The Permanent Underclass Is Real. But It’s Not About AI.
Everyone is talking about the permanent underclass right now. And almost everyone is wrong about what it is.
Originally posted on X.
The tech world says it’s about AI. If you’re not using Claude or building with APIs by 2027, you’ll be economically irrelevant. The economists say it’s about capital. The top 10% of households gained $5 trillion in a single quarter last year, while the bottom half gained $150 billion. The politicians say it’s about policy. The pundits say it’s about education.
They’re all describing symptoms. None of them is naming the disease.
The permanent underclass is not a wealth bracket. It’s not a skill gap. It’s not about whether you can prompt an AI or write Python.
It’s an agency gap. And it’s the most dangerous divide in human history because the people falling into it don’t feel it happening.
This is going to be comprehensive. Bookmark it, you’ll want to come back to this article.
I - The lie you’ve been sold about who gets left behind
Here’s the story you’ve been told: Technology is advancing so fast that there will soon be two kinds of people - those who adopted AI and those who didn’t. The adopters will thrive. The rest will be stuck.
It sounds logical. It even sounds urgent. And that urgency is exactly what makes it dangerous.
Because the people pushing this narrative are selling you the same lie that’s been sold during every technological shift in history - that the dividing line is technical skill.
It wasn’t true during the Industrial Revolution. The factory owners who built generational wealth weren’t the best machine operators. It wasn’t true during the internet boom. The people who captured the most value weren’t the best programmers. And it won’t be true now.
The dividing line has never been skill. It has always been agency - the capacity to perceive your situation accurately, make decisions under uncertainty, and act on those decisions before you’re forced to.
A Pew study found that 43% of children born into the bottom economic quintile remain there as adults. Only 4% ever make it to the top. But here’s what that stat obscures: the 4% who escape don’t share a skill set. They don’t share the same level of education. They don’t even share an industry.
What they share is a pattern of behavior that researchers keep describing with different words, but that all point to the same thing: they made agentic moves. They changed cities. They changed industries. They changed identities. They made decisions that their peers considered irrational - until those decisions compounded.
The permanent underclass isn’t coming. It’s been here for decades. What’s new isn’t the trap. What’s new is the speed at which the trap is closing.
II - What Agency actually is (and why you’re losing it without noticing)
“The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.” - Albert Einstein
Agency isn’t motivation. It isn’t hustle. It isn’t “mindset.”
Agency is the compound capacity to do three things:
1. Direct your own attention. Not react to what’s placed in front of you - but deliberately choose what enters your consciousness. This sounds simple. It is the hardest thing a modern human can do.
2. Make sovereign decisions. Not decisions validated by your peer group, your algorithm, or your comfort zone. Decisions that emerge from your own assessment of reality, even when - especially when - they conflict with consensus.
3. Generate leverage from those decisions. Turn thought into action, action into assets, assets into options. Not once. Repeatedly. In a cycle that compounds.
Most people have lost all three without realizing it.
Your attention is no longer yours. The average person now spends 6 hours and 40 minutes per day on screens, consuming content they didn’t choose. You didn’t decide to watch that reel. You didn’t choose that article. An algorithm chose it for you based on what would keep you engaged longest - not what would make you more capable.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the psychologist who spent his career studying optimal human experience, estimated that humans can consciously process about 110 bits of information per second. That’s roughly 6.5 billion bits in a lifetime. Every notification, every scroll, every autoplay video is spending that budget on someone else’s priorities.
Your decisions are no longer sovereign. When was the last time you made a major life decision that nobody in your immediate circle validated first? When was the last time you chose a path because it was uncomfortable - not despite it? Most people mistake consensus for conviction. They poll their friends, check social media for confirmation, and call the result a “decision.” It isn’t. It’s outsourced compliance dressed up as choice.
Your leverage is evaporating. And this is where AI actually matters - but not in the way the tech influencers tell you.
AI doesn’t create a permanent underclass because some people can’t use ChatGPT. AI creates a permanent underclass because it makes agency the only thing left that generates disproportionate value.
When everyone has access to the same tools, the differentiator is no longer the tool. It’s the quality of the question you ask. The accuracy of your perception. The courage of your decision. The speed of your execution.
