The Crossing the Rubicon Thanksgiving
Alea iacta est
Author’s note: Each Thanksgiving I have tried to write a think-piece along the lines of what follows today. In the throes of the pandemic, it was The Tired Thanksgiving. The next year it was The Expensive Thanksgiving. In 2023, I wrote The Vibes Are Off Thanksgiving. Last year, it was The Insular Thanksgiving, which remains one of my most-read pieces ever, and helped to set the stage for some of the ongoing storylines over the past year here at The Sunday Morning Post.
Before getting into today’s article, I want to wish you all a very Happy Thanksgiving 2025, and to thank you for reading The Sunday Morning Post. I am thankful for you, and for this community of readers and thinkers.
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The Crossing the Rubicon Thanksgiving
The Rubicon is a narrow, shallow river in northeastern Italy. In ancient times, it marked the boundary between the Roman province of Gaul to the north and the territories controlled by Rome itself to the south. The Roman senate had instructed Julius Caesar, then a general in the Gaul province, that crossing the river border would be seen as an act of treasonous insurrection; no outside military leader was to bring their forces into Rome. On or about January 10th, 49 BC, Caesar did just that, purportedly uttering the phrase alea iacta est, as he did, which translates to “the die is cast.” To this day, the phrase, “Crossing the Rubicon,” refers to passing the point of no return, often with serious risks and irreversible consequences. In Caesar’s case, crossing the Rubicon triggered civil war, which ultimately led to his ascension to power, but also to his assassination five years later.
In the four and a half years that I have been writing The Sunday Morning Post, there have been a few regular themes that have emerged. The main topic of these articles early on was the real estate market, with a particular focus on rentals and construction. The tone shifted to more macroeconomic talk about data trends in real estate, but also about the economy more generally. In the past year, the themes have moved towards the future of the workforce, labor, and even how we most basically live our daily lives. That discussion has brought us where we find ourselves today: the shores of the Rubicon.
Part I - Our Brains are Not Ready for This
Philosophers, thinkers, political leaders, and, yes, kooks of all generations have predicted collapse and disorder at the advent of new technologies. The printing press, the telegraph, electricity, the automobile (even the bicycle before it), radio, music, and then, of course, TV, video games, and the internet: these things have all been the catalysts for apocalyptic predictions of doom. So in some ways, it’s fair to ask what use there is in adding to that tradition here and now.
Plus, that life will look much different for our children and grandchildren than it did for us is also not a new phenomenon. Change happens. “Every generation throws a hero up the pop charts,” so said Paul Simon, a reflection upon his own aging stature in the music industry, but also an observation that each generation discards many of the ways of the past and moves on according to its own dictates. To some and in certain circumstances, this is progress; to others, decay. With all that in mind, we should err towards caution with regard to moral panic about changing generational habits.
And yet, nearly everyone you talk to these days including people on both sides of the political aisle seems to share the same basic sentiment: things are not right. To many, the feeling that things are “off” is economic (the K-shaped economy, in which things are getting better for those above a certain level and worse for those below it, is another emerging theme in The Sunday Morning Post). To others, the peril is cultural or values-based. To almost everyone, the whole nation feels off politically, with shattered norms, feckless and futile leadership, and yawning crevasses of partisanship. More than simply disagreeing on, say, tariffs and tax brackets, it feels like we are living in completely different realities from one another.
Two years ago, I wrote about how the vibes are off, saying:
The constant drip, drip, drip of negativity is impacting our brains in ways that I don’t think we really fully understand yet. It also feels overwhelming: like the world is more complicated than any one person can influence or control, which leads to feelings of negativity and stress. People have a general sense that something is wrong, but they can’t quite figure out what to do about it.
The vibes are still off, but in the two years since writing that, my own thinking has hardened as to why we collectively feel this way. The reason is this: technological change is coming at us faster than the human brain is capable of adapting to it. Our brains are overwhelmed, fatigued, and ever-agitated. To make matters worse, that we should feel this way is, in fact, an actual core tenet of the business model of so many of the tech platforms that so many of us use on nearly a daily basis. An emotionally agitated user who can’t turn it off and can’t turn away is a profitable one, for sure.
