I. Thesis & core premise
Primary thesis: The systematic elimination of friction across logistical, digital, social and financial systems does not democratize outcomes. Instead, it strips away stabilizing buffers which increase the frequency of transactions across a fixed time-frame, leading to an accelerated transfer of wealth, attention, power and status from undisciplined participants to the disciplined, high-value ones. The result is an evolution of the traditional bell-curve distributions of outcomes to extreme power laws where the “rich get richer, poor get poorer” and its equivalent plays out across almost every domain like wealth, health, social and dating markets.
The non-neutral default: in a zero-friction environment, what is “normal” is not neutral — it is inherently entropic. As the Overton window shifts to normalize degenerative behaviors, unconscious participants become the cash-flow for self-interested capitalists who seek to extract revenues from a lazy population who feed off the narrative created by the capitalists.
Therefore, to become the top 1%, today and in the future, requires proactive and conscious choice to avoid degenerative mainstream defaults and opt for a life of high-discipline and avoidance of the mainstream script.
II. The Mechanism: Friction removal as a sorting engine
High Friction (Historical): Low Frequency / Long Wavelength [ Slow Iteration ] ──── (Friction / Gatekeepers) ────> Slow Sorting Low Friction (Modern): High Frequency / Short Wavelength [ Rapid Cycles: Win/Loss Transactions ] ──────────────> Hyper-Accelerated Sorting
The past — friction as a shield against degeneracy
Historically, physical friction, geographic boundaries, institutional gatekeeping and communication latency capped both the maximum and lowest level outcome an individual could achieve in the various areas of life important for human flourishing (economic, dating & health). Inefficiencies kept markets local, slowed down human consumption and limited the velocity at which an individual could accelerate past their peers, or ruin their own health or finances. Thus, the vast majority of people found their results to be somewhere in the middle, not spectacular, but not terrible either.
However, as time went on, markets began to aggressively de-friction. The primary cause of this is the coming-online of a global population via smartphones and the internet. As a result, networks, markets and systems which used to be local and illiquid, became global, liquid and instant.
Without friction to preserve the mid-tiers who existed at the centre of the bell-curve, systems naturally organize into Pareto-style power distributions (at first 70/30, then 80/20 and eventually 99/1 in extreme cases).
This means that the “middle class” of any domain (anyone who is “average”) — the average middle class worker, average physical condition, average dating option — is hollowed out into 2 binary options: winners who win even more, or losers who fall to the bottom of the hierarchy.
The ruthless sorting mechanism of nature demarcates the line between the top participants and the bottom ones, sorting individuals into either the top (minority) or bottom (majority) as the mid-tier is systematically dismantled without anyone being aware of what is going on.
Wave frequency and the transfer of value from the bottom to the top
In physical wave mechanics, friction acts as a dampener, its purpose is to slow down wave oscillations. So when friction is reduced in a medium, it allows an oscillating system to complete more cycles per unit of time.
In any market, network or system, participants in that network engage in a transaction where energy is transferred. This energy can be in various forms — capital, knowledge, sexual attention etc. A transaction, then, can be treated as a full-wave cycle (crest to trough), meaning a complete round-trip event where 2 participants engage, and capital, attention or value moves from one person to another.
This transaction extracts and transfers resources from the undisciplined to the disciplined, the poor to rich, the passive and lazy to the productive.
In the historic high-friction world we used to live in (paper checks, phoning a broker, physical stores, lack of private cars, geographic dating boundaries), completing a full cycle took weeks, months or years. The rate of wealth or status extraction was heavily restricted by this friction.
In a zero-friction world, a complete cycle can execute in milliseconds or minutes. A market participant can liquidate their entire retirement fund in seconds with a single-click, where previously, they would have had to call their financial advisor who would talk them out of such an idiotic trade.
Instead of physically traversing across town to physically attend a social event and mustering up the courage to talk to a girl, a man can now swipe on Tinder and instantly have a dating option in seconds.
