Everything is fine.
That is what the glowing rectangle keeps saying. The market is up. Confidence is robust. Earnings are muscular. Somewhere, a boardroom has opened a second bottle of water that costs more than your lunch.
Meanwhile, you enter the grocery store with forty dollars and emerge twelve minutes later carrying a haunted onion, six tortillas, and the legal rights to smell a rotisserie chicken. The receipt is long enough to qualify as a memoir. It has plot twists. It has betrayal. It has a QR code asking how they did.
They did fantastic. I am the one who got mugged by yogurt.
We have been told to hustle, optimize, monetize, network, diversify, and build a personal brand. Fine. My personal brand is now consumer woodland scavenger with a debit card. I will be behind the supermarket at dusk, trading copper wire for cheese.