Humans have been evolving for hundreds of thousands of years — millions if you go back to the earliest organisms. In the great scheme of time, the technology that we are trying to navigate to today was launched barely a split second ago. And that’s not the November 2022 launch of ChatGPT — that’s the dawn of the Computer Age, which different historians and technologists either pinpoint to the 1940s and the launch of computing generally or to the personal computer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s. If all of human time were consolidated to an hour on the clock, these things have come along barely in the blink of an eye ago.
Yes, of course, I know technology has resulted in countless improvements to the world and has helped to cure diseases, expand our collective wealth and well-being to levels that would have been unheard of a century ago, and has altered virtually every aspect of modern-day life to make things more efficient, effective, and easier. I’m not a complete anti-technology luddite. All things being equal, it’s much better to live in the first quarter of the 21st century than it was to live in the first quarter of the 20th century (or any century before that). But more to the point for today’s discussion: our brains have not been ready for the speed and totality of technological change, and we are not adapting to it very well.
The struggle is particularly evident in younger people, whose brains do not finish fully forming until around age twenty-five anyway, and so who are particularly vulnerable to the stimulation onslaught from technology, especially social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok (not many young people are on Facebook anymore). Statistics related to anxiety, teen depression, and self-harm started spiking almost exactly when social media took hold of society, which coincidentally also was around the time when everyone, young and old alike, started carrying a smartphone around in their pocket, providing immediate and constant distraction throughout the day, often when lying in bed at night before falling asleep, and then again when waking up in the morning. Many people (again, young and old alike, but particularly those under age 25) report a sensation of wanting to turn away from their screens, but almost physically being unable to do so, drawn uncontrollably to the scroll. I am not immune from this either; I often get the sensation of scrolling through my Facebook feed and thinking, “None of this is good, why am I still doing this? Why can’t I stop?”
Part II - It Gets Worse
The casino engineering that leads to this sensation of not being able to pull away, the need to try to keep up with unrealistically curated lives as presented through one’s Instagram and TikTok feeds, body image problems and anxiety from peer pressure: it’s all problematic.
On top of this is the barrage of news, often presented in ways that are meant to induce emotional reactions. Much of it is one-sided, or told incompletely in an effort to persuade or to induce actual anger, distrust, or contempt for others or for our institutions. But even news that is fairly presented, notable and negligible alike, is bombarded so ubiquitously through these screens into our brains that it feels nearly impossible to be able to disengage. Yes, what a privilege it is to be able to turn it off; I get that. Not everyone can. Duly noted. But millions of people are going through what I consider to be a long-term experiment about how much stimulation we can take from the events and ails of the world being squarely put before us in such a relentless way.
On the question of why it feels like so much has been getting worse over the past decade or so, I think this is the main reason: that we are presented with so much negativity through social media and online feeds (not to mention cable news, for those that still watch it), that it, naturally, feels like things are deteriorating. In reality, bad things have been done by all actors in all eras. People have always been prejudiced, mean-spirited, judgmental, and yes, actually evil towards one another in large ways and small. The difference is that now so much of it gets broadcast, shared, and amplified by the channels, outlets, and algorithms that fuel so much of this, so it is in front of us all the time in ways that humanity has never had to process it before. Bad things have always happened; the difference today is that they can be transmitted around the world instantaneously, and then are compounded and amplified many times over.
The Algorithm Era
Who would you say is the most trusted person in America today? It feels nearly impossible to say. Sure, like 30% of country would say Donald Trump and maybe 30% would say Joe Biden (or actually probably Barack Obama, still to this day), but then who do you get to next? Taylor Swift? Tom Hanks? Ted Lasso? As I sit here writing this, I can’t even think of any additional names of people I would suggest for this title, that’s how thin and disjointed it gets.
But there was a time when there was a Most Trusted Person in America, and it was the man that America got its news from: Walter Cronkite. Millions of Americans tuned in to the same news broadcast, on the same network, at the same time, night after night, all year long, to hear Walter Cronkite tell it like it is.
Needless to say, the media landscape today is much different than it was in 1960s America. There is no Walter Cronkite. There has been a massive fragmentation of sources, not just in number but also in style, medium, and scope. This is a major contributing factor why it is so hard to get Americans to agree on the basic facts of any circumstance or political question — because there is no shared source of information, especially one that engenders any trust across the political spectrum.
