By Josh Stylman at Brownstone dot org.

The other day, I found my high school yearbook. My kids were flipping through it, laughing at old photos and hairstyles, and one of them paused, surprised. "You and your friends were in all these clubs?" Debate, theater, student council, wrestling - page after page of awkward group photos and teenage optimism.

It made me smile. I hadn't thought about that version of myself in a long time. I told them the truth: I joined everything, not because I had it all figured out, but because I didn't. When you're a kid, you need spaces like that - launching pads for connection, experiments in identity. Trying things on. Figuring out where you fit, and just as often, where you don't.

These days, I've taken on more of the Groucho Marx philosophy - I'd never join a club that would have me as a member - but back then, those communities mattered. They were real. Messy. Human. They involved showing up, in person, with all your imperfections. There were no filters. No followers. No likes.

Most importantly, they weren't content. We joined because we cared about the thing itself - the debate, the play, the game - and because we were hanging with friends who were actually there. Success wasn't measured in views or engagement, but in whether you got better, whether you belonged, whether you contributed something real.

That's what's been on my mind lately: what it means to grow up in a world where being known has been untethered from being known by the people around you, where every human experience gets filtered through the question of whether it's worth posting.

The Economic Engine of Performance

There is something deeply unnatural about being famous - or even semi-famous - outside the borders of your own community. Once, reputation was earned slowly, through presence and action. Now, you can be 'known' by millions who don't actually know you at all.

I've watched this machine operate across different worlds. In tech, I saw smart friends get their faces on magazine covers and slowly transform into their own press releases. In the brewery business, I watched food industry people inflate their own importance, turning craft into performance, substance into brand. Most recently, in medical freedom activism, I've seen principled people get seduced by follower counts, optimizing for viral moments or proximity to power instead of genuine change.

The pattern is always the same: the work becomes secondary to the platform. Authenticity gets traded for amplification. And the person - the real person - disappears behind the persona.

Now I see the same thing happening to an entire generation. Young people today are choosing influencer culture over traditional paths - and I could sound like every generation before me complaining about "young people these days." But here's what I've come to understand through watching this across industries: they're not choosing this path just because they're shallow or narcissistic. They're choosing it because we've made everything else economically impossible.

When housing costs have far outpaced wage growth, when traditional career paths no longer guarantee basic stability, when you can struggle to afford rent while doing meaningful work or potentially make real money by turning yourself into a brand - what would any rational person choose?

The traditional middle path has been systematically eliminated. You can join corporate America and surrender your soul to institutional conformity, or you can be a small business person and struggle financially while competing against algorithmic systems designed to favor monopolistic forces - working 80-hour weeks for what used to be a comfortable middle-class living, watching Amazon destroy your retail business, or Google bury your website in search results.

Influencing promises a third way - entrepreneurship without the overhead, creativity without corporate constraints, financial success without traditional gatekeepers.

Of course, it's a lie. Yo...