The Unwilling, The Unknowing & The Unbothered: A Field Guide to Late-Stage Everything
There’s a special place in history for the people who made something out of nothing. The survivors. The jugaadu. The overextended. The under-resourced. The backbone of every godforsaken institution held together with duct tape, broken promises, and one HR motivational email per quarter.
Konstantin Jireček, the 19th-century Czech historian who is better remembered in Bulgaria, never worked in a startup. Or a government department. Or a late-stage unicorn chasing profitability like a drunk chasing the last auto-rickshaw at 3 AM. But somehow, he clearly time-travelled to a post-pandemic boardroom, and nailed it: “We, the unwilling, led by the unknowing, are doing the impossible for the ungrateful. We have done so much, for so long, with so little, we are now qualified to do anything with nothing.”
(This quote is most widely attributed to Konstantin Jireček, though there is debate about its true origin. For want of a more substantiated attribution, I’m sticking to Jireček.)
If that doesn’t describe your job, your hustle, your three parallel tabs of Zoom, Gmail and existential dread — congratulations! You are now a fully inducted, debt-carrying member of Modern Capitalism.
The Unwilling: A.K.A. The Smart Ones Who Stayed
These are the folks who once believed in purpose. Who joined because someone said “mission-driven” without laughing. Who thought “impact” wasn’t just a KPI from the PR deck.
They are now emotionally spent, spiritually dry-cleaned, and logistically backed into corners so tight, they send Slack messages to themselves just to feel seen.
They’re not lazy. They’re just allergic to gaslighting and reviews titled “Stretch Goals: Do More With Less (Again).”
They’ve been promised “scale.” What they got was a crash course in duct-tape innovation, Excel gymnastics, and the weekly miracle of staying afloat.
The Unknowing: A.K.A. The PowerPoint Philosophers
Capitalism doesn’t reward intelligence. It rewards confidence in a suit. Or a hoodie. Or whatever the Theranos aesthetic is this quarter.
We’re now ruled by people who think financial literacy is a TED Talk and leadership is just content strategy with better lighting.
These are the unknowing—the boss who uses ChatGPT to write empathy emails. The founder who wants to “disrupt poverty.” The LinkedIn bro who posts “Your network is your net worth” while outsourcing emotional intelligence to Notion.
They’ve turned capitalism into a personality cult. VC-funded, jargon-infested, and sealed with a Canva deck.
Failure isn’t a lesson—it’s a vibe.
Layoffs aren’t tragic—they’re “strategic pivots.”
They host leadership retreats where the main deliverable is brunch.
The Impossible: A.K.A. Your Monday Inbox
You’ve been tasked with “reimagining operations,” “realigning strategy,” and “owning transformation.”
Translation: Fix the entire ship while steering it, without alarming the passengers or spilling drinks on the upper deck.
There’s no budget. No team. But yes, leadership is very excited.
You’re expected to innovate without authority, collaborate without boundaries, and stay agile without questioning anything. If you fail, it’s on you. If you succeed, it’s “teamwork.”
You think you’re building a legacy. But you’re just feeding the feed. Another creator. Another cog. Another story on “How I made $100K at 24 by waking up at 5AM and gaslighting my parents.”
The Ungrateful: A.K.A. Everyone Upwards
Recognition, if it comes, is outsourced to an AI-generated thank-you note in Comic Sans.
Modern capitalism is powered by invisible labour—emotional, intellectual, physical. Done by women, by minorities, by gig workers, by interns, by ‘junior staff.’
It’s held up by code written at 2AM and slideshows presented to people who’ll forget them by lunch.
Those who do the most often get the least. A trophy in absentia. A promotion in a department that no longer exists. Or worse, a calendar invite titled “coffee with the CEO”—the professional equivalent of being kissed before being ghosted.
They expect miracles. Question metrics. And forget names. Especially when credit is due.
Enter Gen Z & Gen Alpha: The Terminally Online, The Soft-Quitting, The Content-Monetised
They watched capitalism collapse in real time—from Reddit forums to the FTX scandal to Elon Musk’s Twitter cosplay.
They’ve seen rich men cry on podcasts and influencers sell manifestation courses with zero refunds.
They’ve read Marx, reposted memes, signed petitions—and still ordered from Blinkit at 2 AM.
Gen Z isn’t anti-capitalist. They’re just exhausted subscribers of the same machine, now with better UX and worse attention spans. They believe in climate justice—but also in dropshipping hoodies with “Be Kind” printed in Comic Sans.
Gen Alpha? They’re being raised by tablets, trained in creator economy grammar, and will probably unionise their kindergarten if the storytime playlist has ads.
We gave them ring lights instead of rings. Portfolios instead of poetry.
They’re not just post-work. They’re post-meaning.
The Tragedy of Competence
We’ve built a world where often :
- The competent are invisible.
- Capability hides in the shadows
- The system is engineered for maximum extraction and minimal gratitude.
It’s like a rigged game of Monopoly played with crypto coins on a melting board.
The winners are writing newsletters on Substack. The losers are perhaps writing code. The rest are too tired to care.
When you build systems that reward endurance over excellence, silence over dissent, and visibility over value—you get exactly what we have:
A bloated middle. A burnt-out base. And a leadership slightly confused, or at least bemused, at why nobody claps anymore.
PostScript’s Laws of Late-Stage Capitalism
- You are only as valuable as your last viral post.
- Work-life balance is a branding exercise.
- Productivity is what happens when exploitation is made cute.
- If you’re doing everything with nothing—you’re either a genius or broke. Sometimes both.
- The algorithm doesn’t love you back. It just wants your data.
So What Now?
Burn it down? Maybe. Or just log off. Rewind your nervous system. Build something human again—with less “growth hacking” and more grace. With fewer dashboards. More dignity. With meaning, not metrics.
Because we, the unwilling, know one thing:
Doing the impossible with nothing is not a badge of honour. It’s a diagnosis.
Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author’s own.
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