For a century, the logic of optimization was aimed at our economy and the ambient inputs to productivity (manufacturing, supply chain, financial planning). Now, that logic has turned inward. The new, ultimate frontier for optimization is the human being itself.

This shift is driving what we can call The Great Decoupling: a deliberate and accelerating disaggregation of human experience from the friction, risk, and unpredictability of the physical world.

This theory of change is, as they say, not distributed evenly in its impact. It is cleaving society along a new axis of power. This axis forces us to ask a single question: Is a person being optimized for durability or for efficiency?

The two answers are creating two distinct classes.

The Agency Class is decoupling its biological fate from the averages of public health and its productivity from the constraints of traditional labor. The Managed Class is decoupling its social and emotional life from the messy reality of in-person community, executing a managed retreat into the digital realm.

One path optimizes for the long-term orchestration of the world; the other optimizes for the profitable and tolerable management of one’s own retreat from it. The dichotomy potentially only starting to accelerate leading to perhaps a crescendo or a silent death.

The Agency Class: Orchestration and Durability

The core principle of the Agency Class is the fortification of the human asset for long-term strategic work, scaled impact, and capital compounding. For this emergent class, often resulting from a tier of wealth that allows one to go slow to go fast, technology is a fortress against the decay of time and the volatility of the world. Consumption falls to the wayside as a priority once basic needs are met. The focus thus shifts to one’s capacity to exert force and ideas upon the world, to become an orchestrator of systems, capital, and, increasingly, automated labor.

This is already happening. The stack for this class includes:

• Biological Fortification: A proactive, data-driven management of the physical self to extend “healthspan.” This is a suite of services including concierge medical practices like Atria or QBio, advanced preventative technologies like Prenuvo’s full-body MRI scans, and exclusive gyms or personal training sessions. The numbers tell the story of a separate medical infrastructure emerging for those who can afford it. Concierge medicine fees range from $5,000 to $20,000 annually, with some practices charging up to $150,000, creating a healthcare apartheid where 20% of Americans earning over $500,000 participate in these exclusive medical arrangements.
• Cognitive Enhancement: Today, the mind is treated and recognized as a central processing unit for orchestration. Regimens include supplement stacks, peptides, psychedelics, disciplined tracking via wearables like Oura, Whoop, and Levels, and personalized care from therapists, executive coaches, and shamans.
• Network Cultivation: Socializing within closed loops serves a critical economic function and compounds network inequality. This happens “organically” through tax-advantaged philanthropy and political initiatives and less organically through private member clubs that continue to play a cat and mouse game with normies, resulting in a progression from Soho House -> Aman -> [insert your next tier club of choice here].

In the mid-term, the Agency Class could use its head start to turn personal data into a healthspan advantage with biological and behavioral data providing baselines for AI models and preventative care.

This divide will be exacerbated by novel personalized medicines and therapeutics with large price tags and questionable insurance coverage. As with all things in medicine, the cost curve will eventually come down, but those hoping it looks like a simple peptide like GLP-1s fundamentally misunderstand the manufacturing challenges of more advanced therapies that will be life-changing for the wealthy.

The Managed Class: A Managed Retreat

The Managed Class operates on a different principle. Its members are not victims, but rational actors making a strategic choice: a Managed Retreat. They are trading the high-stress, low-reward reality of physical life (stagnant wages, unaffordable housing, social anxiety, impending necessary re-skilling) for the low-stress, high-reward certainty of the digital feed.

This retreat is enabled by a shift in how we socialize. The decline of unstructured, in-person gathering, the “death of partying“, is the result of a “homebody economy” where superior digital entertainment makes staying in more appealing, and perhaps starts with the post-2000s culture of “intensive parenting” that replaces spontaneous play with structured activities.

This creates a generation whose social muscles have atrophied (and who lack personality), making them prime customers for a suite of products that service this new reality. The market for the Managed Class thrives by transforming loneliness and boredom into monetizable, on-demand services. It provides “social snacks”, quick, low-friction digital interactions, that satiate the immediate need for connection without the difficulty and reward of a “social meal.”

