Buried Talents

How Elites betray their own potential

Preface: Why I’m Writing This Now

I’m thirty-five years old. I graduated from MIT with degrees in computer science and management. Bootstrapped a company as a solo founder and made enough to not worry about money for a while. I’ve worked at Microsoft, helped scale multiple VC-backed startups, and now I’m building civic technology platforms in Brooklyn.

By any reasonable definition, I am an Elite.

I’m also, if I’m being honest, someone who spent most of his twenties and early thirties on the same treadmill I’m about to criticize.

I optimized. I climbed. I told myself the same stories my friends told themselves. So the following critique does not come from the mountaintop of moral clarity. I’m writing it as someone who woke up one day and realized that I’d been coasting on potential for my entire professional career.

And, as it happens, I’m surrounded by people just like me.

My friends from MIT are partners at consulting firms, senior engineers at Google, portfolio managers at hedge funds, directors at biotech companies, surgeons, rocket scientists. They’re pulling down $300K, $500K, $1M a year. They have homes in premium zip codes, kids in private schools, Pelotons in spare bedrooms. They’ve won the game of American Meritocracy™.

And yet, I’ve watched them—watched us—deploy almost none of our extraordinary capabilities toward anything that matters.

By “matters,” I mean problems that affect large numbers of people, where solutions are possible but under-resourced, and where market forces alone won’t deliver the answer. Governance, infrastructure, public health, education, climate, democratic function and other load-bearing structures of civilization that are crumbling in slow motion.

Or to put it more simply: problems beyond your immediate family, neighborhood, or employer’s quarterly targets.

My intention here isn’t to write an essay written from the outside looking in. I’ve sat at the dinner tables, attended the weddings, listened to the rationalizations, and made most of the same ones myself. I know the pulls and temptations that keep people locked in lives of comfortable irrelevance because I’ve felt them.

I still feel them.

I’m writing this now because I’ve reached a point where I can see the full arc.

The choices my cohort made in our twenties have calcified into the lives we’re living in our thirties and forties. The “I’ll do something meaningful later” has quietly become “I guess this is what I do.” Someday has become never, and many of my friends haven’t even noticed the transition.

I noticed. Maybe because I got lucky with timing, achieving financial security right when I was starting to ask harder questions. Maybe I have a contrarian streak that makes me uncomfortable when everyone around me agrees. Maybe I’m just wired to pick at things until they unravel.

Whatever the reason, over the past few years I’ve had several conversations with friends, and I’ve learned something important: when you hold up a mirror to many Elites, showing them the gap between their capabilities and their contributions, they don’t exactly thank you for the insight.

They get defensive.

They get angry.

Sometimes they stop talking to you altogether.

This reaction in itself is a clear tell that something is being protected. That some story is being threatened. It’s the story that lets extraordinarily capable people live lives of minimal consequence while feeling good about themselves.

This is what I want to examine in this essay.

I believe that to those to whom much is given, much is expected.

This is not a popular position among my peers.

They prefer a morality of non-interference: be kind, don’t hurt anyone, tend your garden. They’ve constructed elaborate philosophical frameworks to justify why people with top-tier cognitive abilities, financial security, social capital, and institutional access have no greater obligations than anyone else.

I think they’re wrong. And I think, deep down, they, too know they’re wrong. The fact that they squirm at the suggestion that maybe they’ve been optimizing for the wrong thing suggests as much.

I’m writing this as someone who is trying to figure it out, in public, and who thinks the figuring out might be useful to others in the same position. I don’t have a clean answer for what elites should do with their lives. I have my own bets—civic technology, participatory democracy, trying to make government work better—and I have no idea if they’ll amount to anything.

What I do have is a clear view of the problem, and I think naming it honestly is worth something, even if the solution remains incomplete.

If you’re an elite reading this, you’ll probably feel defensive at some points. That’s fine. I often felt defensive writing it. I just ask that you notice the defensiveness and ask yourself what it’s protecting.

Let’s begin.

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Part One: Defining the Elite

Chapter 1: What Makes an Elite?

The word “elite” gets thrown around loosely, often as an epithet, frequently mistaken for “Elitism”. So let’s use it precisely. For my purposes, an elite is someone who possesses some meaningful combination of the following:

Cognitive capacity in the top five percent or so. This can be demonstrated through educational credentials from selective institutions, professional achievement in demanding fields, or simply through observed ability. These are people who can master complex domains, see patterns others miss, and learn new things quickly. They’re not necessarily geniuses, they are just operating at a level where they could, if they chose, engage meaningfully with almost any intellectual problem.

Economic resources sufficient to provide security and optionality. I’d roughly peg this at $500,000 or more in net worth, or $200,000 or more in household income. The key is having enough that basic survival isn’t a concern and that your choices become real. These are people who could take risks, who could absorb setbacks, who could fund things, or forgo income for a period. They have slack in the system.

Social capital that provides access to networks of influence and opportunity. They know people. They can get introductions. They can pick up the phone and reach decision-makers.

Institutional position that grants leverage over decisions affecting others. They have roles where their choices ripple outward. Maybe they manage teams, allocate capital, set policies, or shape what people read and think. They have leverage in the system where their individual decisions matter.

Not everyone who counts as an elite has all four.

The quant at a hedge fund might have cognitive capacity, economic resources, and institutional position, but limited social capital outside finance.

The thought leader might have social capital and some institutional position but modest economic resources.

The inheritor (read: trust fund adult) might have economic resources and social capital but limited cognitive capacity or institutional position.

The elites I’m focused on in this essay tend to have at least three of these four dimensions, and often all four. They’re the people who, by any reasonable assessment, have been given more than 99.9% of humans who have ever lived.

More intellectual horsepower. More financial cushion. More connections. More power to shape outcomes.

In America, I estimate that there are perhaps six million elites. About 2% of the adult population. Globally, the number is larger, but I’m going to focus on American elites because that’s who I know, that’s my context, and frankly, American elites wield disproportionate influence over global outcomes.

Six million people. Capable, resourced, connected, and positioned.

