I’ve been thinking about this for months, and I keep arriving at the same uncomfortable place. The feeling that I’m falling behind, that persistent hum of inadequacy that follows me from my morning coffee to my midnight scrolling, has a source. And the source has an architecture.
Let me start with a confession. I moved to Singapore in part because I believed the narrative: that if you positioned yourself in the right city, built the right network, worked with sufficient intensity, the trajectory would take care of itself. I’m the founder of a media company. I wake up early. I read widely. I make strategic decisions about where to invest my time. And still, there are weeks where I feel like I’m running on a treadmill that someone keeps tilting upward, just enough that I don’t fall off, but never enough that I actually get anywhere.
For a long time, I called this burnout. The internet certainly wanted me to. There’s an entire industry built around convincing knowledge workers that their problem is a depleted battery, a misaligned chakra, or an insufficiently optimized morning routine. But I’ve rested. I’ve optimized. I’ve taken the walks, done the journaling, adjusted the sleep hygiene. The feeling persists. Because the feeling was never really about energy. It’s about structure.
The treadmill has a blueprint
Here’s what I mean by class architecture. Every society needs a story about mobility. The story has to be credible enough that people invest their best years in pursuing it, and vague enough that when it doesn’t materialize, they blame themselves rather than the system. In the United States, this story is the American Dream. In Singapore, it’s meritocracy. In the European startup ecosystem, it’s the promise that a good idea plus venture capital equals liberation from wage labor.
These stories share a common engineering principle: they make upward mobility feel possible while keeping the structural conditions for genuine class transition extraordinarily rare. A Brookings Institution study found that only 4% of Americans born in the bottom income quintile reach the top quintile in their lifetime. In most European countries, the numbers are marginally better but follow the same pattern. The escalator exists. It just moves slower than the building is growing.
I think about this a lot when I look at the European tech landscape, which I cover closely at Silicon Canals. There’s enormous energy in the ecosystem: founders raising rounds, cities competing to become the next hub, governments launching innovation programs. And yet the deeper question of who actually benefits from this activity, whose lives are materially transformed by it, gets remarkably little scrutiny.
The productivity trap as class maintenance
The genius of the current arrangement is that it recruits you into maintaining it. Consider the productivity industry, worth tens of billions of dollars globally. Its core proposition is that your outcomes are a function of your inputs: your habits, your focus, your tools, your mindset. This framing does something very specific. It locates the cause of your stagnation inside you.
If you’re not advancing, you need a better system. A better app. A better coach. A different city. More discipline. Less distraction. The entire apparatus of self-improvement functions as a pressure valve for structural inequality: it gives people something to do with their frustration that doesn’t involve questioning the distribution of resources, access, or opportunity.
I’m not writing from a position of purity here. I’ve bought the books. I’ve tried the frameworks. I’ve reorganized my workflow more times than I can count. And some of it helped, in the way that rearranging deck chairs helps: the view changes, even if the ship’s course doesn’t. The real insight came when I stopped asking “How can I be more productive?” and started asking “Productive toward what, and for whose benefit?”
The answer, uncomfortably often, was: productive toward generating value that accrues primarily to people who already have capital. That’s the deal. You trade your cognitive output for a salary or revenue that feels like progress, while the delta between what you produce and what you capture widens every year. A study from the Economic Policy Institute finds that productivity in the US has grown 64.6% since 1979, while hourly compensation for typical workers has grown just 17.3%. The gap is the architecture. The gap is the design.
Why the “founder” narrative is the sharpest version of this trap
I want to be careful here because I am a founder, and I genuinely believe in building things. But the founder narrative, as it functions in contemporary culture, is perhaps the most effective piece of class architecture ever constructed. It takes the fundamental precarity of entrepreneurship (no safety net, no guaranteed income, constant existential risk) and reframes it as freedom. It takes the concentration of returns among a tiny minority of ventures and presents it as a meritocratic sorting mechanism. It takes the dependence of most startups on venture capital, which is itself concentrated among a small number of wealthy families and institutions, and calls it a democratized funding landscape.
The numbers tell a different story. Most venture capital goes to founders who attended a handful of elite universities, who have prior exits or connections to prior exits, who come from families with enough wealth to absorb the risk of years without income. The mythology says anyone can build the next big thing. The data says your starting position predicts your finishing position with alarming accuracy.
