Ghost Achievement
What two opposite visions of the AI future both get wrong about you
He’s calculating damage output percentages in a video game.
After every level in Hades 2, you choose between upgrades. He’s running the numbers in his head, selecting the objectively optimal build, skipping past everything else. He has turned a game about Greek mythology into a spreadsheet he needs to efficiently exit.
He’s been doing this his whole life. He built a business this way, a YouTube empire called Charisma on Command, seven million subscribers. He built his body this way. His relationships. His morning routine. He optimised everything. And it worked, which was the problem, because the working was supposed to produce a feeling, and the feeling never arrived.
Then, somewhere in the middle of a dungeon, something cracks. He picks the purple one. Not because it’s better. Because it’s beautiful.
He starts noticing the artwork in the game, which is stunning, which he’s never looked at because he was too busy optimising. The artwork leads him to the myths it depicts. The myths lead him to reflection.
The reflection is what his intuition has been trying to point him toward his entire life.
I want to stay with that image for a while. A man in front of a screen, surrounded by optimal choices, choosing the one that can’t be justified. Because I think that moment contains something the entire AI debate is missing.
The smartest people I read are staring at the same revolution and arriving at opposite conclusions.
Citrini Research and Alap Shah, in a piece called The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis, wrote a fictional macro memo from two years in the future. In their scenario, AI succeeds spectacularly and the economy collapses anyway. White-collar layoffs cascade into a consumption crisis. The S&P draws down 38%. Unemployment hits 10.2%. They tell the story of a senior product manager at Salesforce who loses her job in the third round of layoffs and, after six months of searching, starts driving for Uber at $45,000 a year. The mortgage market, underwritten against incomes that no longer exist, begins to crack.
Citrini coins a great term: Ghost GDP. Output that shows up in the national accounts but never circulates through the real economy. The machines are producing. The humans are not spending. The numbers glow green on every dashboard while the economy underneath is hollowing out.
Michael Bloch, writing in direct response, sees the same technology and arrives at paradise. AI-driven deflation hands the median household a $4,000–$7,000 annual raise. Displaced workers start businesses. The intelligence tax that stratified American life for decades quietly dissolves. A 22-year-old in rural Arkansas gets the same quality financial advice that used to require a $500/hour Manhattan attorney. The canary, Bloch writes, isn’t just alive. It’s singing.
Both pieces are rigorous. Both are plausible. And I’ve spent a hours turning them over, not because I’m trying to decide who’s right about the macro, but because I think they’re both modelling the wrong variable.
Purchasing power, employment, aggregate demand, these are real. They matter. But what will determine whether people feel alive or hollowed out in the next decade is something no GDP print will ever capture.
Would you rather have a net worth of a million dollars, down from two million, or five hundred thousand, up from two hundred thousand?
Almost everyone picks the five hundred thousand. Not because it’s more money. Because the trajectory is up. We are creatures built to feel the direction of our lives more acutely than the coordinates.
Housel calls this the psychology of contrast. Everything you feel about your financial life is measured not in absolute terms but against a reference point. The reference point moves. Always. “The speed at which a luxury becomes a necessity,” he says, “is two seconds.”
He knows a man with a private chef. Three Michelin star caliber meals a day. And the man, Housel suspects, barely registers it, because there’s no contrast. When everything is great, nothing feels great.
The Levittown houses of the 1950s were 700 square feet. One bathroom for a family of six. They would be classified as poverty housing today. The families who lived in them felt they had arrived, because a generation earlier, their parents had nothing. Today, the average new American home is nearly three times that size. The people living in them feel further behind than ever. Expectations compound just as relentlessly as money. Nobody has figured out how to index fund their way to a lower reference point.
Neither Bloch nor Citrini accounts for this.
Whether the AI revolution delivers paradise or crisis, the reference point will move. It always moves. Bloch’s households gaining $7,000 in purchasing power will compare themselves to the households gaining $70,000. Citrini’s displaced product manager will measure herself not against her Uber earnings but against the person she was before the layoff.
The macro trajectory is the headline. The felt experience is the story.
Housel worked at a ski resort when he was eighteen, alongside a guy named Kip, about a decade older. Kip had $25,000 in credit card debt from ski trips across Europe, South America, everywhere. Housel gave him grief constantly. You are insane. You are an idiot.
Kip died in an avalanche at thirty-two.
The speed at which Housel’s judgment reversed was instantaneous. I’m so glad you took those trips, man. I’m so glad you lived the life you did.
He’s thought about it ever since. If Kip had five seconds to see his life flash, Housel suspects he was thinking: I did it. I did some cool things. And Housel admits that his own version of peace would be different, not the trips he took but the knowledge that his wife and kids would be okay. That would be enough.