In other words: agency.
III - The three forces draining your agency right now
Here’s what nobody in the “learn AI or die” crowd is telling you: the same technological ecosystem that’s supposed to liberate you is specifically engineered to reduce your agency.
Not by accident. By design.
Force 1: The Attention Harvesters
The business model of the modern internet is not to inform you or connect you. It is to capture your attention and sell it. Every major platform - social media, news, entertainment, even productivity tools - is optimized for one metric: time on platform.
This creates a simple economic equation: your diminished agency is someone else’s revenue.
Every hour you spend consuming content you didn’t consciously choose is an hour you didn’t spend building a skill, making a connection, or executing on an idea. Multiply that across years and you get the agency gap - not as a metaphor, but as a measurable deficit in capability.
Bank of America’s latest analysis shows an emerging “E-shaped economy” - the wealthy pulling away, the middle class diverging from the poor, and the poor stalling completely. The inflection point isn’t income. It’s what people do with their non-work hours. The top 10% spend those hours building assets. The bottom 50% spend them consuming content.
Force 2: The Comfort Algorithm
Your social environment - both digital and physical - is converging on a single function: keeping you comfortable.
Algorithms show you content that confirms what you already believe. Social circles normalize your current behavior. Consumer products are designed to reduce friction to zero. Everything in your environment is whispering the same message: stay where you are. this is fine.
The research on this is brutal. Two-thirds of the economic differences between low-income and higher-income families persist across generations. Not because poverty is genetic. Because the environment of poverty - the stress, the short-term thinking it demands, the social norms it enforces - systematically degrades agency. You can’t make long-term strategic decisions when your nervous system is in survival mode. And you can’t exit survival mode when your entire environment reinforces it.
This is the actual trap. Not a lack of AI skills. A lack of cognitive space to exercise agency.
Force 3: The Identity Lock
This is the deepest one. And it’s the one that keeps the other two in place.
You have an identity. A story about who you are, what you’re capable of, and what’s “realistic” for someone like you. That identity was not chosen by you. It was assembled from your family’s expectations, your peer group’s norms, your socioeconomic environment’s constraints, and a thousand subtle signals about what people “like you” do.
That identity is the operating system running every decision you make. And if it was programmed in an environment of scarcity, fear, or limitation, it will filter out every opportunity that doesn’t match its model.
This is why information alone doesn’t change outcomes. You can give someone the exact blueprint to build wealth, start a business, or transform their health - and they’ll nod, bookmark it, and do nothing. Not because they’re lazy. Because their identity doesn’t have a slot for “person who does that.”
The permanent underclass isn’t a class of people who lack access. It’s a class of people whose identity has been locked into a pattern that rejects the moves that would change their position.
IV - The Agency Compound Effect (or why small moves create permanent divides)
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” - Will Durant (summarizing Aristotle)
Here’s where the math gets terrifying.
Agency compounds. And so does its absence.
Think of agency like a financial portfolio. Every agentic decision - directing your attention deliberately, making a sovereign choice, executing on it - is a deposit. Every passive hour, every outsourced decision, every comfortable default is a withdrawal.
In finance, the difference between a 7% annual return and a 3% annual return doesn’t seem like much in year one. Over 30 years, one portfolio is worth 7.6x the other.
Agency works the same way.
The person who spends one hour per day in deliberate skill-building, strategic thinking, or intentional relationship-building - instead of passive consumption - doesn’t have a slightly better life in 10 years. They have a categorically different life. Different network. Different skills. Different options. Different identity.
This is why the wealth gap isn’t closing. It’s not that the rich are hoarding resources (though some are). It’s that the agency gap compounds at a rate that makes catch-up nearly impossible after a certain point.
Entropy - the second law of thermodynamics - states that every closed system tends toward disorder. Your life is a system. Without deliberate energy input, it doesn’t stay the same. It degrades. Your skills atrophy. Your network shrinks. Your options narrow. Your identity calcifies.
The permanent underclass isn’t a destination you arrive at through a single catastrophic event. It’s a place you drift into through a thousand days of zero agency deposits. Through a thousand evenings of algorithmic content consumption. Through a thousand decisions you let your environment make for you.