This matters for how I think about the European tech ecosystem that I write about every day. When I cover a funding round, I’m aware that the story I’m telling, the story of innovation, disruption, and growth, is also a story about capital flowing to people who largely already had access to it. The ecosystem is real. The innovation is real. The class dynamics underneath it are also real, and they’re the part we talk about least.
The spatial dimension: cities as sorting machines
Space matters in this analysis more than we typically acknowledge. The cities that function as tech and finance hubs (London, Amsterdam, Berlin, Singapore, San Francisco) are also cities where the cost of living has been engineered to filter out anyone who doesn’t already have significant resources or a high income. This filtering happens through housing markets, through the cost of childcare, through the price of the social infrastructure (the dinners, the memberships, the conferences) that constitutes real networking.
I live in Singapore. I chose it deliberately, for its position at the intersection of Asian and global capital flows, for its efficiency, for its safety. But Singapore is also one of the most expensive cities on Earth, and the version of it that’s accessible to me as a media founder with some success is radically different from the version experienced by the migrant workers who built the skyline I look at from my window. We occupy the same space. We inhabit different architectures entirely.
This spatial sorting is one of the quieter mechanisms of class maintenance. By concentrating opportunity in places that are prohibitively expensive, the system creates a natural barrier that feels like a market outcome rather than a political choice. You don’t need explicit gatekeeping when the rent does the gatekeeping for you.
The emotional signature of structural exclusion
Here’s what connects all of this to that feeling I started with, the sense of falling behind. When you live inside a class architecture that’s designed to make mobility feel achievable, every indicator of stagnation registers as personal failure. You internalize it. You feel it in your chest at 2 AM when you’re calculating whether you can afford the thing that the people around you seem to afford effortlessly. You feel it when you compare your trajectory to the curated trajectories on LinkedIn. You feel it as a specific kind of exhaustion that no amount of rest can fix, because it’s the exhaustion of running a race whose finish line keeps moving.
The burnout industry wants you to treat this as a wellness problem. Take a sabbatical. Practice mindfulness. Set boundaries. And look, boundaries are good. Rest is good. I’m not arguing against self-care. I’m arguing that self-care, applied to a structural problem, functions as a sedative. It makes the condition more bearable without changing the condition.
The open war being waged on the middle class isn’t fought with weapons. It’s fought with narratives: narratives about meritocracy, about hustle, about disruption, about the gig economy as liberation rather than precarity. Each narrative does the same work. It takes a systemic outcome and repackages it as an individual one. Your debt is your choices. Your stagnation is your mindset. Your precarity is your lack of adaptability.
What seeing the architecture changes
I want to be honest about the limits of this analysis. Seeing the system clearly doesn’t exempt you from living inside it. I still have to make decisions about where to invest, what to build, how to position my company. I still experience the feeling of falling behind, even now that I understand its origins better. Structural awareness isn’t a cure. But it does change something important: it changes where you direct your energy.
When you understand that the treadmill is tilted by design, you stop trying to run faster and start thinking about the tilt itself. You start asking different questions. Who benefits from my exhaustion? Whose wealth grows when I produce more for the same compensation? What would it actually take to change the gradient, and who has an interest in making sure it doesn’t change?
These are political questions, not productivity questions. They require collective answers, not individual optimizations. And that’s precisely why the class architecture works so hard to keep you focused on yourself: your habits, your routine, your growth. Because a person obsessively focused on their own optimization is a person who isn’t looking at the structure.
I think about this every time I sit down to write about the tech ecosystem. Every story about a funding round, a product launch, or a market expansion exists inside this larger architecture. The question I keep coming back to, the one that shapes my work at Silicon Canals more than any other, is: who is this economy actually for? The answer changes depending on where you sit in the structure, and the structure is designed to keep you from asking.
So the next time you feel like you’re falling behind, before you reach for the meditation app or the productivity framework, sit with a different possibility. The system is working exactly as designed. You’re not failing it. It’s performing on you. And the first step toward something better is refusing to treat a structural condition as a personal deficiency.
That refusal, quiet as it sounds, is where real change begins.
Feature image by Timur Weber on Pexels
