The Peculiarity of Our Times

As 2025 draws to a close, it is hard not to notice the peculiar duality of our world — modern, dazzling, and quietly absurd.

We live in an age where fortunes are minted faster than moral reflection. The past two decades have produced the fastest accumulation of wealth in human history. Billionaires now appear at the pace of IPOs. Some, like Elon Musk, are awarded compensation packages approaching a trillion dollars; others, like Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, see their wealth multiply tenfold in the time it takes central banks to change their tone.

And yet, in the same world, more than 700 million people survive on less than $2.15 a day. Billions lack access to clean water or basic healthcare. Children die of preventable diseases while investors debate the carbon footprint of sending luxury tourists into orbit. The coexistence of abundance and deprivation is not new. What is new is its speed, its spectacle, and its normalisation.

The old industrial barons built their empires over decades. Carnegie smelted steel; Rockefeller refined oil. Today, billionaires rise through algorithms, platforms, and financial abstractions, sometimes aided by political proximity. Nvidia did not discover a new resource; it sold chips to train machines to imitate human conversation. Musk’s compensation, defended as “performance-linked,” resembles less a paycheck than a coronation: a reward not for delivery, but for belief.

What has truly changed is the velocity of wealth. It is not simply that the rich are richer; it is that their fortunes compound exponentially while real wages struggle to keep pace with inflation. Central banks printed trillions to avert collapse, and the money obeyed gravity, floating upward into asset prices rather than downward into incomes. We were told the tide would lift all boats. It did, but mostly yachts.

Perhaps the strangest feature of our age is the moral comfort with inequality. Once, great wealth demanded justification — divine right, conquest, monopoly. Today it hides behind the neutral language of “market value.” If the price says someone is worth a trillion dollars, who are we to question it? The invisible hand has spoken.

Markets have quietly replaced morality as the arbiter of worth. If wealth is a reward, poverty must be a punishment. Price becomes proof of virtue. Profit becomes moral validation. Failure is recast as personal inadequacy rather than structural design.

In that sense, we no longer merely inhabit an economic system; we inhabit a belief system. A cosmology where algorithms dispense justice and valuations stand in for virtue. The modern creed is simple: if you are rich, you must be right.

Our new aristocracy wears hoodies instead of crowns. Their castles are data centers; their armies are algorithms. They do not conquer land; they capture attention. Their dominion is global, frictionless, and conveniently tax-efficient.

In this digital feudalism, users are both subjects and products. Every click is tribute; every data point a tithe. The old robber barons extracted oil; the new ones extract engagement. The machinery is subtler, but the outcome is familiar; wealth concentration, mass dependence, and moral justification wrapped in elegant design.

Responsibility, when required, is outsourced. Philanthropy and ESG reporting have turned conscience into a public-relations genre. The same corporation that funds climate-awareness campaigns may also bankroll fossil fuels. A duality as modern as it is absurd.

Financialisation has made wealth almost weightless. The highest returns accrue not to those who make things, but to those who price the future. Speculative imagination has displaced production. Meta is a sentiment. AI is a prophecy.

When money is made by monetising belief, inequality is not an accident; it is the architecture. Those who sell the narrative own the future. The rest are spectators, occasionally rewarded with slogans about “democratized opportunity,” more often distracted by endless digital spectacle.

Even entropy, the great equaliser, has been captured. Decay itself is packaged, hedged, and traded as volatility. The poor experience entropy as collapse; the rich experience it as opportunity. The world burns, and someone sells carbon credits.

History offers mirrors. The Gilded Age paired dazzling progress with brutal inequality. Rome offered bread and circuses as its moral core hollowed out. We too have our spectacles: influencers, celebrity scandals, bingeable fantasy, quarterly earnings rituals. When spectacle replaces substance, decline becomes entertainment.

Our contradictions are stark. The same algorithms that predict desire cannot prevent famine or stop wars. The same satellites that map the planet cannot guarantee clean water. The same AI models that simulate empathy cannot feel it.

We call this progress. Technically, it is. But it is progress that magnifies asymmetry: efficiency without equity, intelligence without wisdom. We have learned to optimize everything except fairness.

And so we watch. We scroll. We applaud. Outrage has yielded to fascination; inequality to aspiration. The billionaire is no longer an anomaly but an ambition, detached from the system that makes such ambition possible.

The middle-class tracks success through property prices and stock indices, often unaware that both are products of the same speculative machinery that increases fragility. The poor are told to upskill; the rich to diversify. Both are trapped in an economy that monetizes hope.

We live in peculiar times: a world where wealth has lost its substance and poverty its visibility; where billionaires chase longevity while billions chase survival; where markets serve as moral compasses and algorithms as priests.

This age will not be remembered only for its innovation, but for its indifference—for turning inequality into entertainment and deprivation into data.

Entropy will, eventually, have the last word. Markets will cool. Algorithms will age. Balance sheets will fade into footnotes. But for now, the spectacle continues…dazzling, absurd, and profoundly unequal.

Indeed, we live in peculiar times.