A Letter to Young Professionals Living Through Late Capitalism

To those of us
who did everything we were told to do,

who studied, trained, licensed, specialized,
who delayed pleasure, stayed ethical, stayed careful,
who believed that discipline would eventually translate into ease,

I want to say this plainly:

If you feel tired in a way that rest does not fully cure,
if your life looks successful on paper but fragile inside,
if you find yourself calculating life
with a precision that feels almost like a moral obligation

you are not ungrateful.
You are responding accurately to the conditions you are in.

Late capitalism did not remove the dignity of work.
It removed the promise that hard work would be rewarded with ease.

Many of us carry a quiet grief:
the grief of having lived correctly
without arriving at the promised softness.

This grief is often mistaken for entitlement or ingratitude.
It is neither.

We are living through a major societal transformation.
In this era, competence no longer guarantees ease.
Dedication no longer guarantees security.

Still, something important remains.

We are not foolish for having believed
that dedication and responsibility would be met with stability.
That belief was not naïve. It was once true.

The task now is not to harden ourselves into cynicism,
nor to perform resilience louder.

The task is quieter, and more difficult:

to relocate dignity from outcomes to stance,
from rewards to orientation,
from accumulation to authorship.

To choose our lives deliberately
not because the system will reward us,
but because we refuse to abandon our own standards.

This may look smaller from the outside.
It may feel less triumphant than we were promised.
But it is not failure.

If you are grieving the life you thought your discipline would give you,
know this:

Your grief is proportionate to your integrity.
And you are not alone in carrying it.

We are many.