What are they doing with all of this?

Chapter 2: What Elites Are Not

Before we explore that, let’s clear away some misconceptions.

Elites are not necessarily rich. The tenured professor at a state university earning $130,000 is an elite by my definition. She has cognitive capacity, institutional position, and social capital within her field. She’s not wealthy, but she’s elite.

The young associate at a white-shoe law firm earning $220,000 is an elite, but he’s not rich yet—he’s just high-income. Wealth and elite status correlate, but they’re not the same thing.

Elites are not necessarily famous. Most elites are invisible to the general public. The senior partner at McKinsey, the research director at a pharmaceutical company, the VP of Engineering at a major tech company all wield significant influence and possess elite characteristics, but you wouldn’t recognize them on the street.

Fame is one possible form of social capital, but most elites have network-based social capital rather than visibility-based social capital.

Elites are not necessarily villains. This essay is critical of how elites use their extraordinary capabilities, but I’m not at all claiming that elites are bad people. Most of them are perfectly decent by conventional standards. Kind to their families, fair to their colleagues, honest in their dealings.

The problem isn’t that they’re doing harm.

The problem is that they’re not doing good—or at least, not doing good commensurate with their capacity to do so. There’s a difference between “evil” and “falling short,” and most elites fall into the latter category.

Elites are not a monolith. One of the things I’ll explore in this essay is the tremendous variation among elites, each with their own incentives, psychologies, life circumstances, and degrees of capture by the systems they serve. Some elites are trapped and know it. Some have never questioned their path. Some are actively searching for something different. Treating elites as a uniform class obscures more than it reveals.

Elites are not uniquely responsible for the world’s problems. It would be easy to read this essay as an argument that if only elites got their act together, everything would be fine. That’s not my claim. Many problems are genuinely structural, requiring collective action and institutional change that go beyond what even mobilized elites could accomplish. But it’s also true that elites have a disproportionate capacity to contribute to solutions, and they’re currently not using that capacity.

Chapter 3: Why This Definition Matters

You might wonder why I’m being so precise about definition. Here’s why: the obligations I’m going to argue for flow from the capabilities I’ve described.

If you have extraordinary cognitive ability, you can understand things that others can’t. You can see patterns, diagnose problems, and generate solutions. This capacity is wasted if it’s only deployed toward advancing your employer’s quarterly metrics or your own investment portfolio.

If you have economic security, you can take risks that others can’t afford. You can absorb failures. You can invest time and resources in uncertain ventures. You can walk away from jobs that don’t serve larger purposes. This optionality is wasted if you use it only to accumulate more optionality.

If you have social capital, you can connect people and ideas. You can open doors. You can lend credibility to efforts that need it. This access is wasted if you use it only to advance your own career.

If you have an institutional position, you can shape decisions that affect many people. You can push organizations in better directions. You can be the person in the room who asks the question everyone else is afraid to ask. This leverage is wasted if you use it only to maintain your position.

The argument of this essay is that your unique capabilities create unique obligations.

Capabilities are a kind of resource, and resources can be well-used or squandered.

The elites who use their cognitive capacity solely for employer or personal profits, their economic security only to accumulate more security, their social capital only to maintain their status, their institutional position only to preserve their position, are squandering something valuable.

And they usually know it. Not consciously, or always in ways they’ll readily admit, but somewhere underneath the rationalizations is an awareness that this isn’t enough, that they’re leaving something on the table, that the life they’re living doesn’t match the life they’re capable of living.

The defensiveness I encounter when I raise these topics isn’t random. It’s protective. Something is being defended. And that something, I’ll argue, is a self-image—the story they tell themselves about why their choices are adequate, why nothing more is required of them, why the gap between their capabilities and their contributions is either nonexistent or someone else’s problem to close.

But who are these elites exactly, and what do they believe?

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Part Two: A Taxonomy of Elites

Chapter 4: The Credentialed Professional Class

The Prestige Ladder Climbers

Walk through every big tech company, elite professional firm, investment bank, consulting company, corporate law practice, or major hospital, and you’ll find people who followed the prescribed path with exceptional fidelity and aptitude. Top grades, top schools, top internships, top entry-level positions, and then a steady climb up the ladder.

These are the Prestige Ladder Climbers, and they make up the largest segment of the elite population.

I know these people very well. I went to school with them. I’ve worked alongside them. I’ve been to holiday parties and weddings. I’ve watched them build their lives.

Here’s what their lives look like:

1. Annual income of $400K to $2M, depending on seniority and field. Homes in premium zip codes: Upper West Side, Park Slope, Malibu, Greenwich, Palo Alto, Lincoln Park, Back Bay.

2. Children in private schools or in top public schools in districts that require $2M homes to access.

3. Vacation homes, trips to Patagonia, Tokyo, the Amalfi Coast—places that signal sophistication, not mere wealth.

4. Pelotons and personal trainers.

5. Anxiety managed through excellent therapists, wine collections, and occasional wellness retreats.

What do they believe?

That meritocracy is real and they are proof of it. The system that elevated them is fundamentally legitimate. Success is earned through talent and hard work. Those who didn’t make it lacked something—ability, discipline, or desire. This isn’t arrogance, exactly. It’s more of a faith—one that justifies their position and absolves them of any guilt about it.

These are often genuinely well-meaning people. They have extremely high capacity. These are people who could master almost any domain they turned their attention to. They have discipline, pattern recognition, work ethic, and the ability to navigate complex systems. They’re Formula 1 engines.

And they’re being used to power golf carts. ⛳️

Their actual contribution to anything beyond making their employer richer is near zero. They optimize whatever metric gets them promoted. They make the machine run efficiently. But they never stop to ask whether the machine should exist or what it’s for. Their entire cognitive surplus is absorbed by career advancement, status maintenance, and the logistics of affluent family life.

The gap between capacity and contribution is vast. And the defenses are well-practiced:

“I’m providing for my family.” Yes, and you could provide for your family on half your income while using the other half of your time for something that matters.

“I’ll do something meaningful later.” When? After the kids are in college? After you make partner? After you have $10 million instead of $5 million? Later never comes, and you know it.

