Author: Jim Wallace

Sometimes I think I hate people. At least, that’s the knee-jerk reaction when I’m tired and the world feels impossible. But if I step back, I realize it’s not people I hate. It’s complexity.

Our society has become too complex to navigate without falling into traps. There are costly landmines everywhere, set up by teams of smart people whose entire job was to design a maze where, if you slip once, you lose — and they keep your money.

Think about health insurance. Or trying to actually execute on that “100-day sleep guarantee” from a mattress company. Or, most recently, my adventure in getting a CPAP machine — a process that nearly drove me insane.

Here’s how it went:

• Doctor visit #1: a “consult.”
• Doctor visit #2: they hand me an at-home sleep test and instructions. The nurse told me to turn off all my electronic devices overnight because she thought Wi-Fi might interfere. Meanwhile, I live in Manhattan where I can see 4,000 Wi-Fi access points from my apartment.
• Doctor visit #3: the doctor literally read me the test results off a screen I could see myself — just so he could write the prescription.

Each appointment was time off work because they’re only available 9am-5pm, Monday through Friday. When I finally asked him the one question I had, he sent me a YouTube video. Not a specialized resource. Not even his own explanation. A YouTube video.

The machine itself? It cost my insurance $2,000. Then they handed me off to a “CPAP provider” who wanted me to set up more appointments with them (again, only during work hours, 9–5, Monday through Friday) to “go over” the device — a device I had already set up myself by reading the manual. Meanwhile, you can buy the exact same machine on Facebook Marketplace for $500 with all the accessories, no prescription, no hassle, no appointments.

That whole charade? That’s America today.

Everything is like that now. Health, retirement, car maintenance, even just buying the right phone plan — the responsibility keeps getting pushed down from corporations and institutions onto individuals. You’re expected to be a part-time financial analyst, construction foreman, IT manager, lawyer, and doctor just to avoid getting screwed. It’s exhausting, and it’s breaking us.

Peter Turchin has argued that empires collapse under the weight of their own complexity. That’s what’s happening here. America isn’t failing because we don’t have enough resources or talent. It’s failing because everything is too damn complicated.

And when life feels like that, it’s easy to misdirect the anger. We lash out at other people. At immigrants, at the poor, at “the elites.” But the real enemy isn’t people. The real enemy is the crushing complexity of systems that no individual can navigate alone.

This is why I’m an unapologetic AI hype boy. Not because I believe in some sci-fi AGI future, but because right now, even in its current form, AI actually helps. It can cut through the bullshit, do the research, explain the fine print, and give me answers without me wasting hours or getting conned.

AI is, finally, a tool that helps lift the burden. And if we don’t figure out ways — AI or otherwise — to radically simplify life in this country, then we’re heading straight for a revolution. And it won’t even be for the right reasons.