You articulated it better than I was going to.

In the early 2000s I worked moving furniture for a few years and one of the guys had a saying "you build up your muscles, you tear down your joints" which I found to be true. Stimulus builds strength, but overuse builds weakness.

Sadly in today's world, we have people in positions of wealth and power who perceive work as easy. Meanwhile people who are actually doing the work that affluent people view as beneath them, are slowly declining.

AKA the glorification of work, working class hero mentality, etc, that seduce people into a life of servitude.

IMHO this is causing the class division that's destroying the middle class. Soon there will only be lords who disdain work while touting its virtues, and serfs who are forced to work and be talked at under neofeudalism.

This is why I feel that the wrong people are in power, and have always been in power. The tension is about to reach a breaking point in the 2026 US election. We have the rise of AI and likely AGI in 10 years or less, coinciding with the rise of global authoritarianism, austerity and the shredding of social safety nets. Things could get ugly at a level we haven't witnessed since WWII.

What nobody seems to realize is that AI will level everything. Talent. Experience. Wealth. Class will become situational, performative. Based on luck even more than it is now. Maybe looking something like The Hunger Games.

I would propose that knowing this, we start taking action now to avoid the eventualities of the current timeline. For example, we could form a co-equal branch of government composed of people drawn by lottery (to offset the arbitrary concentration of influence) otherwise known as sortition:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition

I first mentioned it a month ago but it bears repeating. Although it's unlikely that anything like this will happen at a national level in any country.

Short of that, we should consider workplace equality. Where every employee has a vote, just like shareholders. Corporate charters should have the board defer to employees in the case of a tie. Another way to do it is to have the board be 50% labor, like in Germany for companies over 2,000 employees.

TL;DR: if we want to maximize leverage while reducing friction so that everyone has the opportunity to self-actualize, then we should be wary of moral imperatives handed down from the upper class and internalized by the working class.

Why friction is necessary for growth