Niches: How to escape from hypercompetition

Have you ever met an average person?

Average humans are often thought of as generalizations by most, but they're pretty weird. One of the things they're primarily known for is their stories about the afterlife, which makes sense, given that an average person is dead after all. Before dying, they lived quite an interesting life. They were born intersex with one testicle and one ovary. They lived in China and worked as a farmer but spoke to others primarily in English. They practiced Islam, but mostly read the Bible. Have you ever met someone like this personally? Perhaps showing you their picture would make it easier.

To understand why this person looks so weird to you, we need to study the origin of the average man: the statistical construct used to manage large groups of people.

Death is the one thing all humans have in common, so it's no surprise that the study of the average human is built on death. To study deadly epidemics, English government officials in the 1600s began compiling records of deaths and causes on a parish-to-parish basis and publishing them as "Bills of Mortality". Over time, these bills came to be published weekly. At the same time, England was involved in costly wars with France and in need of financing. This is the crucible on which the average man was formed. He was stitched together from the corpses of English citizens who died of natural causes and the mass graves of war. The Bills of Mortality were eventually studied by Edmund Halley, which led to the introduction of the tontine. This financial instrument functioned like a lottery and a group annuity.

A tontine is an investment where a group of subscribers contributes to a common fund. In return, each of them receives regular payments (an annuity) until death. The agreement cannot be terminated; you participate until you die. When a subscriber passes away, their share of the total payments is redistributed to the remaining living subscribers. This means that the size of the payments increases over time as subscribers continue to die. This makes the last survivor the winner of a sort of "mortality lottery".

Averages, Standards, and Scale

The average man is a statistical construct designed by institutions to more effectively use people as resources. Governments, businesses, and the governed alike, use this statistical construct to perform their roles. Governments and businesses design systems built on this construct, and they use power—through policies, social pressure, and institutional design—to discard people who don't fit into these systems. The governed either conform to these systems or suffer the consequences. This might mean imprisonment, economic marginalization, social ostracism, limited opportunities, or even death. The rules that govern the discarding are called standards. The process of designing systems around the statistical construct of the average man and discarding those who fail to adhere is called standardization. This process promotes efficiency but constrains people's behavior into very narrow bands and forces those in those narrow bands into intense competition over limited resources and opportunities.

The Life of a Standard Man

When a normal person uses the term "average guy," they aren't referring to the statistical construct we discussed above. They're talking about a person who conspicuously conforms to this construct as much as possible. This isn't the average guy, because that person doesn't exist; this is the standard guy. This is the type of person institutions like to deal with. He's easy to employ, advertise to, and keep loyal. He often inspires contempt and envy at the same time. He's slavishly devoted to systems that are largely indifferent to him; yet this indifference buys him security he isn't discerning enough to even be aware of. He doesn't bother thinking whether the system is fair, rational, malicious, or about what its intentions might be. He's the type of person who would never be targeted for being discarded by the system.

The standards of the system do make life easier. It's easier to cooperate with people with similar standards. It's easier to make decisions if you refer to standards. Safety standards, language standards, and communication standards are essential for coordinating food production, distribution, and storage. Standards make it easy to know who cannot be cooperated with. People who fail to regularly conform to society's standards are often criminals. Anxiety about the future is quelled because the system is designed to maintain a stable standard of living for those who cooperate. The standard person reaps all the rewards of the system, seemingly oblivious to the disposability of everyone around him. This disposability isn't accidental; it's a direct consequence of a system that trains everyone to be interchangeable, leading to intense competition for "standard" roles and resources. Being the standard man is similar to living the life of someone who won the "mortality lottery" after investing in a 17th-century tontine (a financial scheme where the last surviving member receives all the accumulated funds).

What Happens to Standards as They Scale?

But what happens when this relentless drive for standardization, and the systems built upon it, expand to encompass a global scale, particularly in our new digital world? When standardized systems scale by increasing participants, they eventually reach a state of hypercompetition. At this point, the "mortality lottery" we imagined turns into a real-world battle royale, where everyone is pitted against each other for survival within ever-shrinking parameters. As the barriers to entry collapse and more and more people are added, standards begin to change rapidly. The standard of living of conformists can change rapidly as it becomes harder to conform. Conformists looking to maintain their standard of living begin to single out others because of their nonconformity. It should be no surprise to anyone that cancel culture arose in this technological and economic environment. This phenomenon is a chilling modern example of how conformity is enforced, and non-conformists are "discarded," especially as the stakes of hypercompetition rise. If it had not been invented by leftist activists, something that serves a similar purpose would have had to be invented. In South Korea and Japan, the test-taking culture has reached similar levels of toxicity. Many students turn to suicide and withdrawing from society in response to failing their ultra-competitive entrance exams.

Your Goon Cave is a Shelter from Standardization and Scale

It may not seem like it now, but the fact that you're the only one in your goon cave is an advantage. If you've fallen into one, you've already broken the chains of standardization and scale, even if you did so incidentally. You can't be cancelled if you're already a pariah, nor can you be laid off if you're already unemployed. You're free to explore ideas, people, and places that the system normally penalizes, with minimal consequences. Your goon cave is a shelter from the unrelenting desire of the system to destroy anything it cannot homogenize. That's because goon caves are the opposite of standard; they're niche.

Goon Caves as employment niches

The mainstream view of "gooners" is that they have zero skills, and goon caves are places where the only thing that exists is porn and masturbation. This isn't true; the schedule of a gooner is oddly similar to the schedule of a man who occupies a high-status job. The gooner sets his schedule, avoids topics and people whom he doesn't like, and does most of his work on an electronic device.

Many people reading this may feel discouraged due to long-term unemployment or underemployment. You have skills and expertise, even if they don't appear to be in obvious areas. The skills you've demonstrated by finding this site, posting on social media, or filling out a form are the same skills I used to build this website and get your traffic. You've developed the perfect skill set to build an online career.

Goon Caves as ecological niches

In ecology, the word niche is used in two ways. A niche is defined as a habitat that has resources your species needs to survive, and it also refers to the role your species plays in that habitat. The niche you inhabit could be a forest, and the niche you fill in that habitat could be an herbivore. Research shows us that if two species compete for a resource in the same habitat, one species must either evolve a way to reduce its resource consumption or the species that is less suited to exploit the resource will eventually go extinct.

Goon Caves are perfect because, unlike in the standard world, you aren't forced to pick from a standard set of roles in your ecosystem. When you start your online business, you're free to exploit resources that nobody has ever thought of before.

Goon Caves as economic niches

Online businesses live or die based on specialized markets, and your goon cave comes with several included. What are your authentic ideas, interests, and areas of study? Do any of them require difficult-to-acquire technical skills? Are any of them subjected to social ostracism?

Do you think you could find ten thousand people out of the global population of eight billion to give you $100 a year to solve a problem in that area? If you do, you've found yourself a niche and you're ready to start making money online.