But the problem is not just atomization of news sources; it’s also people’s self-selection of their own news. People are not actually inclined to pursue and digest news sources that challenge their existing way of thinking. That is why conservatives typically stick with Fox News, and liberals tend towards MSNBC (although there is actually a lot of evidence of crossover between these two groups in some sort of “hate watch” phenomenon where they check in on the other side, perhaps just to get themselves riled up).
What most of these news sources do, however, is gratify those watching with viewpoints that affirm their existing values and opinions. This creates a constant cycle of reinforcement of views one already believes in, hardening and entrenching these views over time. In the world of psychology, this phenomenon is called confirmation bias. People seek out reinforcement for what they already believe, as it is much more comfortable than being presented with something new or counter to one’s existing point of view.
For those that consume a lot of media from the same, tilted sources, it becomes nearly impossible for them to process outside information. There is actually evidence that for especially politically skewed consumers of the news, when someone is presented with facts that go against their existing views, it doesn’t actually make them change their mind, it pushes them further back into their own camp — the backfire effect, as some call it.
What we are facing now is a truly toxic combination of people self-selecting their news sources, and then algorithms at these news sources and then in the social media feeds where most people consume their news constantly delivering more, similarly skewed content at a never-ending, relentless pace. If you start clicking one pro-Trump MAGA link, you can bet your feed is going to be overrun with similar content, almost immediately. And the same is true if you click on content from the opposite side. This creates vicious and robust echo chambers.
New York Times reporter Kevin Roose had a very interesting podcast series a couple years ago called Rabbit Hole, which highlighted how quickly someone can click on an ad or a link on YouTube and then fairly quickly they can go down a pretty radicalized path to be viewing white supremacy content and other similarly extreme videos. It’s worth a listen to the full series for anyone who is interested in this stuff. The algorithms are so sensitive, that even clicking one or two things can take you in some pretty wild directions. But even if you don’t end up in extreme territory, the control these algorithms have over what content is presented is pretty stark.
One final point on the algorithm question: it’s not just content from news sources that we are being bombarded by in this constant drumbeat of reinforcement — it’s also the opinions, postings, and ramblings of our friends and contacts in our feeds. Just as we are inclined to choose content we agree with, we are typically going to “like” or share posts from friends who are making political posts along the lines of what we ourselves think. This creates a “Great Sorting” effect, where people are subconsciously (and maybe sometimes consciously) filtering what they are going to see more of in the future by what they engage with now. This leads to conservatives self-selecting into conservative social media echo chambers, and liberals doing the same thing on the opposite side. Because of this, it’s not hard to understand why it feels like we are living in alternate realities from one another — it’s because we actually are.
Part III - The Next Frontier of Deterioration
If Chapters 1 and 2 of this modern-day Rubicon moment were the rise of social media and the impact of algorithms, Chapter 3 is the sudden rise of AI, which is already changing so much about how we work, interact, and live our regular daily lives.
The month of October saw the greatest number of job losses in any single month in 22 years, with approximately 153,000 people laid off nationwide. This brought the year-to-date total to just over one million U.S. job losses. Some of this is cyclical, for sure. Some employers are cutting back after over-hiring during the pandemic. Others are letting people go in response to consumers tightening up, the impact from tariffs on certain industries, and just the overall uncertainty out there right now. But the unique factor at play in the labor market is AI, which is rapidly making certain entry-level jobs obsolete, and impacting the way so many others do their work.
Canaries in the coal mine are popping up everywhere right now, so much so that it is no longer feeling anecdotal, but more so a trend if not an outright new reality. It’s the computer science major who graduated into an empty job market and is working at Chipotle. It’s an unemployment rate for recent college grads of nearly 10%. It’s people in the entertainment industry saying it is the darkest time they have ever experienced among thousands of job losses in the creative classes. The CEO of Anthropic, which is a cutting edge AI research and implementation firm, has publicly stated that AI could wipe out 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs. And he is not talking about some far-off distance possibility — he says this could happen within five years, with the unemployment rate reaching 20% because of it.
