The highest IQ people I know are all either
fully locked in and building or investing in AI. goal is to work towards generational wealth in the midst of a new technological revolution
fully checked out of society and the corporate rat race. they are quitting their job, deleting social media and moving to the middle of nowhere to live a quiet life with no distractions
Literally no in between
I was thinking about this post on X because I definitely identify with the second group. Yet 99% of the people I know remain firmly entrenched within the system, and I don’t think that comes down to IQ.
My impression is that “AI bugs” optimize for wealth while looking toward the future. “Neo-rurals” like me live in the present and optimize for freedom. “Normies,” on the other hand, seem stuck in the past and optimize for convenience.
I’m not sure why, but all of this reminded me of a video I saw a few years ago at La Casa Encendida in Madrid. A teacher was explaining capitalism to a group of children:
“Imagine you have oranges… under the capitalist system, you sell them for money – and with that money you buy orange juice.”
I’ve always felt that exchanging something precious and finite – our time – for something that can be printed infinitely, at will, isn’t a particularly good deal.
The three-way taxonomy is clean and I get why it’s satisfying – but I’d push back on the framing before accepting it. “IQ determines which camp you’re in” is doing a lot of lifting here.
What you’re actually describing is risk tolerance, life circumstance, and access to optionality. The AI builder quitting their job and moving to Montana still needs a runway – probably a savings account, probably no dependents, probably no mortgage.
The neo-rural opting out still needs land, or at least low costs. “IQ” is a flattering proxy for what is, more honestly, a combination of capital, timing, and risk appetite. Most of the people you know who stayed in the system aren’t less intelligent – they’re less positioned, or less willing to absorb the downside.
The orange/orange juice parable is genuinely good – it cuts to something real about the absurdity of wage labor as a mechanism. I’ve always liked that kind of anthropological distance: explaining a system to children as if it were a curious artifact from another culture. It makes the strange familiar again in reverse.
But here’s where the framing slips: “freedom vs. wealth vs. convenience” maps cleanly onto your three groups only if you accept that the corporate rat race is purely path-dependent inertia. Some people are in the system because they built something in it. Some normies are optimizing for family, not just convenience. And some AI builders are just chasing the same wealth game on a different board – “generational wealth” is still the money game, just with a better expected value.
The real question your post raises but doesn’t quite answer: if time is the precious and finite thing, and money the infinitely printable thing – what exactly are the neo-rurals doing with theirs?
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