“The system is too complex to change.” And yet you master complex systems professionally every day. You define yourself by your ability to handle complexity. The complexity isn’t the problem. The will is.

“I donate to effective charities.” Good! But your money is the least valuable thing you have. Your time, your intelligence and your networks are what’s being wasted.

The Golden Handuffs Class

Then there’s a variant I call the Golden Handcuffs class. These are mid-career professionals who wanted to do something else but got trapped by compensation. They took the finance job, big tech, or the law firm position “for a few years” and woke up a decade later with a lifestyle (read: kids) that requires $300K or more annually to maintain.

Golden Handcuffs people are different from the Ladder Climbers because they usually know they’re trapped. They harbor genuine doubts about the value of their work.

Many have latent idealism that surfaces after a few drinks. But they’ve concluded that the exit costs are too high. The private school tuition, the mortgage, the second home, the spouse’s expectations all add up to a prison with golden bars.

Their tragedy is that they see the gap and cannot close it.

Whereas the Ladder Climbers have convinced themselves that there is no gap, the Golden Handcuffed see it every day and feel powerless against it.

“Just three more years until the kids are in college.”

“I need to pay off the house first.”

“I have specific expertise that doesn’t transfer.”

“I’m too old to start over.”

The specifics vary, but the structure is the same: a deferral that never terminates, a threshold that keeps moving, a freedom that’s always six months, twelve months, three years away.

Chapter 5: The Capital Holders

Money is a form of capability.

Large amounts of money—$5 million, $50 million, $500 million—represent enormous potential energy that could be deployed toward almost anything.

The people who hold this capital constitute a distinct segment of the elite, and their failure to deploy it meaningfully is among the most striking features of our current moment.

The Working Wealthy

Consider what I call the Working Wealthy: people whose primary identity is still “professional” but who have accumulated $5 million to $50 million, often through equity in successful companies, early investments, or simply decades of high income and good savings habits. They still work, but they don’t need to.

Many feel a vague unease about whether their wealth is deserved or meaningful. They believe in capitalism because it rewarded them, but they have nagging doubts about whether the game is fair. They’re often drawn to frameworks like effective altruism that let them feel their giving is optimized.

What their lives look like:

1. Multiple homes

2. First-class travel.

3. Children’s futures secured.

4. Yet, often still working fifty-plus hours at jobs that are now entirely optional.

The work provides identity, structure, and social connection. Philanthropy becomes more central to their self-image.

They have enormous capacity. They have both ability and resources. They could fund things, build things, use their networks for leverage. They have optionality that 99.9% of humans have never experienced.

And their actual contribution? Usually minimal.

Philanthropy tends toward safe, prestigious causes, or self-serving causes: the alma mater, the museum, the hospital wing with their name on it. They sit on nonprofit boards but rarely push for change.

They could take risks and don’t.

Their money sits in index funds, compounding.

The gap between what they could accomplish and what they actually do is enormous.

These are people with the resources to matter and the freedom to try. Most do nothing with either.

They have fuck-you money and say nothing.

“I’m planning to give more later.”

“I want to be strategic about it.”

“I don’t want to do harm with uninformed giving.”

“I’m still figuring out what I care about.”

At some point, figuring it out becomes an excuse for never actually doing anything.

The Inheritors

The Inheritors are different. They didn’t build their wealth; they received it.

Trust fund adults, heirs to family businesses, beneficiaries of dynastic wealth transfers. Many are conflicted and often confused about their own legitimacy. Some develop elaborate justifications for their position; others are consumed by guilt.

Many adopt political views—either left or right—that conveniently resolve the tension.

The left-leaning ones advocate for systemic change while maintaining their position; the right-leaning ones construct meritocratic mythologies about their own families.

Their capacity is highly variable.

Some are genuinely talented and have used their security to develop real abilities. Others have been infantilized by wealth, never developing competence because they never needed to.

Their actual contribution is often negative.

They consume resources and generate nothing.

Their “philanthropy” is frequently social positioning.

Their “businesses” are vanity projects that distort markets.

Their political engagement is performance.

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The Founder Wealthy

But the Founder Wealthy are perhaps the most interesting case. These are people who built companies and got rich, anywhere from $10 million to $10 billion or more. First-generation wealth created through entrepreneurship.

What do they believe? In themselves.

The market validated them, and they generalized from this to a belief in their own judgment across all domains. Many develop messianic tendencies, believing their success equips them to solve other problems like education, healthcare, governance, space travel.

At the lower end of wealth, they’re similar to the Working Wealthy but with more swagger.

At the higher end, things get increasingly bizarre like private islands, aircraft, bunkers, longevity obsessions, and social circles where reality-testing breaks down because everyone around them is paid to agree.

Their capacity for a specific type of building—the type that made them rich—is extremely high. But often much lower than they think for other domains.

The feedback loops that worked in their business don’t work in policy, philanthropy, or social systems. Many are cognitively captured by their own mythology.

“I know how to get things done.”
“Traditional institutions are broken; I can fix them.”
“I’m thinking on a longer time horizon.”
“People who criticize me just don’t understand scale.”

The problem is that software obeys you and people don’t.

Startups reward speed, control, and tight feedback loops.

Institutions require coalition-building, patience, and tolerance for ambiguity, skills the founder mindset actively selects against.

The Founder-Wealthy have a ready response to this: “Exactly. That’s why we don’t work within institutions. We disrupt them. We replace them through market forces.”

But this is a category error.

Some problems don’t have market solutions, not because no one has been clever enough to find them, but because the problem itself is about collective action, public goods, or power. You cannot disrupt your way to a functioning democracy. You cannot A/B test your way to a legitimate judicial system. You cannot build an app that solves the problem of concentrated political power. These are not engineering problems awaiting a sufficiently smart founder. They are human problems requiring human politics.

The Founder-Wealthy often can’t see this because their success has validated, in their minds, their judgment about everything, including domains where their instincts are actively counterproductive.

