Image: AI-generated illustration of "If everyone is top of the class, who is last?" The maths of collective myth-making.
Growing up, every parent I knew had the same story. They were top of their class. Number one. Straight As. Sometimes they’d even show you the certificates to prove it.
It was only when my generation started comparing notes that someone asked the obvious question: if everyone’s parent was number one, who was last?
The maths didn’t work. Someone had to be at the bottom. Someone had to fail. But no one’s parent ever admitted it. The collective story held because no one had incentive to puncture it.
I’ve been thinking about that pattern a lot this week.
I know what it’s like to live inside both versions of the story. I grew up with significant privilege: the kind where your house was the one other families visited. Then that privilege disappeared. Financial collapse. Parents split. Suddenly food was a problem. But I was still going to good schools because my dad kept paying, so every day became this strange split screen. Day school meant going home every afternoon to the new reality. No buffer. No distance.
I wasn’t ordinary. I still had access other people didn’t. But the shift taught me something I don’t think you can learn any other way. I understood what asset holders felt because I’d been one. And I understood what scarcity felt because I’d lived it. The distance between those two worlds is wider than most people who’ve only lived in one realise.
Asset holders don't feel the same pressures. They're insulated. And they often rationalise that insulation as normal. When you own property, when your wealth is in things that appreciate while currency depreciates, you genuinely cannot understand why someone would be devastated by dollar-denominated rent or a 15 per cent inflation print. As Orwell wrote in Animal Farm: "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
That distance explains a lot of what I’ve been watching this week.
In 2021, I was an economist at a major bank. I could see what was coming in a small landlocked market I cared deeply about. The data was clear. But I couldn’t say it clearly. Not publicly. Institutional positioning meant warnings had to be polite, framed carefully, stripped of urgency. You worried about political backlash. You worried about client relationships. You worried about your career.
So I gave polite warnings when I should have given clear ones. In private conversations, I told people exactly what I saw: the trajectory was unsustainable and needed correction. But publicly? Diplomatic language. Calibrated phrasing. The kind of analysis that couldn’t get you fired but also couldn’t save anyone.
I left for a better opportunity. Not to reclaim my voice; that came later. The move created conditions where building something independent became possible. That’s the thing about institutional constraint: you rarely escape it through grand principled exits. More often, you make career moves that accidentally create optionality you didn’t initially see.
Canary Compass became that optionality. And once I had it, I designed everything around never losing it again. I’ve turned down opportunities that would require me to tone down or abandon the platform. I’d rather lose income than lose the ability to speak clearly. That choice has created its own constraints, but at least they’re constraints I chose.
This week brought that full circle. I watched the same dynamics play out again in that same market. Different administration. Same pattern. Technical staff spending months building careful frameworks, managing complex rollover schedules, constructing momentum. Then a single policy reversal flattens everything.
Here’s what that taught me: getting your voice back doesn’t mean the system changed. It just means you’re no longer inside it. And individual exit doesn’t reform institutional structures. It just reveals who’s still inside them.
Here’s how you know you’re in a room where the maths doesn’t work:
Everyone’s saying the same thing. Not because they all arrived at the same conclusion independently, but because saying something different carries cost. When you hear the same framing repeated across institutions, across practitioners, across analysis that should be competitive, you’re not watching consensus emerge. You’re watching alignment enforce itself.
The numbers don’t support the narrative, but no one mentions it. Privately, people admit the concerns. They’ll tell you what they actually think. The gap between what people say privately and what they say publicly is the gap where truth goes to die.
Technical competence gets overridden by political expediency, and everyone pretends it was inevitable. You watch careful work, intricate frameworks, coordinated schedules. Then one decision, and it's gone. And instead of naming what happened, everyone explains why it was necessary, why it was pragmatic, why this was always the plan.
The people who know better stay silent. Not because they’re cowards. Because they’re making rational calculations. They have mortgages. They have careers. They know what happens when you ask the obvious question in an environment where alignment is rewarded and clarity is punished.
That’s the pattern. That’s what collective myth-making looks like while you’re still inside it. Not dramatic. Just everyone agreeing to tell the same story even when the maths doesn’t work, because the cost of puncturing it is higher than the cost of maintaining it.
The cost of that collective story isn’t borne by the people telling it.
I started trading in that small landlocked market in November 2009. I was 25. This is January 2026. The conversations haven’t changed. Seventeen years, and we’re still having the same debates about the same structural issues with the same cast of institutional voices saying the same things.
That’s not stagnation. That’s what enforcement looks like. A system that rewards alignment over analysis, comfort over challenge. And the people inside that system, the ones keeping the story coherent, they’re fine. They own assets. When currency depreciates, their property appreciates. When inflation stays elevated, their wealth is insulated.
But the people who eventually pay are the ones who can’t own assets. The ones for whom sustained inflation isn’t an abstraction but an erosion of purchasing power they can’t recover. The ones who watch basic dreams like homeownership become impossible while comfortable voices explain why pricing domestic transactions in foreign currency is pragmatic policy.
The question everyone inside has to answer eventually is this: at what point does staying inside cost more than the story is worth?
I keep coming back to that question my generation asked about our parents: if everyone was top of the class, who was last?
Someone was. Lots of people were. The story just didn’t have room for them because admitting you were average, or struggling, or last carried too much cost. So everyone claimed the same success, and the maths stopped mattering.
That’s not a story about our parents. That’s a story about how collective myth-making works. About what happens when telling the truth costs more than staying quiet. About rooms where everyone agrees to say the same thing even when the numbers don’t support it.
The question isn’t whether you recognise the pattern in hindsight. The question is: where are you in a room right now where the maths doesn’t work, but everyone’s pretending it does?
Where are you staying silent because speaking carries cost? Where are you watching technical competence get overridden by political expedience and calling it pragmatic? Where are you participating in a story where someone has to be last, but no one’s allowed to say it?