Five Generations in One

What it takes to turn today’s effort into something that can carry tomorrow

Here’s my day right now. I lift in the morning, then work the full Central European day and into the evening: contract projects, the writing, recruiting prep for investment banking and sovereign wealth fund roles. The heat has pushed most of my movement to the edges of the day, a hike before the air turns heavy, a paddle board or a set of laps once it finally cools. Then I get up and do it again.

I’m living this particular chapter in Europe, but the economic story underneath it is American. It is the system that shaped where I started, and what it will take to move. I left a comfortable VC job to be here, and I’m building from a stretched position: a host family and a few good friends make it affordable while I stitch together contract work to carry me to the end of the year, when I start my MBA. I’ll be honest about what it is. Not easy. Consistent, but not easy.

I’m telling you this because the shape of it is familiar to a lot of people right now, and I want to put real numbers under the feeling. You can work hard, do the supposedly right things (build skills, stay disciplined, bet on yourself) and still feel like you’re running in place. That feeling is rational. It tracks the math of the economy you’re working inside.

Economists call it the K-shaped economy, and the name explains the gap between how the headlines sound and how your month actually feels. Since 2023, the real net worth of the top 1% has climbed more than 25%, carried by stocks and property. The middle 40% gained less than 10%. Higher earners grew their real spending by about 7.6%; households under $40,000 managed barely 1%. One arm of the K points up. The other runs flat.

The cost of living shows you why it bites. Since 2017, wages are up about 43%. Over the same years, home prices rose 81% and rents 54%. You now hand over roughly $126 for what cost $100 before the pandemic. Even people entering on the supposedly right track feel it: nearly half of recent college graduates are underemployed, the highest rate since the pandemic.

None of that is a verdict on you, and it isn’t an accident either. It’s the residue of how the last forty years were built. Interest rates fell, more or less steadily, from the early 1980s until a couple of years ago, and, among other forces, falling rates helped lift the value of long-duration assets, especially stocks and real estate, rewarding the households that already owned them. Over the same decades, real wages for most workers grew slower than their own productivity, so labor’s share of national income shrank while capital’s grew. You can see the result in one statistic: the wealthiest 10% of Americans own about 87% of all stocks, and the bottom half of the country owns roughly 1%. When the long asset boom finally paid out, it paid almost entirely to people who already held the assets. They often earn more, too, but salary alone doesn’t explain the widening distance. They also own most of the things that rise in value without requiring another hour of work.

That’s the real divide. Income creates the surplus. Ownership gives that surplus a chance to compound, to keep working whether or not you showed up that day.

So the honest question is what it actually takes to get from one side of that line to the other when you start with nothing to your name. I’ve come to think it runs through three things, in order, because each one depends on the last.

The first is surplus: enough left after rent, healthcare, and debt that there’s anything to invest at all. For a lot of people, especially younger ones, there simply isn’t; the cost of living takes it before it can become capital. That isn’t a discipline problem, it’s a math problem, and it’s why wage growth and bargaining power aren’t side issues. They’re the precondition for everything that follows.

The second is access: whether the system around you quietly puts ownership within reach. A retirement plan that enrolls you automatically, an employer match, fractional shares, a realistic path to a first home: these do far more of the work than willpower does. Where those structures exist, wealth-building becomes more automatic and far more likely. Where they’re missing (and they’re often missing for lower-income and gig workers), you’re left to assemble it all by hand, which most people never get the room to do.

The third is trust and knowledge: enough understanding, and enough security, to take a long-term risk and then leave it alone. This is where the literacy gap lives. U.S. financial literacy has been stuck at 49% for eight straight years, and fewer than a quarter of high-school students are guaranteed a single personal-finance class. But knowledge tends to follow access, not lead it. People come to believe markets are for them after they’ve seen, up close, that participating was safe and possible. Belief is the last door, and it opens from repeated evidence.

Stack those up and you see the scale. Economists who study mobility estimate it takes a family born poor in America about five generations to reach merely average income. Five. What I’m describing, going from the bottom to owning enough to pass something down, is an attempt to compress five generations into one lifetime, and it is exactly as hard as that sounds.

And I don’t get to attempt it from nothing. I get to attempt it because generations before me already climbed the earlier rungs: people who did unglamorous, unrewarded work and absorbed the cost of doors being shut so that a door might one day be open. They’re the reason someone like me can speak this plainly, and the reason I have access to tools, institutions, and audiences they never did, advantages that can move a family’s trajectory faster than was once possible. I’m grateful for that in a way that’s hard to put in numbers, and I hold it as a responsibility. The climb started long before me. I’d be foolish to act like I’m doing it alone.

So when I train for investment banking and sovereign wealth roles, I want to be precise about why, because the jobs themselves are still wage labor. A VP doesn’t own the fund. What those rooms give you is different: a sharp jump in income, real fluency in how capital gets allocated, and relationships and credibility inside the institutions that move it. The plan is to convert those four things (money, knowledge, network, standing) into ownership over time. The salary is the entry point. The ownership is the goal. I’d rather spend a hard year positioning myself for that conversion than earn well and end up exactly where I began.

Getting there usually means not staying neatly inside the lines. The conventional script (earn a wage, save what remains, wait your turn) is often just not enough to overcome a large starting disadvantage inside one lifetime. Crossing in a single generation tends to demand the unconventional move: the calculated risk, the room you weren’t invited into, the bet the people around you call reckless right up until it works.

If all of this feels heavier than the headlines say it should, you’re not imagining it, and you’re not alone in it. I know the version where you’re grinding daily, doing the work in the dark, and none of it has shown up yet. I’m in it too, and I won’t pretend the climb is easy or guaranteed. Not every bet works, and persistence doesn’t rescue a bad strategy. But real compounding rarely looks impressive at the start. The quiet stretch where nothing seems to move is not proof that nothing is being built. What looks like it didn’t work is often just early.

That’s what I want this work to be useful for: not pretending the climb is easy, but making its structure clear enough that we can climb it deliberately. On the surface my version of this looks nothing like yours. Underneath, the bet is similar: to turn today’s effort into something that can eventually carry more than the current month. Keep building, and don’t mistake the quiet middle of the climb for its end.