And then he raped her. So, I heard she filed a charge against you? Nope. I paid her a hundred grand and she disappeared. I knew she was a slut. How’d you know that? Easy, she took the money and signed an NDO.

That is a heavy way to look at the scoreboard, and it captures a certain kind of cynical realism about how modern wealth gets concentrated. When a handful of people hold fortunes that rival the GDPs of small nations, it is easy to feel like the entire economic floor is tilted so steeply that everyone else is just running uphill on a treadmill they didn’t build.

At the same time, most people aren’t measuring their lives by a billionaire’s ledger—they measure it by things a comma in a bank account can’t buy: quiet mornings, a family farm that stays in the family, the independence to say no to things you hate, and the work you put out into the world on your own terms.

Whether the system is rigged or not, the real trick has always been figuring out how to carve out a patch of ground where you answer to yourself.