Are You A Deserter Or A Mercenary?

Bifurcation

I recently left a cushy multi-million dollar payout job in pursuit of the billy. I’ve been told by everyone around me that this is an extreme move.

I standby this decision everyday and thinking deeply about this only reinforces a belief I’ve had for a long time...

Normal is where the mediocre go to die.

It used to be the case that there was space for ambitious people to occupy the middle ground. Where they could show up and work reasonably hard to expect reasonable rewards. A system existed that would honor the implicit social contract: consistent effort yields consistent progress yields eventual reward.

Now, if you are paying attention and have both eyes open, you’ll see that your friends have bifurcated into two camps that would have seemed insane a generation ago.

Half are quietly quitting and treating careers like a nuisance they have to manage rather than the ladder they’ve been told their whole life to climb. The other half are building something on the side with religious intensity: they’re building content empires, running sophisticated trading strategies on their PA, drop-shipping Shopify stores, having their own consulting practices, and vibe-coding SaaS products.

The middle is filled with zombies. The middle are the people working moderately hard and expecting moderate rewards. They’re the weird ones now.

The try-hards and the opt-outs have inherited the earth.

Before I continue, I feel obliged to say that I am NOT doing this for the $1mn article reward - I am NOT eligible for it since I do not live in the US. I’ve long been writing articles before they were cool. So I don’t need that milly to incentivize me to write - your follow and retweets however, are worth much more to me!

The Game Has Changed Almost Entirely

A generation ago, the paths to building real wealth were gated by institutions.

Want to reach an audience? You needed a media company, a publisher, a record label. Want to trade markets? You needed a seat at a fund or a bank. Want to start a business? You needed capital, distribution relationships, and physical infrastructure that only established players could provide. Want to consult? You needed McKinsey or Deloitte’s brand to open doors.

The institutions controlled access to the assets that compound: audiences, capital markets, distribution, client relationships. If you wanted to accumulate any of these, you worked for them and hoped they’d share the spoils.

That has changed almost entirely.

Attention is now fragmented across millions of individual creators. The old media gatekeepers have been demoted to platforms, brokers who aggregate reach rather than own it. Trading has been democratized by zero-commission brokers, accessible data, and tools that used to cost six figures. Starting a business requires a Stripe account and a laptop, not a warehouse and a loan. Building a consulting practice means building a reputation on LinkedIn rather than climbing a partnership track for fifteen years.

The common thread is that individuals can now accumulate assets that used to be locked inside institutional walls. Audiences. Portfolios. Customer bases. Client books. Intellectual property. All of it is now accessible to someone with a phone, an internet connection, and the willingness to build.

This is a genuine power shift. When institutions controlled these assets, individuals had no leverage. You worked for them because you had no alternative path to accumulation. The professional bargain made sense: show up, work hard, stay loyal, and the institution rewards you. They could afford to honor that bargain because they controlled something you couldn’t get on your own.

That’s no longer true.

Loyalty is now a career liability. Job hoppers earn 30% more than people who stay put. The average tenure at a company has collapsed to four years, and the people staying longer aren’t being rewarded for it. They’re being punished with below-market salaries while new hires get signing bonuses. Promotions are almost entirely meaningless. Have you seen the kind of title inflation going around? Everyone has a “Senior” in their title now.

So, what now?

It seems like the crowd either chooses to realize that the organizations they work for are not going to meaningfully reward them and opt out of the game, or they choose to build something of their own on the side. Audiences, businesses, portfolios, client books. Anything that compounds in their name instead of their employer’s.

And that brings us to the current.

The Deserters

These are the folks who are part of that “soft life” movement. The quiet quitters. The people doing just enough to not get fired and redirecting all remaining energy elsewhere.

The professional class looks at these people with contempt. Lazy. Entitled. No work ethic. They think they don’t know how the world works.

I actually beg to differ. The problem is that they understand exactly how the world works.

The deserter’s rationalization is simple: if maximum effort gets you 10% ahead and minimum effort keeps you 90% there, the ROI on that extra effort is terrible. You’re trading your finite, non-renewable life energy for marginal gains in a game that’s increasingly unlikely to pay out.

They’ve looked at the senior managers a few rungs above them toiling away and asked an uncomfortable question: do they actually have better lives? Often they are increasingly realizing that the simple, truthful answer is no.

The senior manager has a marginally nicer apartment they’re never in. A better title that means nothing outside the company. More money that goes to paying for convenience services to cope with having no time.

So, don’t knock on the deserters just yet. Let’s agree to call it capital reallocation. They’re pulling investment from a low-yield asset (corporate career) and redirecting it to higher-yield alternatives: relationships, health, experiences, side projects.

They deserted an army that wasn’t going to win anyway.