Network topology and Metcalfe's law of extraction
As I mentioned, in the past, mediocre actors were protected by geographic friction (local retail monopolies, regional social circles, isolated markets). The internet and coming online of a global population meant that regional guardrails are gone, exposing everyone to global competition.
As billions of individuals get online, the number of potential interactions within the network does not grow linearly, instead it scales exponentially. The more nodes in the network means more potential connections, meaning more liquid channels for value to flow to high-value, disciplined participants.
Attention, capital and desire naturally then flow into the top 1% or 0.1% of participants (the most compelling products, most aesthetic faces and bodies, the highest status profiles) as high-value nodes attract more value. As the network becomes larger and more dense, it only supercharges this directional flow of value to the top 1%.
III. Cross-Domain Manifestations of High-Frequency Sorting
1. Financial Markets
Financial markets used to be reserved for the wealthy and financially prudent as participating in them required physically receiving stock certificates, calling up a broker to place a trade and a high minimum wealth threshold to qualify as a client.
Now, with mobile financial apps like Robinhood, participation in financial markets requires nothing more than a smartphone and at least $1 to deposit into a brokerage account. The friction has been removed, resulting in the ability for someone to lose their entire life savings in a single instant if they lack financial prudence and discipline.
The increase in frequency and liquidity of the market also provides instant price-signals to participants, creating anxiety and the impulsivity to overtrade, resulting in extractive billion dollar market makers racking up all-time-high profits via massive trading volumes and disciplined players like long-term hedge funds picking up assets at rock-bottom prices from a retail class that trades on Telegram trading signals, Reddit stock ideas and random trades they picked up on a random post they saw on X.
These companies rationalize their actions as “democratizing financial services”, in reality, they merely democratize the transfer of wealth from the poor and middle class to the highly disciplined players to fund their next real estate purchase.
2. Dating markets
Historically, dating markets were strictly constrained by geography. An individual selected a partner from a localized pool of 15 to 30 candidates within their parish, town, or immediate social circle. The closed nature of this network and culturally enforced monogamy guaranteed stability: the vast majority of ordinary men managed to secure a partner.
Most importantly, the historical baseline for the average man was vastly different from today. Environmental defaults did the heavy lifting without any cognitive effort. The food supply was composed of healthy whole foods, manual exertion was baked into daily survival, and an overarching cultural and spiritual framework demanded work ethic, accountability, and physical capability. A man did not need exceptional self-discipline to remain functional, physically fit, and purposeful, his environment prevented physical and moral rot.
Today, those protective defaults are gone. Modern society is engineered for physical decay and sedation: hyper-palatable junk and fast food, sedentary white-collar jobs, and a domestic culture that encourages men to do the bare minimum — hold a stable job, pay half the bills, and passively consume media. Many men believe that merely earning a median wage grants them entitlement to romantic desire. In reality, any romantic desire they might have commanded in the dating market has collapsed as their physical vitality, discipline, and aesthetics have been completely eroded.
The Exposure of the Real Standard
Digital apps and platforms did not create hypergamy (the biological drive to select for the highest quality partner), they simply removed its geographic barriers and revealed the true hierarchy of human desire.
When apps (not just dedicated dating apps like Tinder, but social media apps which act as de-facto dating apps, like Instagram) provide an infinite swipe inventory, the distribution follows a brutal power law.
The top 1% of men — those who command elite aesthetics, wealth, status, and drive — attract virtually all female attention.
The crisis is not merely that apps are superficial, it is that the standard for what is considered average has collapsed:
The “average” man has become: metabolically dysfunctional, overweight/obese, lacking ambition, and is pacified by video games and social algorithms.
Biological desire, however, has not shifted at all: Instinctive female attraction remains hardwired for masculinity, aesthetics, vitality, drive and ambition.
Because modern men have drifted downward into physical and mental decline, the statistical average is now, in evolutionary attraction terms, bottom-tier.