Chapter 6: The Cultural and Intellectual Elite

Not all elites hold capital or professional positions. Some shape ideas, narratives, and culture. These are the people who determine what the educated class discusses and how they discuss it.

The Prestige Media Class

Writers, editors, and producers at elite publications who believe in their own importance. They see themselves as guardians of public discourse, curators of what matters. Many have genuine intellectual commitments but have learned to temper them for institutional survival.

Their capacity is moderate to high. They’re articulate and often smart.

But their skills are narrow. They know how to produce content that succeeds in their ecosystem. Whether they can think clearly, or just think in ways that get rewarded, is an open question.

At best, they surface important issues, hold power accountable, and facilitate public understanding.

At worst—and this is too common—they produce content optimized for engagement rather than truth, reinforce tribal boundaries, and substitute the appearance of seriousness for actual thought.

The Academic Elite

Tenured professors at research universities who believe in the life of the mind as intrinsically valuable. They believe in expertise, credentialism, and the importance of peer review. They believe that the university is a protected space for pursuing truth, even as they navigate institutions that are increasingly bureaucratic, politicized, and risk-averse.

Their capacity within their domain is high. The selection process is brutal and the survivors are genuinely smart. But many have been so narrowly trained that they lack the ability to function outside academia. They’ve optimized for a specific game that has little to do with broader impact.

Some scholarship matters enormously, changing how we understand the world and producing applicable knowledge.

But much scholarship is citation-farming, produced for tenure files and read by no one. The teaching contribution is real but rarely transformative.

The Thought Leaders

Public intellectuals, bestselling authors, conference-circuit speakers who believe that ideas matter and that they’re the ones with the right ideas.

Their commercial and intellectual impulses are fused, often invisibly to them.

They’re often smart popularizers rather than original thinkers with skills in packaging and presentation, not discovery.

The most successful are better at narrative than analysis.

They tend to reinforce the existing beliefs of their audience rather than challenge them, and the ideas that succeed are unfortunately those that flatter the reader.

Chapter 7: The Opt-Outs

Not all elites are climbing ladders or holding capital. Some have explicitly rejected traditional success.

The Lifestyle Designers

Tim Ferriss’ island in the pacific. People with elite credentials who rejected the path, who write about four-hour work weeks and geo-arbitrage and have seen what Ladder Climbers become and want none of that shit.

They believe in personal autonomy, experience over accumulation, and that life optimization is a legitimate pursuit.

Their lives look appealing:

1. Global travel, think Lisbon, Bali, Mexico City.

2. $50K to $200K annual spend.

3. Days structured around exercise, learning, projects, and socializing.

4. No bosses, no commutes, no meetings.

And their actual contribution is… near zero.

They’ve solved their own lives and stopped there. Their contribution to others is lifestyle content showing that escape is possible.

They’ve redefined the goal so that they’ve achieved it.

Is that wisdom or sophisticated evasion?

The Contemplatives

A unique group who have opted out in a different direction marked by depth rather than freedom.

They might be in monasteries, doing serious meditation practice, writing poetry, or pursuing intellectual projects with no commercial viability.

They may believe that the deepest things are not measurable, that presence, awareness, beauty, and understanding are their own goods, or even that the entire framework of “contribution” is itself a kind of trap.

If the contemplative traditions are right, these people might be doing the most important work, holding open a space for depth in a world so full of surfaces.

If those traditions are wrong, maybe they’re just opting out.

Chapter 8: The Emerging and the Failing

The Young Strivers

The Young Strivers are people currently in their twenties and early thirties climbing the same ladders the older elites climbed. Many have internalized the meritocratic narrative but are starting to question it.

They see the older people above them and wonder “is that really where I want to end up like?”

Their actual contribution is minimal so far as they’re junior and don’t control much. But they’re at peak cognitive ability with elite training and not yet fully captured by institutions.

There’s still plasticity. The question is what they’ll do at the decision points ahead.

The Disaffected Young Elite

The Disaffected Young Elite have the same credentials but are already disillusioned.

They’ve seen enough to know the default path is empty, but they don’t know what else to do. Many are depressed, anxious, or both.

They believe something should be done, but not by them, or not yet, or not in any way they can articulate.

They’re going through the motions at work, numbing with substances, screens, or consumption.

Relationships are often strained by unspoken doubts about life direction. They’re in therapy.

Their capacity is high but frozen. The disillusionment hasn’t converted to action but paralysis.

The Burned Out

The Burned Out are former high-performers who hit a wall.

They pushed too hard for too long, often at things they didn’t really care about, and broke.

They believe the whole game was a lie.

They’ve lost faith in the frameworks they used to navigate by.

The Captured

The Captured are people who were once thoughtful but have become fully absorbed by an ideology, identity, or institution.

They’ve stopped thinking and started performing.

Found on both left and right, in both secular and religious contexts. They believe whatever their group believes.

The content varies but the structure is the same—certainty, tribal loyalty, inability to see merit in opposing views.

These are often people who wanted to contribute, who cared intensely, who found an apparent answer and locked themselves in.

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Part Three: Why They Are the Way They Are

Chapter 9: Systems and Incentives

From the outside, elite behavior is not mysterious. It’s the predictable output of selection pressures and incentive structures.

The entire system of elite production—from selective admissions to corporate recruiting to promotion tracks—selects for certain traits: conscientiousness, institutional legibility, risk-aversion, and optimization within defined parameters.

People who question the game don’t make it through.

People who ask “should we be doing this?” wash out in favor of people who ask “how can we do this better?”

By the time someone reaches elite status, they’ve been through decades of filtration that has selected for exactly the qualities that make them good at climbing and bad at questioning. The philosopher who asks why the hedge fund exists doesn’t get hired at the hedge fund. The lawyer who questions the adversarial system doesn’t make partner. The system self-selects for people who don’t challenge the system.

And of course, the economic incentives.

Elite compensation structures create powerful lock-in. Once you’re making $500K a year, your reference point shifts. Your peers are making similar amounts and so your lifestyle expands to match. The house in the expensive neighborhood, the private schools, the vacation patterns are no longer luxuries you choose; they’re just how people like you live.

