Fam, the list of failures, grievances, and anxieties people are carrying these days is long, and honestly it should be. If you sit with your own life for even a moment, of course you’re going to feel like things are rough. Life has always had its stretches of pure suckage — that’s normal human weather. In a healthy world, you learn to manage it as you grow. Problems get bigger, you get older, and the two move together. None of that is new.

The real issue isn’t that the bad side of the ledger is long; it’s that the good side has shrunk to damn near nothing. Opportunity, stability, routine — the basics that keep people grounded — have been stripped down to scraps. A stable place to live, a safe school that actually supports kids, health care that you don’t have to treat like a lottery system, work that pays enough to keep you fed and sane… these aren’t luxuries. They’re the bare minimum a functioning society should offer. But here? The minimum has been downgraded, budget-cut, outsourced, and left to rot.

Meanwhile, we’re told to put our faith in “business leaders,” like a strong résumé in squeezing workers somehow translates into caring for the public. We’ve been voting for these types for so long that their lives look fantastic now — shiny, comfortable, insulated. And everyone else? We get the fallout. We get the burnout. We get to pretend things are fine while the people in charge shrug and tell us to work harder, cope harder, survive on vibes.

The private sector was never built to save anyone. It creates problems faster than governments can patch them. Waiting for corporate benevolence is delusion. But in a democracy we actually have power, or at least we’re supposed to. We could choose leaders with imagination — people who see beyond donor lists and golf tournaments. People who know what life looks like for the folks actually riding transit, booking clinics, hustling pay cheque to pay cheque.

But we don’t. And because we don’t, the people who already have everything keep getting more, while the rest of us are left trying to build a stable life out of whatever crumbs are left on the table.

If the opportunities don’t grow, the suckage will. That’s the equation. No amount of optimism, grindset speeches, or corporate PR is going to change that. Just real leadership — which, funny enough, is the one thing the “successful businessmen” crowd seems allergic to.