Kip’s credit card debt was the cost of a life he could face the end of. Housel’s savings rate is the cost of one he could. Both are leaps of faith. No spreadsheet will tell you which one is yours.
Rebecca Goldstein is a philosopher who spent most of her career on one question, and she found it by accident. She was writing her first novel, a character who was beautiful, brilliant, funny, sexually magnetic, and profoundly unhappy. Her editor asked why. The answer that emerged from the character’s mouth became Goldstein’s life’s work:
Because I don’t feel like I matter in the way that most matters to me.
In The Mattering Instinct, Goldstein makes a distinction so clean it cuts. We all matter to ourselves subjectively, biology, the baseline hum of an organism paying itself attention in order to survive. But we also long to matter objectively. To feel deserving of our own attention. Not just alive, but justified in being alive.
She calls it a longing, and the word choice is precise. A longing is not a problem. You don’t solve a longing. You live inside it. It colours everything. And it can never be fully satisfied, which is why we build our entire lives around the attempt.
I recognise this. Not from reading about it. From living it.
There was a period in my mid-thirties, a period I think many people pass through and most don’t talk about, where I had everything that was supposed to constitute a good start. Good job. Good relationship. Interesting city. Respected institution. And I felt nothing but a dull, sourceless dread. Not sadness exactly. More like the suspicion that I was living someone else’s idea of my life. The mattering project was borrowed. The reference point was inherited. And no external improvement, no promotion, no recognition, no new apartment touched the thing that was actually missing, which was the sense that I was building something that was mine.
I didn’t have Goldstein’s language then. I just had the dread. Now I understand what it was: a mattering crisis. Not burnout. Not depression, not exactly. A misalignment between who I was and the project I’d chosen to prove I mattered. Or rather, the project I’d absorbed without ever choosing it at all.
Goldstein identifies four archetypes for how people pursue the longing to matter: Heroic Strivers, Socializers, Competitors, Transcenders, and each reveals a different vulnerability to the same ache. The Striver can win every prize and feel empty, because the standards are internal and infinite. The Socializer builds identity around attention, and the crowd is always available and never enough. The Competitor needs to win, and winning is always relative, always measured against the person one rung up.
And Goldstein goes further:
Depression, Goldstein argues, is often not a chemical malfunction but an interrupted process of self-actualisation. The depressed person is not broken. They are stuck unable to find or execute a mattering project that aligns with who they actually are.
William James lay prone in bed for months in his twenties. Medical degree, artistic talent, first rate philosophical mind. He contemplated suicide. What he lacked was not capability or love. What he lacked was a project worthy of the longing.
His sister Alice had every bit of his brilliance. Victorian society offered her no outlet. She became an invalid, decades of hysteria, bedridden, doctors baffled. When she was diagnosed with breast cancer in her early forties, she greeted the news with joy. At last, a disease the world would recognise. At last, objective proof she was worthy of attention.
Alice James has stayed with me since I read this. Because I think what’s really at stake in the AI debate is not what either side thinks.
Think about that Salesforce product manager in Citrini’s scenario. The one driving for Uber at $45,000.
The economic story is bad enough. But read through Goldstein, something worse has happened. Her mattering project has been destroyed. She didn’t just lose income. She lost the entire structure through which she understood herself as someone who mattered. Senior product manager at Salesforce, that’s a Striver’s identity, a Competitor’s rank, a Socializer’s proof of relevance, all compressed into a title on a business card. Uber driver is none of those things. The income drop is the headline. The mattering collapse is the wound.
Citrini calls the broader phenomenon the intelligence premium unwind. For as long as any of us have been alive, human intelligence was the scarce input. Capital was abundant, natural resources were substitutable, but the ability to analyse, decide, and create could not be replicated at scale. Every institution, from the labour market to the mortgage market to the tax code was built on that scarcity. Now machine intelligence is a substitute, and the financial system is repricing.
But here’s what Citrini doesn’t say:
It’s not just the financial system that was built on the scarcity of human intelligence. It’s the mattering system.
Being smart. Being credentialed. Knowing things others don’t. Having expertise. For an entire generation, an entire class, these were not just careers. They were identities. Mattering projects. I went to a good school. I have a master’s degree. I understand things you need me to explain. That was the answer to the question of why you matter.
And the answer just expired.
When the knowledge becomes free and the credential becomes decorative, it’s not just your salary that’s been repriced. It’s your answer to the question underneath everything else: Why am I here? What am I for?
Alice James had her mattering project denied by the constraints of her era. The question for ours is whether a generation of knowledge workers will end up in the same place, brilliant, capable, and unable to locate a project that fits. Not because there are no options. Because the only option they ever learned to see, be the smartest person in the room, is no longer available.
Back to Houpert. Back to the purple one.