And then the trap is set.

To maintain this lifestyle requires maintaining the income.
To maintain the income requires keeping the job.
To keep the job requires not rocking the boat.

The handcuffs are genuinely golden, made of premium materials (or crypto 🤖)—but they’re handcuffs nonetheless.

But the social incentives matter most of all.

Elite solidarity runs on mutual absolution.

The unspoken pact is: I won’t question your choices if you don’t question mine. Anyone who breaks this pact becomes a threat to everyone.

They must be dismissed, pathologized, or excluded—because if their challenge is legitimate, everyone is implicated.

This is why raising expectations among elites produces such intense reactions.

You’re not just challenging one person. You’re threatening the whole arrangement.

Chapter 10: Psychology and Defense

There’s an identity fusion that happens when you’ve spent twenty years on a particular path.

The senior partner at the law firm isn’t someone who happens to have the job of senior partner. They have become their job. To question the value of their job is to question their own self-worth.

This is why criticism of elite behavior feels so personal, even when it’s not directed at any individual.

When you say “elites should do more with their capabilities,” what someone hears is “your life has been a waste.” And since they can’t accept that, they have to find reasons why the criticism is wrong. The defenses are remarkably similar across different types of elites:

The appeal to complexity

“The problems are too complex for anyone to solve.”

“You don’t understand how hard this is.”

“It’s not as simple as you think.”

The complexity is real, but your response to it—total paralysis rather than action—is a choice.

Deferral to the future

“I’ll do something meaningful later.”

“Once I have more resources.”

“When the kids are older.”

The threshold keeps moving. Later becomes never.

Division of labor

“That’s for activists to handle.”

“Someone else is better positioned.”

“I contribute in my own way.”

This misunderstands how change happens. The people with the most leverage to change systems are often already inside them.

They reframe it as just a pathology

“You’re projecting your own issues.”

“This is about your insecurity.”

“You just want to feel superior.”

The challenge itself becomes evidence of the challenger’s dysfunction.

The different values argument

“We just have different values.”

“I’ve made my peace with this.”

“Not everyone has to save the world.”

This conversation-ender removes values from the domain of things that can be discussed.

These defenses aren’t random.

They’re structurally similar because they serve the same function: protecting a self-image from information that would disturb it.

Chapter 11: The Fear Underneath

Underneath all the rationalizations and defenses, is fear.

Fear that they’ve spent twenty years optimizing for the wrong things.

Fear that they don’t actually know how to do anything that isn’t institutionally scaffolded.

Fear that trying something meaningful might reveal them as ordinary.

Fear that they don’t actually care as much as they think they should, and that this would be exposed if they tried.

The elaborate philosophical frameworks, harm-avoidance ethics, complexity paralysis, and virtue-signaling accusations are defense mechanisms against this fear that make the not-trying feel principled rather than frightened.

And for many, there’s a specific fear that might be the most painful of all: the fear that they once wanted more.

That somewhere beneath the credentials and the income and the lifestyle is a person who had bigger aspirations, who believed in their own capacity, who wanted their life to mean something beyond comfort and status.

The people who react most intensely to expectations are often the ones who, years ago, were the most idealistic. The ones who talked about changing the world, who had big ambitions, who seemed destined for something beyond the optimization of personal comfort.

The quiet ones who never claimed to want more? They’re often fine with the conversation. They’ve made their peace honestly. “I just want a simple life” was always their stance, and expectations slide off because there’s no abandoned self to reactivate.

But the ones who burned once, who had the fire and then made the accommodation, who told themselves it was temporary, who locked their idealism in a box labeled “someday”—those are the ones who truly can’t tolerate being challenged.

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Part Four: What We Should Expect

Chapter 12: The Moral Framework of the Elite

Before I can argue for what we should expect from elites, I need to expand on the moral framework that most of them operate under. Because there is one, and it’s coherent, and that’s what makes it so hard to challenge.

The operating moral framework of the professional-managerial class goes something like this:

The goal of life is to be a good person, a good parent, a good neighbor, and a good community member. Don’t inflict harm on anyone. Mind your own business. Build a life that’s comfortable and safe. Provide the best possible life for your children. And that’s it. That’s where obligations end.

Any expectations beyond this are just other people projecting their own issues.

This is a morality of non-interference, of harm-avoidance, of private virtue. And it’s philosophically coherent. It draws on liberalism’s deepest commitments: the individual as the locus of meaning, the family as the primary unit of obligation, the public sphere as a space of tolerance rather than shared purpose.

But there’s an assumption hidden in there: the assumption that the world doesn’t need you.

The “good person, good parent, good neighbor” framework only works as a complete ethic if you believe the larger systems are either basically fine, beyond repair, or someone else’s responsibility.

What it doesn’t account for is the possibility that you are among the few with the capacity to act, and that your non-action has consequences.

Chapter 13: Vocation and Obligation

The ancient world understood something we’ve forgotten.

Virtue wasn’t just “don’t harm”—it was excellence, the full expression of human capability in service of the good.

The virtue of a knife is to cut well. The virtue of a runner is to run fast. The virtue of a person with extraordinary abilities is... to be a good neighbor?

Something is missing from the modern elite’s moral universe: any concept of vocation. The idea that your particular gifts create particular obligations.

That what you can do shapes what you should do.

An MIT graduate with financial security, technical skills, and social capital is not in the same position as someone without these things. The “be a good dad and don’t hurt anyone” framework isn’t neutral for such a person.

It’s a choice to leave capacity on the table.

It’s the stewardship of talents buried in the ground.

I’m not making a utilitarian argument here, or claiming that elites must maximize some aggregate welfare function.

I’m making a more modest claim: that capacity entails something. That having exceptional abilities and resources creates at least a presumption that you’ll use them for something beyond personal advancement. That the default of doing nothing special requires justification, not the other way around.

I can already hear the objection:

“But I do contribute. I coach my kid’s soccer team. I volunteer at church. I’m on the neighborhood association.”

