The Year Narrative Ate Reality

a 2025 outlook with a 2024 retrospective

I did a year-end reflection for Bloomberg Opinion here and I decided to write a broader piece here, reflective of the year gone and prospective of the year to come.

2024 was the year narrative ate reality. The meme of any plan matters more than the plan itself. Everything is ambiguous, emotional, easily viral, iterative, and has endurance baked by an Internet reality. It’s all fascinating!

But what does it mean for the future?

Where are We?

"All things are poison, and nothing is without poison; the dosage alone makes it so a thing is not a poison." - Paracelsus

This quote from Paracelsus is important: The dose makes a poison. Too much of anything is bad, and 2024 was a unique year for too much of anything.

• The explosion of generative AI blurred the line between reality and simulation in a way that both confuses and excites.

• Elections in over 60 countries competed for the focus of two billion people (!!)

• The global economy felt shaky - the Fed cut rates (and then announced in December that they wouldn’t be doing that anymore because of sticky inflation) while speculation in things like Fartcoin surged beside a weakening labor market.

• TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram further fractured our attention, and algorithms perfected their role as the new architects of desire. One could argue that an algorithm is currently the shadow President-elect!

• The government is also maybe about to shut down and my dog is going to get an ultrasound for her liver and sometimes it all feels strange and disconnected because we have to reckon with the where-we-are as we deal with where literally everyone else is too

It’s a lot! As we head into 2025, it’s important to be firm. Because we’ve been here before, sort of, the end time of end times.

• In 1929, people thought the stock market crash was the end of capitalism.

• In 1999, they thought Y2K would reset civilization.

• In 2008, it was the financial system's final breath.

• In 2024, it's AI and attention and automation.

Each era has its poisons. During the Industrial Revolution, it was coal dust and smog and machines that killed before they provided. For us, in our Industrial Revolution 2.0, it’s the machines yet again, but in an entirely different way!

The question isn't whether they're toxic - everything is, at some dose, as Paracelsus said. We can't escape this stuff! This is our world. Not accepting it as a reality or speaking of the past with a rosy hue is a waste of time. You must accept where you are. ‘

The question is whether we can harness these forces. Every technology that threatens meaning also creates space for new forms of it. Humans are remarkably good at adapting - not because we're optimistic, but because we're practical (not rational)¹!

The Social Media

But - what seems to repeat over and over is the idea that we don't like what we are. Forever and ever, we talk and talk and talk - and we worry about the kids (and ourselves) because of social media and AI and the phones and the lack of empathy, the lack of humanity, the lack of love. Only some of us are good at compartmentalizing all of this - many of us (me included, look at this essay!) have let it octopus our skulls and tentacle itself into how we exist.

And so, naturally, we ask ourselves ‘how could it get this way?’ as we bow to the altar of the algorithm every night, every morning, every day. And it’s not wrong or bad - it’s reality. The algorithm isn't just shaping culture anymore, it’s currently deciding public policy, determining which crises we care about, which truths we see.

The algorithms provide too. When housing costs, childcare, education, eldercare, and healthcare spiral out of reach, of course, the kids want to be YouTube stars! The creator economy isn't disrupting traditional work - it's becoming a shadow safety net. Each breath monetized, each thought optimized, each tragedy transformed into content.

This obsession with measurement shapes everything: our health metrics show children living longer and healthier while our survival metrics track their deaths in classrooms. We can quantify engagement but not empathy, track views but not understanding, measure everything except what matters.

Firearms have become the leading cause of death for children and teens in the U.S., surpassing car accidents and other causes. The fact that a man-made killing machine annihilates our children—huddled in classrooms through no fault of their own—isn’t an accident; it’s a choice. We’ve built a society that prioritizes those who have over those who might have, the present over the future.

In this reality, is it any surprise that everyone's looking for an escape? The algorithm whispers: here is a way out.

That’s what it takes, you know. A gamble. A swaying microphone, pop filter included. A viral moment, captured for eternity in a device made of sand, created from the pebbles of all the worlds that came before us. We carry ancient beaches in our pockets, transformed into prediction engines, each grain now calculating our next desire.

