jobs to automation... but new industries arise. Humanity ascends to higher planes… virtual reality worlds, space colonization, some sort of leisurely utopia. That’s the theory.
And yes it's true, to a degree. But at each new level, fewer and fewer people are actually needed to run things.
So what do we do with the rest of us?
“Idle hands are the devil’s playground.”
We invent jobs. We manufacture demand. We create entire industries around things we must have — even if we really don’t.
This doesn’t mean the jobs are fake. These industries are very real. But the demand is... manufactured. Not consciously. There’s no puppet master. It’s just the natural consequence of trying to avoid societal collapse at a subconscious civilizational level… imagining all of humanity as a single organism… adapting and doing what it feels it must do to survive. Because if you have billions of people with no jobs, no routines, and no roles... you get chaos.
It’s a bit like when your kid says, “I wanna help!” but there’s nothing they can actually do to truly help. You don’t want them to feel bad, so you give them a shovel and tell them to dig a hole over there — and make up a reason why. It makes them feel useful while also keeping them occupied. That’s modern economic life in a nutshell… a global parent handing out shovels, inventing tasks, and praying the kids don’t get bored and start throwing rocks at each other!
Years ago, I started joking about this with friends. I imagined a dystopian future where AI and machines take over all jobs. So the government creates the Department of Pigeon Counters — an employment program for the entire adult population. A massive ground-breakingly complicated “study” is released by the world’s leading experts claiming pigeons are ecologically vital and must be monitored… but can only be monitored manually by humans. No tech allowed. No sensors. No drones. Just human counters… counting slowly and inefficiently.
And soon the world runs on pigeon counting.
There are elite best-in-class pigeon counters and “mid” pigeon counters. There are pigeon counting universities. There are trade shows, magazines, podcasts, influencers, awards all focused on pigeon counting. Entire supply chains… trophies, uniforms, foods that boost eye endurance for “counting”. Everyone believes it’s important and that they’re playing their part. And in the strangest way, it is... and they are…
To this day, my friends will still refer to certain careers or industries as "pigeon counting" when we're feeling cynical.
The goods news is that… we’re not there yet. But I think we’re getting close. We’re in the awkward, noisy, messy pre-pigeon-counting transition zone.
What is that transition zone, exactly?
We’re making content.
Content is the one thing we can always produce no matter how advanced automation gets. We create information and we use it to advert attention. That’s literally what "advertising" means — to divert someone’s attention.
Someone in entrepreneurial circles recently said, “embrace the cringe.”
The implication, though, is the acceptance that the only way to gain followers and survive in today’s economy is to meme, provoke, or polarize other people… to say something shocking, or absurd, or grotesquely AI-generated “slop”… so people are forced to look.
On the flip side, there’s the “philosopher-king” content — high production value, self-actualization porn for the upwardly mobile. In a way that’s what I’m even producing here. I am allowed to break the 4th wall with self-analysis and self-critique.
But it's all the same thing —> content as a grab for attention.
It's time theft. It's stealing someone’s focus from what they were doing... to sell them something. A product, a service, an idea… even yourself as a “personal brand.”
It’s normalized now, of course, because we’re in this late-stage economic zone where screaming into the void is the only way to stay relevant.
We all want things. Especially attention. Because attention —> potential sales. We’ve inverted Buddhism in that we still pursue wanting.
Most companies today.. and I’ll pick on CPG because it’s my professional focus… are built around this strange reality. We’re not solving hunger or thirst. We’re selling novelty, dopamine and some combination of the 5 S’s... sex, status, salt, sugar, security (e.g. some health claim).
Even the companies that don’t make products — they just support those who do. Imagine a data provider for energy drink brands to help them with sales intelligence. Then their sales people will use Salesforce accounts. They will attend industry expos. It all orbits around products we could literally stop consuming tomorrow with no material consequence to the world or anyone’s health or well-being… other than those who might lose their jobs.
Would this be “uncreative destruction?”
Imagine if everyone on Earth suddenly decided to just drink water. The entire ecosystem — trillions of dollars in GDP — would vanish overnight. That’s degrowth!
Now run that thought experiment for every industry. What would the world look like?
Scary… right?
So what stops everyone from waking up and rejecting this consumerist matrix? Is it impossible? Are you sure?
The uncomfortable truth…
There’s really nothing left to do.
We’ve beaten the levels. The things we “need” are handled. So now we compete for attention to sell things we don’t need. The future of all economic activity is converging toward diminishing returns because new ideas are increasingly unnecessary.
So how long can this continue? How long can the system keep absorbing the dissonance between inherent needs and invented wants? Keep creating new layers of jobs, products, and platforms just to keep people busy?
Even content creation itself — the last frontier — is being eaten by AI.
And what comes next?
More yelling. More pigeon counting. More performative productivity in a world that doesn’t really need us. But we still need the 5 S’s. We still need meaning.
So...
Who will become the most elite pigeon counters?
Pigeon counting sounds a lot like Keynesianism but without the goal of full employment
Consistently great stuff