I was catching up with old friends last week. Smart, accomplished, Gen X families. We talked about everything from layoffs, to college to tariffs to the economy. One of my friends works for a well known global consulting firm and mentioned how quickly they hired new product and tech people — only to let them go recently. AI is already displacing certain white-collar jobs. Nearly half of U.S. workers still have never touched an AI tool at work, and the federal government just finalized a rule that will pull funding from college degree programs whose graduates don’t out-earn high school diploma holders. It’s a lot.
This is the thing that keeps me up at night. Not that the world is changing — it always is. But that the speed of structural, economic and technological change has completely outpaced most people’s awareness of it. And the people who benefit most from that gap? They’re not at dinner parties. They’re on yachts.
The Numbers Are Brutal
Let’s start with financial literacy, because it tells you everything about the baseline. U.S. adults correctly answer just 49% of basic personal finance questions, according to the 2025 TIAA Institute–GFLEC Personal Finance Index. That number hasn’t budged since 2017. We have more access to information than at any point in human history, and we’ve made zero progress on understanding how money works.
Meanwhile, only 28% of Americans earning under $25,000 a year are considered financially literate. At $100,000 and above, that jumps to 58%. The correlation between income and financial knowledge isn’t coincidental — it’s structural. If you grow up in a household that talks about money, invests money, and has access to financial advisors, you learn financial literacy through osmosis. Everyone else gets a high school that might not even offer a personal finance class. Only 19% of American adults say they took one.
And it’s not just about knowing how a 401(k) works. People who score low on financial literacy are twice as likely to be constrained by debt and three times more likely to be financially fragile. This isn’t a knowledge gap. It’s a vulnerability gap. And it’s by design.
The Wealth Concentration No One Talks About at Dinner
In the third quarter of 2025, the top 1% of U.S. households held 31.7% of all wealth — the highest share the Federal Reserve has recorded since it began tracking in 1989. That’s roughly $55 trillion, which is about equal to the wealth held by the entire bottom 90% of Americans combined.
How did this happen? In part, because the wealthiest Americans own 87% of all corporate equities and mutual fund shares. When the stock market rallied in 2025 — the S&P 500 gained over 10%, fueled largely by AI investments — the wealthy got wealthier. The middle class? Their wealth is mostly tied to their homes, and home price growth has been slowing. Lower-income Americans are drowning in higher debt loads.
Here’s the part that connects directly to the dinner table conversation: higher-income households saw wage growth of 3% in December 2025. Middle-income households? 1.5%. Low-income? 1.1%. The Gini coefficient, a key measure of wealth concentration, hit a 60-year high. These aren’t talking points. They’re economic facts that most people never encounter because the information pipeline they live in doesn’t serve it to them.
Billionaires continue to be billionaires in part because the rest of us are too fragmented, too exhausted and too distracted to notice what’s structurally shifting beneath us.
The Creator Economy Myth
Let me say this plainly, because it applies to a lot of the people I know and work with: the creator economy, as it’s been sold to most Americans, is a fantasy.
Nearly half of all TikTok creators, 48%, earn less than $15,000 a year. The platform’s original Creator Fund pays between two and four cents per 1,000 views. Do the math: a video with a million views earns you $20 to $40. You need 50 million views to earn $1,000 from the Creator Fund alone. Only 7% of TikTok influencers make $200,000 or more. The average salary figure you’ll see cited, around $131,000, is wildly skewed by the top fraction of a percent pulling in millions.
I bring up the creator economy not to trash it, but because the narrative around it functions as a pacifier. It tells people, especially young people, that there’s a viable economic path that doesn’t require understanding how the economy actually works. Just post. Just go viral. Just build an audience. It’s a story that benefits the platform, not the person.
Your Degree Might Not Exist in Two Years
While most families are still operating on a circa-2005 mental model of what college is supposed to deliver, higher education is quietly being restructured underneath them.
In January 2026, the Department of Education finalized a new rule that requires college degree programs to demonstrate that their graduates out-earn the average high school diploma holder. Programs that fail this test lose federal funding — including Pell Grant eligibility. Analysts have predicted that universities will respond by shuttering programs in the fine arts, humanities, social sciences and ethnic studies.
This isn’t hypothetical. It’s happening right now. On April 1st, Indiana’s Commission for Higher Education voted to consolidate, suspend or eliminate roughly 584 degree programs across the state’s seven public universities. At IU Bloomington alone, 43 undergraduate programs were suspended, including Art History, Classical Civilization, Religious Studies, and Spanish. Across all Indiana public institutions, 210 programs are being fully suspended or eliminated. The commission is now launching a second review of programs whose graduates earn less than the average high school diploma holder in Indiana — roughly $24,000 to $35,000 — with a deadline of December 1st to decide which of those survive.