The middle tier of viable, desirable suitors has been hollowed out. There is no middle class of men in modern dating anymore — only the disciplined 1% who clear the biological threshold, and an undifferentiated mass who fail it.
The Permeable Wall of Offline Dating
People believe that real-world dating resists this hypergamous power law. In closed settings—workplaces, hobby groups, local friend groups—proximity and interpersonal chemistry soften the hypergamous nature of human desire.
However, closed settings no longer exist in isolation. Real life is completely porous to the digital realm. A woman chatting with a pleasant, soft-bodied man at a weekend social gathering is not evaluating him solely against the five other men in the room.
In her pocket lies direct, frictionless access to thousands of local men, including the top-tier which generates genuine attraction in her. The digital market operates as a continuous cognitive benchmark.
The moment an offline option registers as mediocre, the app exists as an immediate escape hatch. Proximity cannot paper over biological apathy when proof of superior attractiveness is an arm's reach away.
Even if she isn’t actively on dating apps, social media apps provide an endless feed of highly attractive men that showcase to her the true standard of what she desires.
This desire for the highest quality partner which has been revealed globally leads to the following 2 potential paths a woman can take.
Path A: Resentful monogamy
When a woman finds that she cannot secure long-term commitment from the top tier—either offline or through an app—she faces a practical dilemma. Long-term biological imperatives, the financial burden of modern living, and the logistics of raising children still make a monogamous household the pragmatic choice.
She settles. She accepts an average man not out of genuine admiration, but through cold rationalization: he is “nice”, predictable, and harmless. Above all, she calculates that he is unlikely to abandon or cheat on her—not because he possesses deep moral character or disciplined fidelity, but because his absolute lack of market value renders him incapable of attracting anyone else. Lack of optionality is mistaken for virtue.
This produces a devastating dynamic:
Internalized resentment: Her hypergamous instinct does not vanish, it is suppressed. Lacking true desire for her partner, she views his softness and lack of drive not with sympathy, but with quiet, corrosive resentment. Domestic life deteriorates into transactional tolerance, functional flatlining, and emotional coldness.
The subsidizing of his mediocrity: By settling with him, she inadvertently subsidizes his mediocrity. A man in this position never experiences the total romantic starvation that forces an existential reckoning. His basic domestic needs are met, his ego is cushioned, and he remains permanently insulated from the existential pain required to spark transformation and self-improvement.
Path B: Casual polygyny, total displacement, and pacification
The alternative trajectory is that women refuse to settle long-term. Recognizing the hollow state of the middle tier, they choose casual access or non-exclusive arrangements with top-tier men over monogamy with an uninspiring peer. Soft polygyny replaces paired partnership: a small handful of elite men commands recurring intimacy, while the displaced majority of men are locked out of the dating market entirely.
These excluded men hit an absolute, unbuffered rock bottom. Historically, such widespread romantic rejection generated intense, concentrated existential fury—the kind of friction that pushed men into the gym, into dangerous commercial risks, into self-discipline, and into radical personal overhauls to build undeniable value.
In the modern landscape, that transformational fire is intentionally defused:
The digital escape: The energy meant to fuel physical and material rebirth is routinely drained into hyper-stimulating pornography and mindless social media consumption. The biological urge to transform and compete is satisfied through synthetic pixels.
Black-pill fatalism: Rather than diagnosing their own physical inertia, poor habits, and lack of agency, these men adopt online deterministic ideologies. They construct intricate rationalizations arguing that genetics, facial bone structure, or female malice have rendered effort futile.
The primal fire that once forged higher-order men is dissipated into a tissue and venting on anonymous forums. The bottom tier remains pacified, sedated, and stagnant—completely bypassed by an indifferent sorting algorithm that continues to reward absolute value and punish complacency.
3. Physical Health
In health, before the advent of 21st-century food science and engineering, people ate local, fresh organic produce by default. High-fructose corn syrup laden bubble teas and McDonald style franken-burgers did not exist.
