This started as a diary entry and turned into an argument. Bear with me.

In the life of a 26-year-old I think the hardest thing is finding your place. I say this because when I started loving myself and truly understanding who I was, I started losing people who didn't even try to see me for who I was becoming. All they wanted was for me to turn into who they thought I should be.

When you lose enough people, one of two things happens. Either something fundamental changes in you, or you stop before that happens and try to become the version they want. Sociology has found that the fear of judgement, prosecution and isolation, as one of the main drivers of migration and brain drain. People leave so they can chase their dreams, or just start over, out from under the gaze of everyone who matters.

Take the first outcome. You see society for what it is, and something sets in—anger, apathy, some cold clarity about the world you came from. But it frees you. You pursue what you set out to do without inhibition. You get to be yourself, doing the thing you actually think you ought to be doing. That's the best case. That's what produces the independent journalist, the great director, the actual builder.

The second outcome is quieter and worse. These people have a voice in them too. They just beat it into submission so they can keep hanging around the people they call home. And the voice only rebels a little, without their permission, on the hard days. It doesn't speak the language of the people around them. It speaks in what if, what now, I wonder. The world around them speaks in just like, that's how, that's it. Their beaten-down voice leaves room for wonder; the world only wants to see what it already knows. And as their voice dies, so does their wonder, and with it their identity. Everything that made them who they are falls away, one piece at a time, until what's left is a face without an opinion, contributing exactly as much as the room will tolerate.

That's where you get the second-generation business owner with the strength to row and no sense of direction to steer. The first-generation academic who forgot that knowledge production was ever the point and now just wants the pay-check to never end. The husband who surrendered a lifetime of hard-won principles because he wouldn't risk the validation of the person he loves, no matter how wrong she was. Three people, one story: their voice went quiet, and they called it peace.

Whether they know which category they're in is none of my concern. But to the ones in the first category, let me say this plainly. We need activists. We need fighters. We need journalists. Most of all we need humans. For every hundred owners who run a workforce of millions and pay them just enough to breathe while saying "that's what the market dictates," we need one person capturing those workers' lives and daring the rest of us to do better. For every man drawing a soft income from a soft job that was his because daddy wanted an heir—no feel for the industry, no sense of the world that doesn't run on seven- and eight-figure dreams but without which none of his money would exist—we need a few smart, stubborn bastards speaking in languages and wrestling with ideas those men couldn't follow if they tried.

So to the talented risk-takers: fuck the people who won't even try to understand you. They can't.

Don't spend your life as one more salaried engineer—we have too many. Don't become a second-gen owner without an education; some of us wish that were impossible. Don't rot into a consumer of the same hyped-up slop everyone's already scrolling. If all we can do is complain, about how hard it is to even breathe in our country–then we deserve to die in a Tsunami or in a communal riot.

The system doesn't need more value production. It needs more values.