The most bitter people you’ll ever meet are white-collar workers in their late 30s who took gifted classes in elementary school and AP classes in high school, got 3.8 GPAs in college, and now make $150-200k in corporate middle-management jobs after failing to develop the personality or the social skills requisite for leadership and authority. These people spent their entire childhoods getting told they were Very Smart and Very Special—that they would one day rise through the ranks of the professional managerial class, inherit the earth, and have dominion over the jocks who tormented them and the cheerleaders who denied them—only to wake up one day at the cusp of 40 and find themselves working in a fluorescent-lit office park in suburban America, earning a salary good enough to get trapped in an expensive lifestyle but not sufficient to ever feel successful, eight layers deep in a corporate hierarchy and still 10 years away from having any decision-making power in their organization (if ever). Rather than being a master of the universe, they spend their days attending “stand up” meetings and HR seminars, thumbing through Microsoft Teams alerts while sitting in traffic, and moving text boxes around PowerPoint decks ahead of their boss’s boss’s boss’s meeting with the new private equity owner flying in from Greenwich, CT on a G550 for the afternoon. Meanwhile, enough of their contemporaries have gotten rich by now—many of them back-slapping frat guys or sorority “woo girls” who got 2.7s in college but learned how to win friends, influence people, and, most importantly, close deals—that they have started to realize everything the gatekeepers of the institutional world told them between kindergarten and their first post-college entry-level job was utterly fraudulent. Rather than designing the machine or pulling the levers of the machine, they are the pulp fed into the machine each day, victims of an assembly line owned and operated by people less intelligent than them—less worthy than them—who somehow escaped the conveyor belt despite their inferior brains and lower test scores. It’s not what they were promised all their lives, it doesn’t add up, and it’s not fair. These people are too young to think about retiring yet too old to think about making a change, they feel stuck and frustrated, and it’s everyone’s fault but their own.