Additionally, the lack of food delivery apps meant you had to traverse the cold for 30 minutes or more to get to your local market to buy anything — and even then it was only real, whole foods on offer that you actually had to prep and cook.
Today, instant delivery apps eliminate the time, prep and physical energy previously required to consume food. Additionally, fast-food has devolved from its previous perception of being a shameful, embarrassing indulgence of undisciplined actors to a normalized food choice by exhausted, lazy adults.
Most people assume that life expectancies will continue to rise as medical science progresses but my guess is that the opposite is true. I believe we’re quickly reaching an asymptote and may even experience a decline in average life expectancies over the coming decades as obesity rates rise, and life becomes more sedentary. I doubt medical science will be sufficient to compensate for the intentional destruction of our own health.
The bifurcation of health
At the same time, information about health and access to healthy whole foods, supplements, regimes etc. have skyrocketed. Now, you no longer need months to procure some obscure Brazilian superfood, instead, you can have it at your doorstep in 2 days with a single-click.
So we can see very clearly that the physical health of the population is bifurcating. The healthy are becoming healthier, whilst the unhealthy are rapidly becoming less healthy.
That said, good health requires discipline which the average modern person is structurally devoid of. So whilst this bifurcation happens, only the minority are sorted into the top-tier of health percentiles, whilst the majority fall to the bottom.
The past default where everyone had a low body-fat percentage and good biological markers is gone. People are unknowingly being sorted into the metabolically dysfunctional overweight/obese class, or the lean, healthy long lifespan class.
IV. The Myth of the Neutral Default & The Entropic Drift
The second law of thermodynamics states that the total entropy (disorder) of a system must always increase over time unless energy is constantly channeled into it.
In life, what this means is that all systems — the human body, personal finances, the mind etc. — all decay unless a continual input of energy and conscious discipline is funneled in, to maintain order and system health.
In the past, the Overton window was centered on a high-discipline culture which valued natural hierarchies, agency, merit and excellence, thus only behaviours which were considered conducive to “excellence” were showcased. Degenerative, immoral and undisciplined behaviours were considered sinful, or evil.
As the world secularized and became morally relativistic, hierarchy-less, and coddled, the Overton window shifted to normalize degeneracy as a valid mainstream default. Fast food, laziness, video games, nihilism, physical decline, chronic distraction and impulsivity became the new-normal.
In life, that which is popular is never what is good, instead, it’s always what’s easy and panders to the human desire for ease and comfort.
Discipline has been stripped away as oppressive and passive drift has become the default norm. Lowering standards across society makes being a loser tolerable, removing the internal shame and embarrassment that once served as a natural corrective mechanism.
V. Post-hoc rationalization
Most people believe themselves to be rational, high-agency individuals. The unfortunate truth is that humans are emotional, tribalistic, conformist creatures first who backward rationalize irrational decisions with logic.
We do not wake up and actively decide to surrender our autonomy, health or capital. We lose it through a series of micro-decisions along the path of least resistance: clicking the push notification, tapping the delivery app, buying the gimmicky product they don’t need.
To protect the ego from the painful reality of lacking impulse control, individuals construct elegant intellectual rationalizations (e.g. YOLO-culture in r/WallStreetBets, re-framing obesity as a dismantling of traditional beauty standards etc.)
This rationalization prevents the diagnostic honesty and humility required to introspect, swallow one’s pride and accept one’s own current deficiencies and spend grueling, boring years trying to correct them over time.
VI. The Solution and Conclusion
In the high-friction past, a person could unconsciously stumble into an average, comfortable life through adherence to mainstream cultural scripts.
In the low-friction era of today, living unconsciously results in a drift to entropic decay as society normalizes and glorifies everything that was previously considered shameful, sinful or immoral.
The mid-tier of any domain — economically, socially, physically — is aggressively becoming hollowed out. Nature acts as an unforgiving sorting mechanism which presents a painful ultimatum: either become the rare disciplined individual who rises to the top-tier or fall to the bottom with a very painful, if not impossible, journey back up.