I don’t doubt it. And these things are commendable. But they’re not commensurate with your capacity.

An MIT-trained engineer spending Saturday mornings at a food bank is doing something any able-bodied person could do. The contribution is real, genuine, and valuable. But it doesn’t require anything that makes you—you.

Your particular gifts—the pattern recognition, the systems thinking, the ability to master complex domains, the networks, the resources—none of that is being deployed. You’re contributing your the bare minimum of your abilities when you could be contributing your mind.

Local volunteering is what you do in addition to using your exceptional capacity. It’s not a substitute for it.

This is not a popular position. It’s also not a comfortable one for me to hold, given that I’m an elite who has spent plenty of years not living up to this standard.

But I think it’s right.

Chapter 14: The Counter-Arguments

Let me address the strongest objections:

“Everyone has equal moral worth, so no one has special obligations.”

True, everyone has equal moral worth. But equal worth doesn’t imply equal obligations.

The person who can swim has an obligation to try to save a drowning child that a non-swimmer doesn’t. Capacity creates obligation. This doesn’t mean the swimmer is morally superior—just that their capacity is relevant to what they should do.

“I earned my position; I don’t owe anyone anything.”

Let’s grant that you earned it (though this is more complicated than most people think—who chose your genes, your parents, your early environment?). However earned, capabilities are capabilities. The question here isn’t whether you deserve what you have. It’s what you do with what you have.

“If everyone focused on their own business, the world would be fine.”

This confuses universalizability with reality. Maybe in an ideal world, if everyone were a good neighbor, large-scale problems wouldn’t exist. But we don’t live in that world. We live in a world with coordination failures, institutional capture, collective action problems, and system dynamics that don’t reduce to personal virtue.

Your being a good father doesn’t touch climate change. A thousand good fathers don’t touch climate change. The framework ignores the nature of the actual problems we face.

“I don’t know enough about these issues to contribute meaningfully.”

Probably true. But you know how to learn. You learned corporate law or distributed systems or financial modeling. You could learn about housing policy or climate technology or democratic reform.

The “I don’t know enough” is often an excuse to not learn, not an actual constraint.

“Any contribution I could make would be too small to matter.”

This is just wrong as a matter of empirical fact.

An MIT-trained engineer working on carbon capture makes a different contribution than they would optimizing ad click-through rates.

A corporate lawyer drafting pro-bono housing policy has a different impact than one drafting another merger document.

The contributions aren’t infinite, but they’re not zero either. And they compound, especially if enough people shift.

Chapter 15: What the Expectation Actually Is

Let me be specific about what I think we should expect from elites.
It is not a demand for sainthood. It’s a demand for something more than nothing.

Use your cognitive capacity for more than career advancement. Spend time understanding problems that matter. Don’t outsource your worldview to whatever your profession tells you. Think, actually think, about what’s broken and what might fix it.

Use your economic security to take risks. You have a safety net that most people don’t. Use it.

That might mean taking a lower-paying job with more impact. It might mean funding something uncertain. It might mean speaking up when speaking up has costs. The security is wasted if you never use it.

Use your social capital to open doors. You know people. You have access. Some of that access could be made available to people doing important work. Introductions, legitimacy, and connections are valuable, and you’re hoarding them.

Use your institutional position to push for change. You’re somewhere in the system. Maybe you can’t change everything, but you can change something. The question to ask: “What’s the most important thing I can affect from where I sit?” Most people never ask this. They just do what’s expected.

Rethink the allocation of your time and energy. You probably work fifty or sixty hours a week. How much of that is genuinely necessary? How much is status maintenance, the hedonic treadmill, or just what you’ve always done? The reallocation doesn’t have to be dramatic. Even ten hours a week redirected to something that matters would, across millions of elites, transform what’s possible.

This doesn’t mean becoming an activist, or a monk, or a martyr.

It’s about answering for yourself: given your unique perspectives, talents, and capabilities, are you doing enough?

And for most elites, the honest answer is no.

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Part Five: The Defensive Response

Chapter 16: Why They Bristle

When I have these conversations with my friends, they bristle. They get defensive. Frustrated. Sometimes even angry. Sometimes they stop talking to me for a while.

I used to think this meant I was doing something wrong. That maybe I was imposing or projecting my belief on others.

Now I think it means I’m touching something important.

As I mentioned earlier, there’s a social contract among high-achieving peers that involves mutual non-expectation—a tacit agreement that everyone’s choices are equally valid, that success is personal and relative, and that no one should be positioned to judge another’s use of their talents.

Elite solidarity runs on mutual absolution.

When I express expectations, I break this pact.

What I’m doing isn’t judgment (although it’s almost always taken that way) but expectation, which is almost worse, because it comes from my belief in their capacity.

I’m saying: “You could be shaping the world. You’re not. That’s a problem.”

Respect-as-expectation can feel like a burden, especially to people who’ve made peace with lowered ambitions.

When you treat people as capable of consequential action, you’re implicitly suggesting they’re not currently engaged in consequential action. Their comfortable job or their BigCo PM role is a choice, and perhaps a choice that falls short.

The defenses come fast:

“You’re projecting.” Maybe. But even if I am, that doesn’t mean the underlying question is invalid. My motivations don’t change their situation.

“You’re being judgmental.” No, I’m having expectations. There’s a difference. Judgment is about the past; expectation is about the future.

“We have different values.” Then tell me what yours are. Not what you do, but what you actually believe, as a reflective commitment. And then tell me how your life expresses that.

“Tell me what you expect me to do, then.” This is a trap. If I give something specific, they’ll find flaws. If I stay general, they’ll say I’m being vague. The real question isn’t what I expect, it’s what they expect of themselves.

Chapter 17: The “Tell Me What to Do” Trap

Let me dwell on this last one, because it’s important.

When someone says “okay then, tell me what you expect me to do,” it looks like they’re engaging. It sounds like they’re finally ready to hear ideas, right?

No of course not. It’s a trap to shift the burden of proof in a way that’s designed to fail.