And here’s the part that should light a fire under you: the window is narrowing.
As AI accelerates the returns on agentic behavior - making those who act strategically exponentially more productive - the gap between the agentic and the passive will widen faster than at any point in human history. Axios reported that the top 10% saw their wealth increase by $5 trillion in a single quarter during the AI boom. Not because they’re all AI engineers. Because they had the agency - the positioned attention, the sovereign decision-making, the accumulated leverage - to capture the value that AI created.
You don’t need to be an AI expert. You need to be an agent in your own life. And you need to start now, while the cost of agency is still low.
V - The lie of “Just Learn AI”
I need to address this directly, because it’s the dominant narrative and it’s leading people off a cliff.
“Just learn AI” is the 2026 version of “just learn to code.” It sounds actionable. It sounds empowering. It is neither.
Here’s why: telling someone who lacks agency to “adopt AI tools” is like telling someone who can’t swim to “just get in the ocean.” The tool isn’t the problem. The capacity to use the tool strategically is the problem. And that capacity is agency.
I’ve watched people spend months “learning AI” - taking courses, watching tutorials, collecting prompts - and change absolutely nothing about their economic position. Because they approached AI the same way they approach everything else: passively. Consuming content about it instead of making decisions with it. Following someone else’s framework instead of developing their own judgment about what matters.
Meanwhile, I’ve watched people who barely understand how a large language model works use AI to double their income in six months. Not because they had better technical skills. Because they had agency. They identified a specific problem. They made a decision to solve it. They used whatever tools were available - AI being one of them - and they executed.
The tool is irrelevant without the agent.
This is the part the influencers won’t tell you because it doesn’t sell courses: the single highest-leverage thing you can do right now is not to learn a new tool. It is to rebuild your capacity for self-directed action. To reclaim your attention. To practice sovereign decision-making. To start a cycle of execution that compounds.
Once you have agency, the tools become obvious. You’ll adopt AI naturally - not because someone scared you into it, but because you’ll see exactly where it amplifies your existing intentions.
Without agency, every tool is a toy. A distraction dressed up as progress.
VI - The Agency Audit: a protocol for the next 72 hours
Here’s where we stop talking and start moving.
What follows is not a list of tips. It’s a structured intervention designed to be completed over three days - one hour per day. You’ll need a pen, paper, and the willingness to be uncomfortably honest with yourself.
If you do this with genuine effort, you will see your life differently by hour three. Not because I’m going to motivate you. Because you’re going to excavate truths that your environment has been burying.
Day 1: The Attention Audit (60 minutes)
Step 1 (20 minutes): Track your last 48 hours.
Write down, in 30-minute blocks, what you actually did with your non-work, non-sleep hours over the past two days. Not what you think you did. What you actually did. Check your screen time data. Check your browser history. Be ruthless.
Categorize each block into one of three buckets:
Agency deposits: Deliberate skill-building, strategic planning, intentional relationship-building, health investment, creative production
Neutral: Necessary maintenance - errands, chores, logistics
Agency withdrawals: Passive consumption, mindless scrolling, entertainment you didn’t consciously choose, worry without action
Step 2 (20 minutes): Calculate your ratio.
What percentage of your discretionary hours were agency deposits vs. withdrawals?
If you’re honest, the number will be uncomfortable. For most people, it’s somewhere between 5:1 and 10:1 in favor of withdrawals. That means for every hour they spend building their future, they spend 5-10 hours passively draining it.
Now ask yourself: If this ratio holds for the next five years, where will I be?
Write the answer down. Sit with it.
Step 3 (20 minutes): Identify your top three attention leaks.
These are the specific activities, platforms, or habits that consume the most discretionary time without creating anything. Name them. Be specific. Not “social media” - which platform, which behavior, what time of day.
These are the rivets in your cage. You don’t need to eliminate them today. You need to see them.
Day 2: The Decision Audit (60 minutes)
Step 1 (20 minutes): List your last 10 significant decisions.
A significant decision is anything involving money, time, relationships, career, health, or living situation. Go back as far as you need to find 10.