The TLDR of this essay is this: as friction is removed from systems, the guardrails against stupidity and low-value behaviour are removed. Thus, the only way to ensure good outcomes in life is to become a conscious, sovereign agent in life. We can do this by:
1. Exploiting low-friction systems, for excellence, not decay
Fundamentally low-friction systems (e.g. financial, e-commerce, social media apps) are merely network infrastructure that allows participants to pick and choose how they want to interact with it.
You can use this infrastructure to build your life, or be exploited by people who use them to build their own lives.
You can use them as a high-earning producer or mindless consumer.
You can use them to extract value, or be extracted by it.
Instead of mindlessly participating in these systems and being used by them toward decay, use them to attain excellence.
Here are some examples of how to use these apps for excellence:
Use delivery apps to order healthy groceries (not fast food)
Use financial markets to easily participate in the markets and hold for years (not day trade your life away)
Use social media and global infrastructure as a producer to earn a high, remote income from a global customer base (not as a consumerist customer freely handing his cash away)
Use instant ride-hailing to drive you to the gym (not to the pub)
Use Amazon to purchase health supplements and things which enhance your life (not pointless junk)
Use AI to help you become more knowledgeable and wise (not to create stupid brainrot videos)
Use the internet to seek out high quality first-principles information and primary sources (not to mindlessly consume unqualified opinions on TikTok)
Note the operative word in the above list: “Use”. To use something implies to consciously wield that thing with intent, not to be unconsciously used by it.
2. Become the high value node and be the extractor, not the extractee
As you use these platforms for excellence, you become a high value individual. As you become high value, you naturally attract resources, attention and status.
You can then use these platforms to amplify your leverage, influence and resources as capital, attention, status flows to you effortlessly, instead of being drained from you.
3. Internalise discipline
In the past, discipline was baked into the ambient environment we lived in. Now, the environment has changed, and is one which rewards decay.
This means that you can no longer unconsciously pass through life and expect excellence. Excellence requires intentionality. This means you must reclaim discipline as an internal standard you hold for yourself, rather than expecting institutions or the mainstream culture to hold your hand through it.
The days of a priest holding you accountable, or a community group intervening with your life to ensure excellence are gone, you need to hold yourself accountable to your own internal standard.
4. Resist conformity
In a previously Christian world, mainstream conformity meant conforming to a culture and framework which demanded excellence, discipline, sanctification and growth.
Now, conformity means consuming hyper palatable junk, short-form algorithms, time-wasting video games, and becoming a lazy impotent person.
To become top-tier, you must go against the herd. You must say no to the Thursday after-work pizza social, you must say no to weekend binge drinking culture, you must say no to having your mind monopolized by others on social media.
This makes you a black sheep. People will think you’re a weirdo. This is normal and to be expected. When a herd of sheep are blindly being led to the slaughterhouse, the heretic who veers off by himself is considered the “idiot” by that same herd.
Conclusion
If you follow these 4 key principles, you will be placed on the right path. You will climb your way to the top-1% of any domain in life. The real difference between the top-tier and bottom-tier is that the top-tier is intentional and proactive about life, whilst the bottom-tier is unconscious and unintentional.
The average person drifts through life falsely believing that everything is fine. They believe they can just show up to their 9-5, do the bare minimum, find a girlfriend/wife and life will just hum along. We no longer live in an age where such a lifestyle is realistic, without purposeful, intentional effort.
If you don’t channel conscious effort into making your life excellent, it will slowly rot into obsolescence. In fact, most people are already there and don’t even realize it. Corporations tell us the lie that it's perfectly fine to be fat, broke, unfocused and numb. Meanwhile, those same corporations extract every penny from us behind our backs.
In the end, “the rich get richer, the poor get poorer” rings truer than ever and it applies across every facet of life. The middle-class of any domain is dead, because it was never how nature operated in the first place. And in its place is a brutal, unforgiving power law that rewards those who are productive, disciplined and fight entropy every day and punishes those who don’t.