How Generation X Lost Control of Both Work and Home

You have a voice, but not agency. And a voice without the ability to effect change is just performance.

You spent decades playing by the rules of the game.

You went to college, developed expertise, climbed ladders, and paid into systems that promised security.

You made the trade, consciously or unconsciously, by surrendering daily autonomy in exchange for stability, benefits, and a predictable path to retirement.

Now, in your peak earning years, you’re discovering the terms have changed unilaterally, and you never had a vote.

• At 48, you’re “not a culture fit” (pure ageism).

• At 55, you’re “overqualified” (aka too expensive).

• At 58, you’re “restructured” out (if not earlier).

You gave your best decades to companies that are making decisions about your economic viability without your input or regard for your well-being. You can’t control when they hire you, when they eliminate you, or whether other management will think differently about you.

This state of affairs is not only the precursor to a retirement crisis, in which longer lives require longer work spans that employers aren’t willing to grant. It’s agency extraction, or the elimination of your ability to do what’s beneficial for you as you see fit.

And it’s not just work.

​​When Geography Becomes Captivity

The agency crisis isn’t confined to corporate cubicles.

While your go-forward earning capacity is being systematically undermined, the geography you took for granted — whether the United States or some other expensive Western nation — became contrary to your best interests.

Most people are anchored to a single place, usually the one where they happened to be born, just because it was where they got that first job thirty years ago. That jurisdiction now controls:

• How your tax dollars are spent, without benefit to you

• The quality and cost of your access to healthcare

• How much Social Security you’ll receive, if any

• What personal freedoms you’re permitted to exercise

• How safe you feel at the grocery store, the movie theater, or your kid’s school

And if any of those factors deteriorate further? Your only official recourse is to vote, write representatives, or “advocate for change” as a keyboard warrior on social media. These are activities that rarely produce results within timeframes that actually matter to your life.

You have a voice, but not agency. And a voice without the ability to effect change is just performance.

Your participation in these systems is not effective when:

• A government can change policy overnight;

• Essential healthcare costs can spike beyond reach without warning;

• A corporation can eliminate your role after a quarterly earnings call; or

• Your purchasing power can be inflated away by monetary policy you didn’t authorize.

Instead, you’re captive to those systems. And most people simply accept that captivity, even when it’s a one-way path to eventual disaster.

How Many People Control Your Life?

Here’s a test that will likely prove unsettling about your true level of agency:

How many parts of your economic and personal life require you to ask permission?

Economic agency questions:

• Can you decide what work you do each day without approval?

• Can you determine your own compensation without negotiation?

• Can you choose who you work with and who you refuse?

• Can you work from any location without justification?

• Can you structure your business without investor consent?

• Can you keep the full value of what you create?

Personal agency questions:

• Can you move to a different country without economic penalty?

• Can you access healthcare without employer-provided insurance?

• Can you choose how and where to structure your tax obligations legally?

• Can you exit systems that no longer serve you without catastrophic consequences?

• Can you make major life decisions without consulting HR policies or municipal regulations?

If the answer to most of these is “no” or “only with permission,” you don’t have high agency. You have conditional privilege that can be revoked by people and entities you don’t control.

True agency means not having to ask anyone for permission to live your life on your terms.

That’s the basis of self-determination. We’re not talking about an escape from consequences or responsibilities, but the freedom to choose which consequences you’re willing to accept and which responsibilities you want to shoulder.

It’s the ability to say no to arrangements that exploit you and yes to opportunities that align with your values without requiring anyone’s permission. For most Gen Xers, that fundamental capacity has been systematically stripped away in exchange for promises that are now being broken.

We were raised to believe that with hard work, we could succeed based on merit. But here we are in midlife, slowly learning that scenario no longer applies to us in the traditional sense.

And in the immortal words of Tyler Durden from Fight Club, “We’re very, very pissed off.”

How We Got Here

The agency extraction wasn’t accidental. It’s the core bargain of evolved corporate employment.

The Corporate Side:

You gave them 40 to 60 hours per week, your creative output, your professional identity, and most importantly, your higher-agency alternatives. In exchange, they provided salary, benefits, structure, and the promise of long-term security. The implicit deal: Trade freedom now for stability later. And we believed it because it worked spectacularly for the Baby Boomers.

But not for us. “Later” has arrived, but the promised stability isn’t there. Companies are eliminating experienced workers in barely disguised ageism, while offshoring other roles and automating what remains. The average 55-year-old can’t get hired but also can’t retire because 401(k) balances are insufficient, and who knows what Social Security looks like in 10 years.

You kept your end of the bargain. They didn’t keep theirs. And they still have your agency.

The Geographic Side:

You planted roots based on where you were born, which led to you starting your career there. You bought a house or three. You participated in various communities. You assumed “the greatest country in the world” would remain stable in terms of opportunity, democracy, and quality of life.

But jurisdictions, like corporations, are making unilateral changes. Property taxes spike. Services decline. Healthcare costs accelerate. And you can’t easily move because your economic survival and healthcare are tied to local employment, your wealth is locked in non-portable assets (mainly your home), and uprooting feels impossible.