Syracuse University announced last week it’s cutting nine humanities-based majors, including Classical Civilization, Digital Humanities, German, Russian and Middle Eastern Studies. West Virginia University axed 28 majors and cut 12% of its professors. Missouri Western eliminated English, history, philosophy, political science, economics, sociology, art, Spanish and French.
And at the federal level, institutions like Brown, Columbia and Harvard were forced to cancel doctoral programs, primarily in humanities and social sciences, as a result of funding cuts tied to political disputes over DEI policies and campus protests.
The parents at my dinner table whose kids are juniors in high school? They have no idea that the major their child is considering might not exist by the time they declare it.
AI Is the Biggest Shift Most People Are Ignoring
According to Gallup, nearly half of U.S. workers, 49%, report that they have never used AI in their role. Not “rarely.” Never. Meanwhile, AI use among leaders is at 69%, more than double the rate of individual contributors. Workers in technology, finance and higher education are adopting at high rates. Workers in retail, manufacturing, and service industries are barely starting.
The implications are staggering. Workers who develop AI skills now command a 43% wage premium over those who don’t — up from 25% in 2023. That gap is widening every quarter. And yet, only 13% of American workers say their company has offered them any AI training at all.
This is a two-speed workforce emerging in real time. On one side: knowledge workers, leaders and tech-adjacent professionals who are integrating AI into their daily workflows and reaping productivity gains. On the other: everyone else. And because AI-skilled workers tend to be higher-earning, higher-educated, and more likely to work remotely, this technological divide is layering directly on top of the economic divide that already exists.
Researchers have identified 6.1 million American workers who are both heavily exposed to AI disruption and poorly positioned to adapt. Many are in administrative and clerical work. They’re older. They’re in smaller cities. And nobody is training them.
The Attention Gap Is the Real Crisis
Here’s where I’ll make this personal, because I think it matters.
I’m a Gen X working mom. I run a business. I have two kids. I’m currently recovering from a ruptured Achilles tendon. My bandwidth, on a good day, is already maxed out. And yet I spend my mornings reading about AI adoption curves, federal education policy, wealth distribution data and creator economy economics. Not because I have extra time. Because I understand that not knowing this stuff has a cost — and that cost compounds.
What I keep running into, in conversations with friends, peers and even other business owners, is something I’ll call the attention gap. It’s not that people are unintelligent. It’s that the pace of structural change has outrun most people’s capacity, or willingness, to track it. Media is fragmented. Algorithms feed you what you already believe. And if you’re working two jobs, managing a household, or just trying to keep your head above water, you are not spending your evenings reading Federal Reserve wealth distribution data.
Information asymmetry isn’t a bug in the system. It’s a feature. The ultra-wealthy invest in financial education, tax strategy and AI tools. The rest of us get TikToks about side hustles.
The wealthy invest heavily in staying informed — in financial advisors, AI tools, policy access and lobbying. Public financial education, meanwhile, has been essentially flat for decades. The asymmetry isn’t accidental. It’s structural. Billionaires benefit when the majority of people don’t understand how wealth compounds, how policy shapes economic outcomes, or how technology is reshaping the labor market.
So What Do You Actually Do?
I’m not here to moralize. I’m here because I think the Gen X cohort, my cohort, has a particular advantage right now, and we’re underusing it. We’re old enough to remember the pre-internet economy. We adapted through the dot-com boom, the financial crisis, and the pandemic. We have pattern recognition that younger generations don’t yet have and that older generations have sometimes decided they no longer need.
What I’d encourage, especially for the women over 40 in my audience who are running businesses, raising families, and trying to figure out what comes next, is this:
Learn one AI tool well. Not all of them. One. Use it in your work for 30 days. The wage premium data alone should convince you this is worth your time.
Understand where your money actually is. Not vaguely. Specifically. If your wealth is almost entirely in your home, you need to know why that matters differently than wealth held in equities.
Question the college playbook. If you have kids approaching college age, the landscape they’re walking into is not the one you graduated from. Entire majors are being defunded. Federal rules are changing what gets supported. Have a real conversation about this — not the aspirational one.
Pay attention on purpose. Build a 20-minute morning habit that includes something other than your existing social feeds. Read one piece of economic reporting a week. Follow one AI newsletter. The bar is low — most people clear it by just showing up.
Adaptation isn’t about being the smartest person in the room. It’s about being the person who noticed the room was changing.