If I give a specific answer, say: ”work on housing policy,” “join this organization,” “use your legal skills for X” they will find the flaw. And there will always be a flaw, because every specific path has limitations, uncertainties, reasons it might not work.

“That organization is too small.”

“That cause is too niche.”

“That approach has been tried.”

“I don’t have exactly those skills.”

“That’s not scalable.”

“The theory of change is unclear.”

The criticism is always available because nothing in the real world is immune to criticism.

But notice something.

The standard being applied to my suggestion is perfection, while the standard applied to their current life is mere adequacy.

Their BigCo job doesn’t have to be perfect or even good. It just has to be normal. The alternative has to be bulletproof.

And if I stay too general—”find something that uses your specific talents for broader impact”—they’ll say I’m being vague.

“That’s not actionable.”

“What does that even mean?”

“You’re just philosophizing.”

The frame is designed so that no answer can satisfy.

The test is simple: Are they taking notes? Someone who genuinely wants ideas tries to capture them, build on them, ask follow-up questions that develop possibilities. Someone running the trap is waiting for you to finish so they can explain why it won’t work.

What I’ve learned to do instead is refuse the frame.

“I’m not going to tell you what to do. That’s your job. What I’m asking is whether you’ve genuinely tried to figure it out, or whether you’ve decided in advance that nothing could work.”

Or flip it: “What would excite you? Not what’s practical, not what’s safe, but what would actually feel meaningful?” This forces them to take ownership.

Or name the dynamic directly: “I notice that when I give specific ideas, you find reasons they won’t work. And when I stay general, you say I’m not being concrete. Is there any answer I could give that you wouldn’t immediately dismiss?”

This last one is risky. It feels confrontational. But it makes the trap visible. And sometimes, once they see what they’re doing, something shifts.

Chapter 18: What the Defensiveness Reveals

People need to believe that they are good, that their choices are justified, and that these two things are connected. This is a basic psychological requirement. Without it, you face internal fragmentation that’s hard to live with.

My friends and I have built lives. We’ve made thousands of choices over decades. Those choices have to mean something. They have to add up to a story in which the protagonist is reasonable, decent, and doing roughly the right thing.

By simply holding open the question—by treating our choices as actual choices rather than inevitabilities—I threaten the coherence of that story.

The threat isn’t “Edan thinks I’m bad.”

The threat is: “What if the story I’ve been telling myself is wrong?”

That’s annihilating. That’s not a dinner party disagreement. That’s an existential crisis.

If the challenge is valid, if it’s actually reasonable to expect more of capable people, if their elaborate justifications are actually evasions, then they have a problem.

But if I’m the one who’s crazy, or projecting, or driven by my own issues, then they don’t have a problem. I have a problem.

All of the ad hominem responses share a structure: dismiss the challenger to avoid the challenge.

There’s something almost ritualistic about it. I become the container for the discomfort they can’t process. By casting me out—distancing, invalidating, labeling—they externalize the threat. The bad feeling isn’t inside them; it’s me.

Get rid of me, and the bad feeling goes away.

This is ancient. It’s how communities have always dealt with people who threaten the collective self-image.

I’m not just saying they should do more. I’m implying that they know they should do more. That somewhere in them, beneath the defenses, is a person who had bigger aspirations, who believed in their own capacity, who wanted their life to mean something beyond comfort and status.

I’m speaking to that person. And that person often hasn’t been spoken to in years.

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Part Six: Mobilizing Elites

Chapter 19: Who Is Movable

Not everyone can be reached. The question is who can.

In my observation, there are three categories worth focusing on:

The Disaffected Young are people in their late twenties and early thirties who are already disillusioned but paralyzed. They see the emptiness of the default path but don’t know what else to do. Their defenses haven’t fully hardened. They’re in motion; they just need direction.

This is the most recruitable population. The patterns aren’t set yet. If you can get to them before the handcuffs lock, before the identity fully fuses with the institution, there’s real plasticity.

The Golden Handcuffs Who Are Cracking are mid-career people whose defenses are starting to fail. The “I’ll do something meaningful later” has bumped into the actuarial reality that later is running out. The kids are getting older. The mortgage is paid down. The rationalizations are getting harder to sustain.

These people are closer to the edge than they appear. The conflict is conscious. Often, what they need is permission and a path.

The Post-Crisis Rebuilders are people who’ve been through something that broke the old pattern—burnout, health crisis, job loss, divorce. They’re in an interregnum. The old identity is damaged; the new one isn’t formed yet.

This is a dangerous moment (they might just rebuild the same thing) but also an opportunity. If they encounter an alternative during the reconstruction, they might build something different.

The people who are probably not reachable are the Ladder Climbers who are still climbing successfully and the Captured who have locked into ideological frameworks. The first group hasn’t hit any friction yet. The second has found a different kind of answer. Neither is likely to respond to the kind of challenge I’m describing.

Chapter 20: What Activation Requires

Readiness is not sufficient. People can be ready for change and still not change, because readiness is a psychological state and change requires material scaffolding.

What the movable people need isn’t inspiration. They’ve probably had plenty of that.

What they need is:

A specific thing to do. Not “make the world better” but “here is a project, here is your role in it, here is what success looks like in six months.” The specificity matters because elites have been trained to evaluate and optimize. Give them something to optimize.

A peer group that legitimizes the choice. One of the deepest hooks of institutional life is that everyone around you is doing the same thing. Walking away feels like exile. They need a new “everyone around me.”

A gradient, not a cliff. Most people can’t go from BigCo to full-time crusader overnight. They need a path: first this small involvement, then more responsibility, then maybe the leap. The intensity ramp matters.

Someone who has done it. Not someone who has succeeded necessarily, but someone who is in it, demonstrably, and hasn’t died. Proof of survivability.

Economic viability. The material constraints are real. Student loans exist. Mortgages exist. Children’s needs exist. Paths that ignore these realities will fail. Activated people still need to live.

Chapter 21: The Role of Structure

Many high-achieving people have never actually done anything. They’ve optimized within structures. They’ve climbed ladders built by others. They’ve managed, coordinated, executed against predefined metrics.