You didn’t choose your jurisdiction strategically. You ended up there by mere circumstance, and now you’re stuck with the consequences of decisions made by politicians you may not have voted for, implementing policies you might not support, funded by taxes you have no choice but to pay.

The Compounding Agency Crisis

What makes this particularly brutal for Gen X is the timing. We’re facing crises involving work and geography at once.

The psychological weight of this is real. When both your economic and personal agency contract simultaneously, learned helplessness can set in. You start believing the constraints are permanent, so you stop looking for exits. You accept diminished circumstances as inevitable.

This is how intelligent, capable, experienced professionals end up trapped in situations they would never have chosen. It’s not because they lack skills or ambition, but because they lack agency in the face of what feels like an insurmountable problem.

It’s not insurmountable. But the weight of the struggle is real, and it can only be overcome by recognizing the very real possibility of destitution in your later years, if not sooner.

To be clear, true agency isn’t about unlimited choices or consequence-free existence. This isn’t about “living the dream,” even though that’s very much a viable possibility compared with doing nothing. It’s about controlling the terms of your participation in economic and social systems.

So, what does true agency look like?

Economic agency means:

• You create value that people pay for, without requiring employer approval.

• You own what you build, including the IP, the relationships, and the reputation.

• You’re compensated directly for value created, not for time extracted.

• You bootstrap, so investors can’t mandate or coerce your decisions.

• You base your level of effort on your priorities, not corporate quarterly targets.

Personal agency means:

• You can choose where to live based on what optimizes your life: taxes, healthcare, culture, safety, and cost of living.

• Your economic viability improves after strategic relocation, without penalty.

• Your income-generating assets are portable across jurisdictions.

• You have genuine alternatives if your current situation deteriorates.

• You can quickly and easily exit systems that no longer serve you.

Combined, this is sovereignty: the ability to make decisions about your work and your life without requiring permission from corporations, governments, or investors.

This isn’t about escaping responsibility or avoiding contribution to local communities and broader society. Rather, it’s about participating on terms you can accept rather than terms imposed on you by people and entities that don’t have your interests in mind.

The Permission Problem Is Structural

You must understand that you can’t solve this problem by working harder, being more loyal, or hoping institutions will honor old social contracts. The problem isn’t your effort. It’s the architecture.

Corporate employment, by design, extracts agency in exchange for stability. When the stability disappears but agency extraction remains, you’re left with the worst of both worlds.

Single-jurisdiction residency, by design, makes you a captive market for whatever policies that jurisdiction implements. When you can’t easily leave, you can’t negotiate. You just endure.

The only structural solution is to build alternatives that restore agency across both dimensions. Not as a mythical “golden years” retirement dream. Not as a Plan B you’ll get to eventually. Instead, it should be treated as the primary strategy for navigating the next ten years of your life, beginning now.

More Than Just a Business: The Agency Engine

This isn’t a lifestyle choice. This isn’t about working from beaches, or avoiding taxes, or dropping out of society. This is about building your economic and personal agency engine.

An agency engine is infrastructure that generates ongoing capability across both dimensions. It’s not a single business or a single move. Rather, it’s a system that:

• Produces income independent of any single employer’s approval;

• Creates assets that move with you across jurisdictions;

• Operates effectively regardless of where you physically are;

• Scales based on your leverage, not your hours; and

• Can’t be eliminated by someone else’s quarterly earnings wishes.

It’s not a “lifestyle” business, which is about optimizing for comfort. This is for people reclaiming self-determination in a system designed to extract it.

Over the coming months, we’ll be exploring exactly how to build this:

• the specific architecture,

• the strategic sequencing,

• the practical steps that compound into real capability.

But it starts with recognizing reality for what it is.

You’re not struggling because you failed to adapt, because we’ve been doing that our entire lives.

You’re struggling because you were operating under a social contract that the other parties have unilaterally abandoned.

They took your agency and didn’t deliver the promised security. The only rational response is to take the power back.

The many predictions made 27 years ago in The Sovereign Individual have come true. This means you have more opportunity for true agency than perhaps at any other time in history.

You just have to decide to take action. Take that first step. And then another.

One small step every day. Each action immediately increases your agency, even before you see the economic and mobility results. By the summer of 2026, you’ll be amazed at how much you’ve accomplished and will have a clear view of what’s possible and the choices you’d like to make.

While the agency crisis is real, it’s not permanent or insurmountable.

Let’s build your agency engine together.

Keep going-

Brian

P.S. Ready to transform your expertise into location-independent income and upgrade your life at midlife? Further Premium gives you the complete roadmap, with digital business-building instruction, financial planning advice, expat guidance, and more.

further: flashback

🎶 The Power Station – Some Like It Hot, The Power Station, 1985 🎶

Take John and Andy Taylor from Duran Duran, add Chic’s Tony Thompson beating the drums like they owe him money, and top it off with the soulful and sartorial elegance of Robert Palmer, and you’ve got Some Like It Hot by The Power Station. If you were “hot” for the woman in the video in your younger days, consider yourself open minded. That’s transgender model Caroline Cossey, also known as Tula. (YouTube)

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