He was thirty, with the business he’d dreamed of, the girlfriend he’d imagined, the money, the friends. And something was wrong that he couldn’t name. He started unconsciously destroying things, complaining about work that thrilled him, straining relationships that nourished him. His soul, he said, was waking up. And he had no concept of a soul.
He calls this the second lonely chapter. The first is the Rocky montage, leave the herd, discipline yourself, build something, lose friends who didn’t want to grow. Every underdog movie has that scene. The second lonely chapter has no montage. It’s the moment the achiever looks at the achievement and realises it was a delivery mechanism for something that never arrived.
I want to give this a name, because I think it describes something millions of people are living through and don’t have language for. Your therapist calls it burnout. Your company calls it a retention problem. Your spouse calls it “I don’t know, you just seem distant lately.” None of those are right.
What Houpert had built was ghost achievement.
I’m borrowing the structure from Citrini’s Ghost GDP, output that registers in the national accounts but never circulates through the real economy. Ghost achievement is the personal version: results that register on every scoreboard, every CV, every LinkedIn profile, every year-end review, and circulate through nothing that actually matters to you. The numbers are real. The feeling is absent. You have the career, the apartment, the network, the optimised morning routine. And some part of you, the part that picked the purple one, is starving.
You already know whether this describes you. You knew before you finished the paragraph.
Chris mentions unteachable lessons in the conversation, the ones everyone knows and nobody learns until they burn their hand on the stove.
Money won’t make you happy. Fame won’t fix your self-worth. You should see your parents more. All your fears are a waste of time.
He knows they’re trite. He rolls his eyes reading them back. His point isn’t that the lessons are wrong. His point is that knowing them does nothing. The lesson is unteachable not because you’re stupid but because nobody learns it in advance. That’s the design. That’s the curriculum.
And then the part that I need for myself and my kids: the voice in your head that says I told you so after you’ve burned yourself? That voice is a prick. The shame is misplaced. You were supposed to make the mistake.
So what’s the answer?
Not to either macro scenario, I don’t know whether Bloch or Citrini is closer to right, and neither do they. It will probably be messier than either version, and more uneven, and stranger.
The answer I’m after is to the question underneath the question: When the cost of intelligence drops to zero, what will we discover about what we were actually hungry for?
I wrote about this a week ago in an essay called Phase Change, and I got there through a different door. The argument there was about embodiment, about the emerging neuroscience showing that consciousness doesn’t originate in the cortex, where computation lives, but in the brainstem, in feelings, in the body’s friction with the world. Michael Pollan calls it Copernican: the discovery that the most valuable human capacities were never cognitive. They were always embodied, relational, felt. The catch in someone’s voice. The weight of a child against your chest. The twenty-three years of pattern recognition that let a cardiac nurse hear the word “different” and understand danger.
The cognitive got commoditised. The conscious cannot be.
Goldstein would say it differently. She’d say the mattering instinct is finally being forced to find its true object. For decades, we could satisfy it with proxies, credentials, titles, salaries, being the smartest person at the table.
The proxies are dissolving. What’s left is the longing itself, raw and unmediated, demanding an answer that actually fits.
Housel would say it’s about what you’d think about with five seconds left.
Houpert would say it’s about whatever the purple one is in your life, the thing you’ve been optimising past, the thing you can’t justify on a spreadsheet, the thing your body knows and your mind keeps overruling.
Some people will use the coming abundance to find this.
The mattering projects that were locked behind capital, credentials, and institutional gatekeeping are about to be available to anyone with a laptop and the nerve to begin. Someone who spent ten years wanting to write a book but couldn’t afford to quit will write the book. Someone who had an idea for a business but not the technical skills will build the business. That part of the story is real, and it matters.
Many others will use the same tools to optimise harder, to build ghost achievement that registers on every scoreboard and circulates through nothing that matters. They will arrive, as Houpert arrived, at the place where the delivery mechanism delivered everything except the thing it was supposed to contain.
Kip died in an avalanche at thirty-two with $25,000 in credit card debt and a life he could face the end of.
Alice James died in a bed she never chose to be in, with a mind the world never got to see.
A product manager in Citrini’s scenario sits in her car between Uber rides, the engine running, the app pinging, trying to remember who she was before the title told her.
And somewhere, a man looks at a screen full of optimal upgrades, pauses, and picks the purple one. Not because it’s better. Because something in him, something no machine has or wants recognised it as beautiful.
The tools are about to get very, very good.
The longing will remain exactly as old, and exactly as human, as it has ever been.
And the question it asks is the one no machine can answer for you:
Not what can you do, but what, when you do it, makes you feel like you are finally, actually, here?
Forward this to whoever picked the purple one.
boom. and echo the first comment!
Well written. So insightful.