Everyone looks immortal in the middle of the story
All empires have the same ending
“Materialism and meritocracy: the greatest exports of the United States.” The line’s been rattling round my head for days. We argue about climate and it turns into a fight about consumption, we argue about migration and it turns into a fight about who’s allowed to compete. And while everyone’s busy litigating fairness, the market keeps minting new winners that look undefeatable, until they don’t.
That’s the bit we forget: in the heart of the moment, everything feels like it will last forever. With a bit of distance all empires have the same ending.
This week I found myself quietly marking a birthday that hardly anyone noticed: Yahoo launched in 1995. I only know this because of an obscure Gilmore Girls reference I noted while eating spicy Doritos on the sofa with my partner on her birthday at 1am. I love serendipity.
Back then the web felt like wet clay and a scrappy directory could be the front door to all of it. They clocking 100,000 unique users in 1996, I was one of them. The IPO hit like a flashbang before the dotcom bubble burst, $848m market cap out of the gate for a company with 100,000 unique users. and for a while Yahoo was the sun we orbited, because that’s what happens when the world is small enough for a single index of every website about football to exist in one space.
A decade later, in 2005, Yahoo was boasting hundreds of millions of monthly users and a £50bn market cap, owning their moment like the Motorola RAZR in their tenth anniversary book. In the middle of the story they looked immortal. Then they didn’t.
What we’ve lost in the scroll is a sense of scale. We toss around “millions” like confetti and forget what a hundred thousand actually is.
A hundred thousand a packed stadium and a half. It’s a medium city. It’s a swung election.
Once upon a time, 100k people could help justify a billion dollar valuation, not because the math was sound, but because the future was small and the story was big.
Today, the present is so bloated you can rack 100k YouTube subscribers and if your views and RPM sits where most creators’ does, your ad share from YouTube will land you less than you’d earn in an Amazon warehouse. You’re still baking bread, and if it’s a side hustle it’s putting your kids through college, but your channel isn’t getting an $800m IPO.
The platform doesn’t pay for your followers; it pays for attention over time, and attention is fickle. A million views can be worth broadly $1,200–$6,000 in ads depending on niche and seasonality, but if you’re helping sell kitchens, land or server farms, you’re not getting many $6k cheques during a recession. Do the fag packet maths and you see why so many big channels feel increasingly small on the balance sheet.
Materialism teaches us more is better, meritocracy says the best will rise. Both are seductive and equally are bad historians.
More is only better until the carrying capacity groans or you hit diminishing marginal utility. The best is only best until the surface tilts under a new technology, movies become talkies, flat lay images on Instagram become synchronised dances on TikTok. Yahoo wasn’t stupid, it was of its moment. Google is living it’s own right now, as people question what will happen to search in a post-ChatGPT world. So is whatever you and I are building right now. That’s not an argument for nihilism, it’s an argument for humility. Build things that work when you’re not the centre. Build things that survive when your curve rolls over.
I keep coming back to the human unit and the recent terrible questions about the utility and indeed value you can place on a human life. A hundred thousand people isn’t marginal, it’s everyone in a city waking up on Monday morning, it’s school runs and hospital shifts and taking the dog out in your pyjamas so it can pee at 6am. Everything irrational and beautiful about human life that economists gloss over as irrational and suboptimal in the face of AI and the sound of bombs turning hospitals and schools into rubble.
If your project needs a million strangers a day to feel like it has substance, you’re looking at life wrong. Maybe the game is to make something that holds value at human scale, then let time decide whether it deserves more.
Everyone looks immortal in the middle of the story. The trick is to make peace with endings and build for after you’re forgotten.