The Mercenaries

The personal brand maximalists posting content every day. The guy at your office running a Shopify store on the side. The trader who spends more mental energy on her own Polymarket book than her day job. The developer building a SaaS product in the evenings. The consultant slowly converting corporate clients into personal ones.

The professional class looks at these people with contempt. Narcissistic. Cringe. Main character syndrome. Distracted. Not a team player.

Again, I disagree. They’re building BECAUSE they have more self-awareness than anyone.

The mercenary’s rationalization is simple: your job is a depreciating asset, but things you own are compounding ones.

When you work for a company, you’re building their equity. The relationships you forge, the skills you develop, the reputation you build, it all accrues to the corporate brand. When you leave, you start over. When they lay you off, you have nothing but a resume line.

Owned assets work differently. An audience compounds. A product generates revenue while you sleep. A trading strategy that’s on YOUR BOOK scales without permission from anyone. A client roster follows you when you quit. These things create optionality that no employer can give you and no layoff can take away.

The specific vehicle matters less than the principle: build something that’s yours. Some mercenaries accumulate attention. Others accumulate capital. Others accumulate customers or skills or intellectual property. The common thread is ownership. They’re done building equity for shareholders who wouldn’t recognize them in an elevator.

In a world of AI, layoffs, and industry disruption, the only durable moat is having leverage that doesn’t depend on your employer’s continued existence. “Cringe” is a tax paid by people building leverage. The people calling it cringe have no leverage. Their contempt is cope.

Why The Middle Is Now Irrational

The traditional path, work hard, be humble, climb steadily, trust the system, is now the highest-risk choice. It used to be the safe option.

Boring but reliable. You traded upside for stability.

Now you get neither.

The person in the middle is paying all the costs of ambition without the upside of either extreme. They don’t get the time freedom of the deserters. They don’t get the asymmetric leverage of the mercenaries. They get the worst of both worlds: working hard for a system that won’t reward them, while building nothing that’s truly theirs.

The middle path is a bet on the old system still functioning. And that bet looks worse every year.

The Meta-Strategy

Here’s the dirty secret... the smartest people aren’t choosing deserter OR mercenary.

They’re both.

They’re deserters at their day job. Doing exactly enough to stay employed, never burning out, refusing to sacrifice their life for someone else’s equity. And they’re mercenaries on their own time, pouring real energy into building assets they actually own.

The 9-to-5 is strategic mediocrity. Don’t get fired. Don’t get promoted into more responsibility for marginal pay increases. Coast.

The 5-to-9 is where the real work happens. The newsletter. The side project. The audience. The skill stack that’s portable.

This is optimal because it correctly identifies which games are worth playing. Your corporate career is a game you can’t win, so play defense. Your personal leverage is a game you designed, so play offense.

The people who feel conflicted, asking “am I being lazy or am I being strategic?”, are usually running this dual strategy without admitting it to themselves. They feel guilty for not caring more about their job. They shouldn’t. Their instincts are correct.

The corporation gets your presence. You get your future.

For The Corporations

If you’re an executive at a corpo reading this or are a boomer that’s stuck to the “traditional way” and are feeling attacked, here’s the uncomfortable truth... There’s nothing wrong with the mindset of the deserters and mercenaries. It is the incentive structures that are broken.

You need to understand this isn’t a f*cking game. You’re competing for talent against their own imagination, their own ambitions, their own future. This shows up as their side projects, their trading books, their audiences, their online shops.

And you’ll lose if you keep offering them a shit deal of working hard to build YOUR equity, and then give them a salary that afford them a house in 30 years and a title that means nothing.

The pizza parties aren’t working. The “we’re a family” speeches aren’t working. The ping pong tables and unlimited PTO that nobody actually takes aren’t working. These are band-aids on a bigger problem.

There’s only one thing that competes with ownership: ownership.

If you want people to care about building your company like they’d care about building their own thing, you need to make it their thing. Meaningful equity. Not 0.1% that vests over four years with a cliff and a prayer.

Enough that when the company wins, they win in a way that actually changes their life.

The companies that figure this out will get the best people operating at full capacity. Everyone else will get strategic mediocrity from deserters-in-waiting who are mentally clocked out by 5pm to go work on what they actually care about.

You’re not entitled to the ambition of this generation.

You have to buy it. And the price is a real stake in the outcome.

The Choice

The next decade will belong to people that have correctly identified which games are worth playing, and play those games with everything they have.

Not the hardest workers. Not the most talented. The most strategic.

The deserters saw the rigged game and walked away. The mercenaries saw the rigged game and built their own. Both are rational. Both are defensible. Both are coherent responses to the actual situation.

The only incoherent response is pretending nothing has changed.

So: are you a deserter or a mercenary? The only wrong answer is “neither.”