Something changed and most people cannot quite name it. The friend who spent eight years climbing the corporate ladder just launched a consultancy. The person you went to school with who was the most reliable company-man type is selling a product on Shopify. Your cousin quit her marketing job to run the thing she was doing as a side project. And somehow this does not feel like a trend anymore. It feels like something structural.
It is structural. The employment contract that most people signed — implicitly, without realizing it — for most of the twentieth century was essentially this: you give us forty years, we give you stability, a pension, an identity, and a version of security that your grandchildren will recognize. That contract started breaking in the 1990s. By 2020 it was in pieces. Most people just have not updated their mental model to match.
The layoffs changed the psychology. Specifically the tech layoffs of 2022 and 2023, which hit a class of workers who had genuinely believed they were safe — educated, skilled, well-compensated, employed at brand-name companies. When they got cut anyway, by the tens of thousands, in weeks, after years of loyalty, it answered a question a lot of people were still asking. The question was whether the company's interests and your interests were aligned. They found out they were not. Not when it mattered.
What followed was a recalculation. If the stability you were trading your autonomy for was not actually stable, then the trade did not make sense. And if the trade did not make sense, then the thing you had been postponing — the business, the product, the service, the thing you kept saying you would do someday — moved from the category of dream to the category of plan.
The tools made it possible in a way it never was before. Starting a business in 1990 required capital, physical infrastructure, and access to distribution that most people did not have. Starting a business now requires a laptop, an internet connection, and something genuinely useful to offer. The barrier between having an idea and having a company is lower than at any point in human history. That is not hype — it is a real structural change in what is available to ordinary people.
The people who are three steps ahead figured this out early. They built something on the side while they still had the safety net of employment. They let it grow until it made the safety net redundant. They did not quit dramatically — they just eventually noticed that the business was bigger than the job and made the obvious choice. That is the path that most people who are just starting now will follow, and that is fine. The point is to start.
The age of trading forty years for a pension that may not exist when you need it is over. The people who figured that out early built businesses. The ones who figure it out now will build businesses. The only question is whether you want to be in the first group or the third.
