Thoughts
Humans, as a species, have achieved extraordinary things—Beethoven’s symphonies, Picasso’s masterpieces, Einstein’s theories, and countless other feats of creativity and intellect. Yet, we also excel at two less admirable traits: destruction and greed.
Since the dawn of civilisation, humankind has eradicated approximately 83% of mammal biomass and half of the world’s plant biomass. We have fought hundreds of thousands of wars among ourselves, leaving devastation in our wake.
The richest 1% of humanity controls nearly half of the world’s wealth. If you live in a Western country, your income or assets, even if modest by local standards, likely place you among the top 10% of the wealthiest people on Earth.
Money is essentially an illusion because there isn’t enough physical cash to back all the money in circulation. The same funds are referenced multiple times. For instance, if you deposit £1,000 into a bank, the bank can loan that same £1,000 to someone else. Now, you, the bank, and the borrower all effectively claim to have £1,000.
Money is an inter-subjective reality: it only works because people collectively agree it has value. If that belief disappeared, the currency would collapse. In practice, money often seems to function like a Ponzi scheme—those with wealth, through compound interest and accumulation, keep gaining far more than they need, while those without it struggle, receiving far less than their fair share.
According to Oxfam's analysis (September 23, 2024), the richest 1% then held more wealth than the combined total of the bottom 95% of the world's population. The picture has only worsened since: Oxfam's January 2026 report found the richest 1% now own 43.8% of global wealth, with a person in that group holding on average 8,251 times more wealth than someone in the bottom 50%. Billionaire wealth alone rose over 16% in 2025 to a record $18.3 trillion—three times faster than its average annual growth over the previous five years.
Don't get me wrong—to date, capitalism is the only system that has ever delivered prosperity and technological progress our caveman ancestors couldn't have dreamt of. I watch Bloomberg most days and personally have a diverse stock market portfolio. And remember: the Stone Age didn't end because we ran out of stone.
The Constants of Life:
1. Reproduction
2. Evolution
3. Death
The Constants of Humanity:
1. Technological progress
2. Greed
The only thing you can truly own is time. It is truly precious, and as much as you can, you should try to enjoy it and spend it with your loved ones. Everything else—possessions, wealth, even status—is borrowed or rented. But time itself is an enigma. It doesn’t exist in the way we think it does; it’s influenced by gravity and is fundamentally a human construct—a system we’ve created to make sense of our fleeting existence.
Give humanity enough time, and even our greed turns out to be a rounding error on the universe's own arithmetic.
Ultimately, as much as humans strive for sense and order, the second law of thermodynamics states that entropy, or the measure of disorder in a system, tends to increase over time, meaning all things naturally progress toward greater chaos and disorder.
Well, at least until the heat death of the universe 😜
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