The skill set that gets you to Senior Director at Microsoft is not the skill set that lets you build something from nothing, operate in ambiguity, or pursue a goal without a performance review framework.

Asking them to work on hard problems outside institutions isn’t just asking them to change their allocation of time. It’s asking them to discover whether they have any capabilities that aren’t institution-dependent. That’s terrifying. Many suspect the answer is no.

This is why structure matters so much for activation. The activated path needs to provide what the institutional path provided:

Legibility: “What do I tell my parents I do?” People need a story that makes sense to their social world.

Operational scaffolding: How do you actually get things done without a fifty-person support staff? Many elites have never worked without significant infrastructure.

Feedback and validation: How do you know if you’re doing a good job? The metrics may be different, but people still need to know.

Community: Who are your peers? Who do you eat lunch with? Humans are social animals. The activated path needs to provide belonging.

Without these, even motivated people will drift back to default paths. Not because they don’t care, but because the alternative is too structurally demanding.

Chapter 22: Types of Leadership

There are different kinds of leadership, and different people need different things:

Direction-setting: I know where we’re going; follow me. This requires having a clear destination and confidence you’re right.

Permission-granting: You already want to do this; I’m telling you it’s okay. This requires articulating what they’re already feeling but can’t justify to themselves.

Structure-providing: Here’s how we’re going to do this; here’s your part. This requires having built something they can plug into.

For the disaffected young elite, permission-granting is often sufficient. They know something is wrong. They’re looking for someone to tell them their instinct is right and it’s okay to act on it.

For the mid-career people with institutional dependency, structure-providing is essential. They can’t just be given permission; they need something to plug into.

For the truly captured—if they can be reached at all—something has to break first. Neither permission nor structure helps if the person isn’t yet in motion.

Chapter 23: The Numbers

I don’t know how many elites are movable.

The honest answer is that no one does. But I know the number isn’t zero.

I’ve seen the cracks. I’ve watched people who seemed permanently captured by the default path start to question it. I’ve had conversations that went nowhere for years and then, suddenly, something shifted—a health scare, a layoff, a kid asking the wrong question at the wrong time—and the person on the other side of the table was finally ready to hear what I’d been saying.

The Disaffected Young are the most obvious pool. They’re already disillusioned; they just need direction and permission. Some of them will find their way regardless. Others need someone to show them that the leap is survivable.

The Golden Handcuffs who are cracking are harder to reach but more consequential when they move. They have resources, networks, and skills that the younger cohort hasn’t developed yet. When a senior partner at a law firm or a VP at a tech company redirects even a fraction of their capability toward something that matters, the leverage is significant.

The Young Strivers are the long game. They haven’t locked in yet. The patterns aren’t set. If you can get to them before the identity fuses with the institution, before the lifestyle inflates to match the income, before “later” becomes the answer to every hard question—there’s real plasticity there.

If even a small shift—a few thousand people redirecting their capabilities toward problems that matter—would change what’s possible. The current number of elites genuinely engaged in meaningful work is small enough that doubling or tripling it is not a fantasy. It’s a realistic target if the right structures exist to catch people when they’re ready.

The question isn’t whether mobilization is possible. It’s whether anyone is building the infrastructure to make it happen.

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Part Seven: A Conclusion, of Sorts

Chapter 24: What I’m Doing With This

I’m not writing this essay from a position of superiority. I’m an elite who has spent years on the same treadmill, making the same accommodations, telling myself the same stories.

The difference, if there is one, is that I’ve started trying to do something about it. The civic technology work I’m doing—Bloc, DeepDebate, NYC budget analysis, the participatory democracy tools—is my attempt to use my capabilities for something that might matter. It’s small, it’s uncertain, it’s not the bulletproof plan that my friends demand before they’ll consider alternatives.

But it’s something. And something, done by enough people with enough capability, might add up.

I’m also trying to be honest about what I observe. This essay is about honesty. It may cost me friendships. It has certainly cost me social comfort. Holding up a mirror to people and showing them a gap between who they are and who they could be is not a recipe for popularity.

But I think it’s important. And I think enough elites are ready to hear it that it’s worth saying.

Chapter 25: The Invitation

If you’re an elite reading this, here’s my invitation:

Stop defending. Just for a moment, let go of the defenses and ask: Is it possible that the life I’m living is smaller than the life I’m capable of living? Is it possible that my capabilities and resources create obligations I’m not meeting?

If the answer is “maybe”—even a tentative maybe—then the question becomes: What would I do if I took that seriously?

Not what does Edan want me to do. Not what would satisfy some abstract moral principle. But what would I do if I actually believed that my gifts create obligations and that I’m currently falling short?

The answer might be small. An extra ten hours a week. A different allocation of charitable giving. A willingness to speak up when you’ve been staying silent. A phone call to someone doing meaningful work to ask how you might help.

Or the answer might be big. A career change. A rethinking of what the next decade looks like. A fundamental reorientation of what you’re optimizing for.

I’m not here to prescribe. I’m here to ask the question.

And I’m here to say: you’re capable of more than you’re doing. I believe that about you. That’s not a judgment, it’s an expectation. And expectation is a form of respect.

What will you do with it?

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Afterword: To Those Who Are Already Moving

To the elites who are already trying—who are already in the arena, deploying their capabilities toward something that matters, taking the risks and absorbing the costs—I see you. This essay is not about you, except to say: you’re not alone, and your example matters more than you know.

Every person who makes a different choice makes the next person’s choice a little easier. Every activated elite is proof that activation is possible. Every alternative path that doesn’t collapse is a path that others can consider.

If you know people who are ready to move, help them. If you’re building organizations that can absorb activated elites, keep building.

If you’re living proof that the leap is survivable, be visible about it.

We are trying to create a new normal. It won’t happen all at once. It won’t happen through argument alone. It will happen through accumulation, one person at a time, one choice at a time, one proof point at a time.

The gap between what elites could contribute and what they actually contribute is enormous. This essay won't close it. But maybe, for a few people, it names what they've been unable to name. And naming is where change begins.