Rarely is a piece of writing able to capture the nuances of what my wife and I are firm believers in. We’re a little younger than you @ericvancewalton but close enough to completely resonate with what you’ve authored.

As I commute to work, I’ve often pondered the idea of “just get by” and how much my existence – indeed that of all of us – as a cog in a wheel seems to have been baked into a cake, the recipe for which was written long before birth.

My wife and I use the term “The Schwarzenegger effect”, in reference to Arnold’s autobiography “Total Recall”. If ever there was an example of one man’s success being the result of a sequence of right-place-right-time circumstances, it’s his.

The point is, he is the trophy example of reaping the rewards of a methodology that is now unavailable. Someone now could work every bit as hard as him but due to the saturation of markets, the end-state of globalisation and the distortions of capital and wealth, there is no possibility of repeating the outcomes.

This speaks to your notion of the obsolete road-map. I completely agree with this concept. I also, in the quagmire of serfdom, find a spring in my step when I think of the liberation that the tools of today and tomorrow may afford us.

If people like us are correct in our thinking, we may be spoken about in the future (in terms of witnessing turning points in history) as those of the American revolutionary war, and struggles like it, are spoken of now.