The future of employment is a fascinating yet troubling topic. Some of the smartest and most well-resourced companies in the world are currently spending hundreds of billions of dollars on the race to the top on this technology, seeing it as the future of, well, everything. The troubling thing, of course, is what happens to the economy and, indeed, the possibilities maintaining a stable society if the unemployment rate does reach 20% or even anything close to it, with all the riches and spoils of the AI boom going to those who are already in such close proximity to the top. It certainly has the feel of a K-shaped economy with the arms and legs of the K moving in even more diametrically opposed trajectories. Then again, if people aren’t working (or are working for sub-optimal wages in purely service-related industries), it would likely bring down the entire economy, as the economy doesn’t work unless people are financially secure enough to spend money in it. If 20% of America is out of work as those jobs dry up, the multiplier effect from all of their spending dries up, too.
Back to the Rubicon
What we are facing now is a Rubicon-crossing era with three distinct by overlapping catalysts: social media bombardment, algorithmic influencing, and the potential for AI devastation on the workforce. And one of the most troubling things of all, there is no one in any meaningful leadership position that seems to have any of this on their radar. The future of the workforce may be the defining issue of our time, and certainly will be of critical concern in the decade to come. Where is the commission working on this? Where is the Marshall Plan? The New Deal? The Contract with America? It may seem hyperbolic at this point, but without some planning, the other side of the Rubicon could look and feel pretty perilous and dark once we are fully through to it.
At my most optimistic on this, I can say that humans and human society do, in fact, evolve. I think this is why we are seeing candidates for political office thrive who are especially disruptive. This has been Trump, for sure, but it’s also Zohran Mamdani, the recently elected mayor of New York City who is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. Here in Maine, Democratic candidate for senate Graham Platner has lit the grassroots on fire with his fierce rhetoric and open determination to, it feels, burn it all down. Regardless of your political affiliation, it’s far better to have a bloodless revolution at the ballot box rather than blood in the streets, so that’s something to feel positive about even if our politics is in turmoil right now. Candidates are getting a lot of attention who want an outright rejection of the old order.
We are in the most significant period of humanity’s history. Right now, all of us are experiencing it together. Of the hundreds of thousands of years of human development and, hopefully, the hundreds of thousands of years to come, we are living in one of the most consequential Rubicon moments — one that will be as significant to the future of humanity in ways both positive and, for sure, challenging, as was the Industrial Revolution and the Computer Age, but perhaps even more so because it is not affecting just the ways we work and do business, but also the ways we think and process and synthesize information.
The analogy I think about a lot on topics like this one is that of a butterfly. It’s perhaps a more uplifting one than the Rubicon, the crossing of which for Caesar led to war, power, and assassination. A butterfly goes through its own crossing, however, that of turning from a caterpillar into its ultimate form, spreading its wings and flying free. Perhaps humanity can successfully navigate the triple threaded influences as discussed above, and will soar to greater heights than ever. That said, just as Caesar could not cross back over the Rubicon, a butterfly can’t go back to being a caterpillar, even if it wants to.
Ben Sprague lives and works in Bangor, Maine as a Senior V.P./Commercial Lending Officer for Damariscotta-based First National Bank. He previously worked as an investment advisor and graduated from Harvard University in 2006. Ben can be reached at ben.sprague@thefirst.com or bsprague1@gmail.com. Thoughts and opinions here do not represent First National Bank.
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A couple of potential postives that I have been thinking about, though not sure the answers.
1. Would it be so bad to lose some white collar jobs if it meant gaining some blue collar workers? Right now a lot of affordibility issues stem from a lack of labor force in certain areas like construction. Could AI help drive down the cost of living?
2. Are some AI solutions an answer to the glut of government and budget imbalances? As much as it fears me to think of AI helping run the government, could that reduce government costs on things like the DMV, benefits processing, and other menial work that no one really wants to do, costs a lot to do, and adds very little value? Perhaps we can finally cut government spending substantially
For the social media and algorithm stuff, a lot harder to find positives. We just have to all collectively put down our phones. It is probably the #1 topic of conversation for me and my fellow 30ish year old friends. How do we stop? People are getting apps that lock out their phones, deleting instagram, and even buying old school phones that have no media apps! There's some hope
Reading about Caesar always makes me think about those high-stakes decision algoritms. Do you think the 'alea iacta est' moment is more about conviction or just the lack of other viable branches in the decision tree?