The Consciousness Ponzi

The physician sitting across from me had a practice worth buying. Good payer mix. Strong referral network. Surgical center throwing off cash. He was running it at half capacity.

I asked about the receivables. He didn't know the number. Turns out it was north of half a million dollars. Billed, owed, sitting uncollected in an aging report he hadn't opened in months. When I asked how he tracked his finances, he said something I haven't been able to shake: “I check my bank account. If it's going up, I'm happy.” My partner is an ENT surgeon. She's been telling me for years that physicians are the worst businesspeople she knows. Sitting across from this guy, I couldn't argue.

Meanwhile, he was taking merchant cash advances at rates that would make a loan shark wince. Forty percent annualized. Not because the practice couldn't generate cash. Because he'd stopped looking at the practice. His attention was elsewhere: the stock market, a real estate play, a plan to leave the country entirely. He'd taken an SBA loan meant for the business and diverted it into speculation.

The practice worked. Patients needed him. The revenue was there, sitting uncollected, while he chased returns in markets he didn't understand with money he'd borrowed against a business he'd stopped running.

He wasn't failing. He was succeeding at the wrong thing so he wouldn't have to feel the weight of standing still.

I kept thinking about him. Not as a deal. As a pattern. I've been circling this for months. Not as a thesis. As a feeling I couldn't name until I started counting how many people I know who look exactly like this. Not physicians. Everyone.

The carousel

Americans wagered $150 billion on sports in 2024. Not stocks. Not crypto. Sports. Since the Supreme Court struck down the federal ban in 2018, the infrastructure has metastasized: six years, 38 states, a 382% increase in tax revenue. The apps that deliver it look identical to the apps that deliver stock trades, which look identical to the apps that deliver crypto. Same dopamine loop. Different regulatory wrapper.

Zero-days-to-expiration options, contracts that live and die within a single trading session, now account for more than half of all S&P 500 options volume. 1.5 million trades daily. A fivefold increase in three years. The UCLA credit bureau study followed four million consumers and found what you'd expect: lower credit scores, higher bankruptcy, reduced savings. Disproportionately among young men.

Those same young men are also going to church.

For the first time in 25 years of tracking, men go to church more than women. Forty-five percent of men versus thirty-six percent of women. Gen Z churchgoers attend nearly twice a month, up from once in 2020. The gender reversal is unprecedented. But Pew's caveat matters: overall church attendance hasn't actually increased. Fewer people, going harder. Simultaneously more committed and more secular. Polarization, not revival.

The driver, according to researchers at Impact 360 Institute: traditional Christianity, particularly Catholicism and Orthodoxy, offers a narrative of responsibility, sacrifice, and hierarchy. Men seeking a defined role in a fluid world. Peterson as the on-ramp, framing biblical narratives as psychological maps rather than metaphysical claims.

Same demographic. Same search. Different carousel horse.

Then there's the trades. HVAC demand up 67% since late 2022, juiced by AI data center construction. Vocational graduates landing jobs at 75% versus 70% for four-year college degree holders. Gen Z electricians grossing six figures in year one. TikTok is lousy with trades influencers selling not certifications but an identity: competent man with calloused hands who answers to nobody.

Only 38% of Gen Z actually believes trades offer the best path forward. The narrative is running ahead of the reality. Sound familiar.

Then the TV. Yellowstone became the most-watched show on cable. Zero Emmy nominations. Taylor Sheridan built an empire on unapologetic physicality and traditional gender roles that the industry couldn't categorize and couldn't stop watching. Landman followed. The DEI backlash followed that. Except DEI didn't disappear. It rebranded. “Belonging.” “Inclusive culture.” “Fairness.” The words changed. The oscillation didn't.

And then we got Clavicular.

A twenty-year-old named Braden Peters who smashes his own face with a hammer on livestream because the looksmaxxing community believes your worth lives in your bone structure. Testosterone at fourteen. Crystal meth to stay lean. Over $100,000 a month from Kick, streaming to an audience of young men who watch him reshape his skeleton in real time. The Atlantic called him the newest star of the movement. He calls himself the metrosexual's messiah. Which sounds like satire until you realize he's not joking, and neither are the million young men watching.

We went from cowboys on Paramount to a kid breaking his jaw with a ball-peen hammer in under three years. If you want to know how fast the carousel spins, that's your answer.

So what connects gambling, God, HVAC, and a kid smashing his own face on livestream?

The parallel is exact. In 1978, the economist Hyman Minsky described three financing regimes: hedge finance, where your income covers your obligations. Speculative finance, where your income covers the interest but you roll the principal. Ponzi finance, where only asset appreciation keeps you solvent. Over stability, economies naturally migrate from hedge to speculative to Ponzi. Then they break.

In 1986, the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. described American culture oscillating between liberal and conservative phases on roughly sixteen-year cycles. Not a pendulum. A spiral. I'd never come across Schlesinger before chasing this thread. Once I did, I couldn't unsee it. Conservative phases don't fully reverse liberal gains. Each cycle slightly different from the last.