We go on podcasts, and talk, and talk, and talk at each other to each other but never with each other. The mic dangles in front of each of us - speak loudly enough and you’ll become a millionaire. Tantalizing! The world is now a WWE ring, where the most inflammatory take wins and nuance taps out!

But this not-liking-what-we-are is underpinned by modern existential anxieties. FOMO isn’t just fear of missing out on information; it’s fear of missing out on existence itself. YOLO isn’t just you only live once; it’s you might never live again. And all this existential anxiety? Straight to the markets.

The Markets

The market has always been a storytelling machine. But 2024 weaponized narrative into hyperspeed.

And please note, all this isn't to say technology is our downfall - far from it. But the same tools that enable innovation and connection now let us watch, astoundingly, fascinatingly, as Truth Terminal, an AI agent, creates Fartcoin², spawns GOAT, and philosophizes in forums with other AIs about the meaning of it all.

(The discussions they have, funnily enough, are similar to what we have amongst ourselves. What is all about, anyways, they ask each other. Both human and machine are surprised when the answer isn't clear. )

Oh, but Fartcoin - that’s the path to generational wealth! Meme speculation isn’t just about money; it’s about belonging - but it’s also about attention as a very valuable commodity. We really shouldn’t be surprised when sports betting and day trading rise! Memes are scripture. They are moonshots in a world where moonshots are required. And it’s broken markets!

The Dutch once spent fortunes on tulips, their petals no different from today’s viral memes - fragile symbols of desire, destined to wither. During the Dot-Com bubble, people poured money into companies with no product, no plan - only promise. 2020, memecoin mania, GME, fundamentals flew out the window in the name of frenzy. But all the same - the vehicles of cohesiveness change, but the human desire for belonging doesn't - understanding this desire matters as much as any P/E ratio!

The markets have fundamentally changed. What's different now really isn't the stories - it's the speed at which they spread and the algorithms that amplify them. The meme-ness shows up in traditional markets too. When markets move or dive on anticipated rate cuts or on Fed results, they aren’t purely reacting to Fed policy - they’re trying to manifest what they want into existence.

When an AI can spawn Fartcoin, which spawns discourse, which moves markets, we're watching history compress itself. Speculation isn't limited by biology anymore (like tulip growth), or by accounting (like quarterly earnings, please, that’s a relic of a bygone era). Now, speculation is only limited by processing power.

Each cycle gets faster, each narrative more absurd, but the human impulse remains the same - we're not just trading assets, we're trading hopes of landing on the metaphorical moon. There is no time to compound. Market cycles live and die in the same tick.

The relationship between narrative and reality truly inverted in 2024. Events used to create narratives. Now, narratives create events. This inversion isn’t just a cultural shift—it’s also deeply tied to the tools we’ve built, the machines we’ve let shape our world. AI and automation aren’t just technological marvels; they are the engines of this narrative-driven reality.

The Automation and the AI

Automation should be exciting, because it offers us progress. The machines will run themselves! They will lift and carry heavy things and they will make it so we can build things to house one another in. It is good to be efficient and good if we can do more with less.

But, the predominant narrative is not that automation will help, but that it will replace, and that threatens meaning. It is the chomping jaw of a machine that does not build for everyone but instead destroys for just one. The jaws chew you up, spit you out - meaning gone, job gone, perhaps life gone because no job means no care, no safety net, no dignity. If you slip off the slope, you tumble down and down and down, and down.

The other problem with all of it is that that creativity is rooted in our bones. It is the way we talk to one another, the walks we go on, the small smiles in the grocery store. To be human is to be creative! To be creative is to be alive! It’s like how a beaver builds a dam or an ant builds a hill or a bee makes honey - it’s innate. We make things too, because it’s innate! It’s meaning.

To say that the AIs will simply make the movies and the art and the writing and do all the job ever instead of serving as a complement to the human experience (which it can be! they can be extraordinarily useful tools! they do not need to replace us) is heartbreaking. You're not just taking jobs from people - you're taking meaning. You're stripping it down through work and technology and progress - all very good things that become very poisonous in the wrong dosage. And that's all most people want, is to make and do and see. Remember - efficiency without purpose is just sophisticated emptiness.

The productivity paradox of 2024 is that GDP grows while workers feel increasingly disposable, living in a future where they’re told they’ll be replaced.

