The Delusion of Capitalism at the Edge of Collapse
There is a peculiar kind of consciousness emerging in our time, not spiritual, not collective, but intensely personal and hyper-capitalist. Billionaire consciousness. It is not defined by the size of one’s bank account alone, but by a way of seeing the world shaped by unimaginable wealth, power, and detachment. Think of Musk launching cars into space, Bezos building rockets named after freedom, or Trump, endlessly proclaiming his greatness while leaving wreckage behind. These men are not simply rich. They inhabit a different psychological planet, orbiting far above the daily concerns of ordinary people. And the tragedy is not just that they live this way, but that the system is guiding us all toward their altitude, or at least toward believing that we should want to.
In many ways, billionaire consciousness is the logical endpoint of capitalism. It begins with the promise of opportunity: work hard, innovate, and success will follow. But the slope is steep and slippery. Capitalism rewards accumulation, and once a certain threshold is passed, wealth multiplies without work. The rich get richer not because they are smarter or more moral, but because the game is rigged. What began as aspiration hardens into separation. Billionaire consciousness forms in this altitude, where basic needs are long forgotten and control over systems, people, and even reality itself becomes the obsession.
It is a mindset defined by detachment. When you can buy anything, time, labour, even influence, the idea of shared sacrifice becomes abstract. The billionaire does not wait in lines. They do not worry about bills, healthcare, or housing. Their concerns become strategic, global, often absurd: how to colonize Mars, how to upload consciousness to the cloud, how to outlive death itself. These are not merely ambitions. They are escape plans, crafted from a deep fear of falling back to Earth, to vulnerability, to being like the rest of us.
And yet, the rest of us carry the cost. The billionaire’s freedom is built on the exhaustion of others, warehouse workers, gig drivers, unpaid interns, drained ecosystems. While they shape narratives of disruption and innovation, the public sphere withers: schools starve for funding, hospitals close, housing becomes speculative. The billionaire believes they are solving the world’s problems. But more often, they are bypassing them, privatizing the solutions and charging admission.
Worse still, billionaire consciousness spreads. It infects culture. We begin to admire them, even defend them. We internalize their logic: hustle harder, scale faster, be your own brand. The dream of becoming a billionaire, or just escaping precarity, keeps us in line. But it is a dream, and like most dreams, it is not shared equally. The vast majority will never join the club. Meanwhile, democracy erodes, inequality widens, and attention becomes the most mined resource of all.
What makes billionaire consciousness so devastating is not its extravagance but its emptiness. It is a hollowing out of human connection, of the idea that we rise together. It replaces meaning with metrics, relationships with transactions, and wonder with spectacle. The billionaire may escape to space, but they leave a scorched Earth behind.
And so, we must wake up. Not just from the illusion of ever becoming billionaires, but from the system that tells us we should try. There is another kind of consciousness worth cultivating, one rooted in community, in limits, in care. A consciousness that sees freedom not as personal detachment but as shared dignity. The billionaire may live above the clouds. The future, if we are to have one, must be grounded here, with each other.