They were describing the same oscillation from two different rooms. Neither knew.

Ponzi consciousness

In Ponzi finance, you don't generate returns. You borrow against the future and hope the appreciation covers the debt. When it doesn't, you don't sit with the loss. You find a new asset to borrow against.

Apply that beyond balance sheets and the pattern holds at the level of meaning itself. Call it Ponzi consciousness: depending on the next identity, the next ideology, the next cultural wave to maintain psychological solvency. Not generating meaning internally. Borrowing it from whatever's next and hoping the appreciation covers the debt.

The crypto bro wasn't making a risk-adjusted bet. He was performing a role: sharp operator who sees what others miss. When that identity deflated, he didn't sit with the loss. He rotated into AI. Same energy, different ticker. The trades influencer isn't teaching pipe fitting. He's selling a persona: man who builds real things in a world of abstractions. When that narrative cools, the next one is already loading. It always is.

Daniel Kahneman named the individual version: “The ultimate currency that rewards or punishes is often emotional, a form of mental self-dealing.”

Mental self-dealing. That's the Ponzi. The score we keep isn't financial. It's existential. And the market for existential solvency accepts increasingly volatile currencies.

Brent Beshore, a holding company operator whose letters I've read for years, named the individual version: “a process of substitution, not decision.”

Substitution, not decision. Nobody decides to become a crypto bro, then a trades evangelist, then born-again. They substitute one identity for the last one that stopped paying dividends. The persona expands. The person recedes.

You can't diagnose the carousel while you're on it. Each rotation looks like a new destination. Crypto looks like technology. HVAC looks like blue-collar pragmatism. Church looks like tradition. You have to zoom out far enough to see they're all horses on the same ride, going nowhere at increasing speed. The strange part isn't that nobody's connected these. The strange part is that the people best positioned to see it are spinning fastest.

I'm writing this from the carousel.

At this moment I am a deal operator evaluating healthcare acquisitions. Pursuing a few different w2 roles I'm interested in. Building a product strategy case for a tech company. Advising a content startup. Independently sponsoring a thesis about services rollups.

Five identities. None fully chosen.

I sat down one evening to take stock. Not the finances — those were fine. What made me stop was the gap between the identity I expected to have at 35 and the one I was living. I'd spent years not on the wrong things but on the first chance I'd ever had to chase my own curiosity: evaluating opportunities across industries, building in directions I couldn't fully explain, choosing becoming over arriving.

The money was never the crisis. The identity gap was.

A few weeks earlier I'd said something in a conversation that I haven't been able to stop hearing: “I walk towards identity.” I choose opportunities based on how they feel as an identity rather than pure economics. A medical practice doesn't excite me. A gaming fund does. A tech company does. Never mind that the practice throws off cash and the fund hasn't closed a deal.

I published a piece a week ago arguing that distressed services companies are mispriced assets. I stand by it. Entry at 5-8x today, cycle analogs say 3-5 years to 8-13x. I also notice that's exactly the kind of sentence someone writes from the carousel. Here's the opportunity. Here's the edge. Here's why this time the ride stops at my horse.

There's a book in my library called The Outsiders. It profiles CEOs who generated extraordinary returns by doing the opposite of their peers during crises. 1970s stagflation, 18% interest rates, BusinessWeek running “Are Equities Dead?”, and these operators were buying everything in sight. Greedy while others were fearful. Consciousness of the cycle was their edge. They saw the carousel clearly enough to time their entry.

My therapist would point out the tension. My own pattern log shows fifty activations of something I've been tracking called “Decision Paralysis via Optionality.” The pattern where seeing every possible path prevents you from committing to any of them. The Outsiders used consciousness to act. I use consciousness to research, analyze, build frameworks, write essays about consciousness. And keep spinning.

Does seeing the carousel save you, or does it just make you more articulate about the ride?

Both. And neither.

Full circle

He had a practice that worked. Patients who needed him. Revenue sitting in an aging report, waiting to be collected. He was borrowing at 40% to chase returns in markets he didn't understand, because being a physician had stopped feeling like enough.

I went in to evaluate his business. I came out thinking about everybody I know.

We've been here before. The Gilded Age had the same convergence: speculation mania, religious revival, cultural backlash, political tribalism. It lasted thirty years. The resolution wasn't someone diagnosing the carousel. It was the intensity becoming unsustainable until something gave. Playing doomer about the current rotation is just another carousel horse. A dark one. But it spins the same direction.

The biggest mistake isn't the gambling or the bone-smashing or the born-again pivot. The biggest mistake is treating each rotation like a destination when it's just a rotation. So you ride with your eyes open. You buy the practice because the work is there. You show up to the job site because the calluses are honest. You go back Sunday because the quiet is real. Not because any of it stops the carousel. Because what you do between rotations is the only thing that was ever yours.

He had a working practice and couldn't stop reaching for what felt bigger. I had a working career and couldn't stop reaching for a curiosity I'd never had the chance to chase. Same restlessness. Different horse.

The receivables are still sitting there. Mine and his.