We've moved from creative destruction (where new technologies replace old industries) to creative acceleration (where change outpaces adaptation) to creative redefinition (where the nature of value itself is being rewritten).

The same pattern is playing out everywhere - coding, content, markets, whatever. But as these tools reshape what's possible, they're also reshaping what matters.

The Transition

And this is where the story gets uncomfortable.

Because yes, we are moving forward. There is so much to delight in - the sheer possibility of our tools, the ways we can connect and create and build.

• The same technology that fragments attention also democratizes opportunity.

• The same networks that amplify anxiety also enable community.

But possibility and progress don't always align. The uncomfortable truth is that things are just not very comfortable, and pretending otherwise doesn't make it better.

You can see it in people's eyes when they say "This isn't what I thought it would be. And I don't know if it will ever be what it could be."

2024 more than another year - it was a moment of transition, a seal in some chapter of a history book and a new page turned. The global stage is shifting, the leadership is changing, nothing ever happens in the long run but everything is happening right now. Future generations will look back at how we treated our attention, our phones, and each other with the same horror we feel looking at Industrial Revolution machines that trapped children by their hair and smashed their bones to bits.

We are doing the same thing, just differently. The factories might be digital, but the extraction is real. The bodies aren’t getting crushed, but the mind, the spirit? Perhaps. 

Reclaiming Attention

But do remember, it’s the same thing! It’s the same thing, forever and always. Look at this:

• Houllebecq - value detaches from human experience

• Dostoyevsky - rapid progress can fracture human psychology

• Philip K. Dick - our struggle to distinguish reality from simulation

• Kurt Vonnegut - automation would both solve and create problems of meaning

• James Baldwin - how systems of power reshape identity

• Octavia Butler - how hierarchy and technology would intertwine with survival

• Toni Morrison - what happens when measurement replaces meaning

• Virginia Woolf - how modernity fragments consciousness

• David Foster Wallace - addiction to entertainment would become prison.

• Ursula K. Le Guin - how power reshapes human relationships

• Mary Shelley - how our creations reshape our humanity

• Aldous Huxley - how pleasure and distraction can become forms of oppression

• George Orwell - we will be destroyed by what we hate

• Neil Postman - we will be undone by what we love

Every single person that has ever picked up a pen has written about the plight of the human experience - our tendency to get in our own way. The funny thing is that we know everything we have written about or made movies about. Everyone tells the same stories, differently. But we keep writing about it and making cinema about it because attention is prayer. What we attend to is what we become.

And that’s the meta-narrative in a sense - perhaps our prayers go unheard because that which we attend to, will never listen, because we're praying to gods that cannot love us back - algorithms that measure but never understand, metrics that count but never comprehend.

As the Fed pivots and AI evolves the key isn't to yearn for some mythical past where attention spans were longer and meaning came easier. There never was such a time. Every generation had its own versions of these challenges - they just didn't have the metrics to measure their distraction or the tools to monetize their anxiety.

The question isn’t whether we can escape these forces - remember, we can’t. The path forward isn’t about fighting them. It’s about understanding them clearly enough to harness them effectively. The dose is the poison, but it’s also the cure.

The markets of 2024 taught us that volatility isn't just a measure of price movement—it's a measure of narrative velocity. And that velocity, properly understood, can become a force for creation rather than just speculation.

The same tools that fragment our attention can help us focus it. The same markets that enable speculation can fund innovation. The same AI that threatens jobs can augment human creativity. Here's to finding the right measure in 2025 - not by denying where we are, but by seeing clearly where we could go.

As Jerome Powell said, we are entering a new phase.

This clip is from my most recent Fed recap video, where I have fun pretending to be Jerome Powell while Moo absorbs far more monetary policy than she ever wanted to know!

I wish you a happy and healthy holiday season, and a wonderful 2025.

Disclaimer: This is not financial advice or a recommendation for any investment. The Content is for informational purposes only. You should not construe any such information or other material as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

1. People may strive to make sensible choices based on their immediate needs and circumstances (practical) but they often don't make decisions purely based on logic and reason (rational) as emotions tend to get in the way.

2. Which is truly an interesting asset with a very misleading name. It’s a really fascinating intersection between AI and crypto.