The tools of this stack are ubiquitous:

• Cognitive Engagement: Platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube capture unstructured time, while immersive games like Roblox and Fortnite create entire virtual worlds to inhabit.
• Emotional Efficiency: Services like Character.AI provide risk-free companionship, while parasocial relationships on Twitch provide a feeling of connection without commitment.
• Life as a Service: Platforms like DoorDash, Instacart, and Uber eliminate the need for future planning, while fast fashion from Shein and Temu provides frictionless consumption. Services like Klarna, Affirm, and Afterpay make precarious finances feel manageable.

The future of this stack is a fully managed life, where an AI not only provides entertainment but also assigns gig work and manages a UBI stipend, all while users make varying attempts at gambling on sports, in the stock market, or on crypto in hopes of vaulting themselves to a new level of consumerism-happiness.

The user’s life becomes a dashboard of services as this system deploys reward hacking at a civilizational scale, optimizing for engagement while the true goal of a self-determined life is rejected or forgotten.

The Geopolitical Accelerator: The National Balance Sheet

This internal bifurcation represents a calculated geopolitical strategy. As monetary policy continues to back itself into a corner, nations increasingly operate like corporations managing a portfolio: they need a small cohort of hyper-productive innovators generating outsized returns (the Agency Class) while minimizing the costs and risks of their larger population (the Managed Class).

The math is stark. If 5% of your population generates 50% of innovation and GDP growth, while the remaining 95% can be pacified with digital entertainment and minimal transfer payments, you’ve optimized for international competition. China’s 996 work culture for tech elites alongside massive investments in social stability maintenance illustrates this model (and it’s no wonder that US tech startups are starting to adopt it).

Silicon Valley’s concentration of wealth and innovation while Middle America retreats into screens represents the same dynamic through different mechanisms.

This strategy appears rational until it generates its own contradictions. The populist anger that fueled the democratic socialist victory of Mamdani in New York City’s 2025 mayoral primary signals the first cracks.

A population trained for passive consumption eventually recognizes its own marginalization. When they do, the very optimization that created national competitive advantage becomes a source of internal fragmentation; a weakness foreign adversaries can exploit. A geopolitical liability.

A “Cognitive Sputnik Moment” could erupt in the mid-2030s. The United States may awaken to credible intelligence that a strategic rival’s populace, systematically optimized for discipline, is dramatically outperforming their American counterparts. We have already seen hints of this from post-COVID education statistics and a piling up of anecdotes from college professors on the unreadiness of newly-admitted students.

In this scenario, the stack running the Managed Class would be reframed from a social pacifier to an engine of national decline. A nation’s digital consumption habits could become its primary geopolitical vulnerability, creating a monoculture easily exploited by foreign adversaries.

The Battle for the Middle

An Aspiration Economy will emerge in the contested space between these classes. A battleground where the Managed Class glimpses agency just out of reach.

There are positive slantings of this that relate to the above-mentioned commoditization of “high-tier” services towards middle-tier prices across each of the beneficiary categories of the Agency Class.

With that said, there are also negative or more nefarious interpretations with the goal of the National Balance Sheet aimed at allowing the Managed Class to have their aspirations feel slightly more attainable over time, in order to stay appeased and not eject/uprise.

In this world we could imagine some form of swift response: feeds would become more addictive, virtual worlds more enticing, and ecosystems more inescapable to prevent citizen churn. Perhaps even an airdrop of money to gamble with for a year or so to make people feel rich before economic gravity (inflation) makes them once again feel poor.

Simultaneously, the rise of Agency-as-a-Service creates a new market. The systemic atrophy of real-world skills becomes a business opportunity. This market will have its bright spots but it will also have its dark corners, with a proliferation of grifty life coaches and hustle-culture gurus selling simplistic frameworks for success (looking at you, Andrew Tate).

Perhaps either way, the path out of the managed retreat is likely not a peaceful exit.

Agency as the Final Asset

While this essay paints a somewhat black and white picture that overly starkly pairs financial class with opportunity, what’s clear is that we are engineering a society where the capacity for human agency is becoming the ultimate luxury good. The Great Decoupling is producing two different human outcomes: one of command, one of dependency. What begins as a rational choice for convenience or retreat hardens into a structural reality that becomes nearly impossible to escape.

One path optimizes for the consolidation of power. The other optimizes for the profitable management of powerlessness.