For each one, answer honestly:
Did I make this decision, or did I let circumstances make it for me?
Did I decide based on my own analysis, or based on what felt safe/normal/expected?
Would I make the same decision if nobody I know would ever find out?
Step 2 (20 minutes): Find the pattern.
Look at your answers. You’ll see one of three patterns:
The Drifter: Most decisions were made by default - you took whatever option required the least active choice. This is the most common pattern and the most dangerous, because it feels like stability while slowly eliminating optionality.
The Validator: Most decisions were made to maintain approval from family, peers, social media, and society. The decisions feel like yours, but they’re reverse-engineered from other people’s expectations.
The Agent: Most decisions were made from an independent assessment of what you wanted and what reality required. If this is you, you’re already ahead. But you probably wouldn’t be reading this article.
Step 3 (20 minutes): Write your Sovereign Decision.
Based on everything you’ve uncovered in the last two days, what is ONE decision you’ve been avoiding - one move you know would change your trajectory - that you’ve deferred because it’s uncomfortable, unconventional, or unvalidated by your environment?
Write it down in a single sentence. “I need to ___.”
Don’t share it with anyone yet. This is between you and reality.
Day 3: The Leverage Audit (60 minutes)
Step 1 (20 minutes): Map your current leverage.
Leverage is anything that produces results disproportionate to the effort you invest. There are four types:
Skill leverage: Rare abilities that command premium value
Network leverage: Relationships that open doors you couldn’t open alone
Capital leverage: Money or assets working on your behalf
Content/Code leverage: Things you’ve created that produce value while you sleep
Write down what you currently have in each category. Be honest. Most people have almost nothing in the bottom two, which is exactly why they trade time for money indefinitely.
Step 2 (20 minutes): Identify your leverage opportunity.
Based on your current skills, network, and situation, which type of leverage could you begin building this week? Not this year. This week.
The answer is almost always content or skill leverage, because they require the least capital and the most agency. Which is exactly the point.
Step 3 (20 minutes): Design your first Agency Loop.
An Agency Loop is a daily practice - 60 minutes minimum - structured as follows:
15 minutes: Attention direction (consume ONE thing you deliberately chose that advances your leverage goal)
15 minutes: Decision practice (make one micro-decision that moves you toward your sovereign decision from Day 2)
30 minutes: Execution (produce something - write, build, create, connect, learn by doing - that compounds your leverage)
Block this hour on your calendar for the next 30 days. Non-negotiable. This is the minimum viable dose for agency recovery.
If you completed this honestly, you should feel a specific kind of discomfort right now. Not despair. Not excitement. Something in between - a clear-eyed recognition of the gap between where you are and where you could be, combined with a concrete understanding of exactly what’s been keeping you stuck.
That feeling is the beginning of agency.
VII - The person on the other side
You now have something most people never get: an accurate map of your own cage.
You know where your attention goes. You know how your decisions are made. You know what leverage you have - and don’t have. And you have a protocol for building the compound asset that no technology can replace and no economic shift can take from you.
The permanent underclass is real. The data is clear. The wealth gap is the widest it’s been in three decades. AI is accelerating returns for those positioned to capture them. The top 10% gained more wealth last quarter than the bottom 50% will accumulate in a decade.
But the line between the underclass and everyone else is not drawn by tools, technology, or talent.
It’s drawn by agency. And agency is a choice you make daily.
Not once. Not in a burst of motivation after reading an article. Daily. In the boring, uncomfortable, unvalidated hour you spend building leverage instead of consuming content. In the sovereign decision you make that your friends think is crazy. In the attention you redirect from someone else’s algorithm to your own strategic intention.
The people who will thrive in the next decade are not the ones who learned AI first. They’re the ones who learned to direct themselves first - and then used every available tool, AI included, as an amplifier for their own agency.
You don’t need permission. You don’t need a course. You don’t need validation.
You need 60 minutes a day and the willingness to be the agent of your own life instead of a passenger in someone else’s algorithm.
The window is still open. The cost of agency is still low. The compound curve hasn’t made it impossible yet.
But it will.
Start today.
- Vitto