Have you ever stopped to think about why the Western world feels like it is falling apart?
The easy answers come first. The war in Ukraine. The Israeli invasion of Gaza. The United States dragging the president of Venezuela out in a night raid. Those events are horrifying, no argument there. They also happen in every civilization, in every era. Empires rise, conflicts follow, power asserts itself.
The harder question is why everyday life feels worse. Why trust is lower. Why people are angrier, poorer, louder, and more misinformed than ever. Rooting through the mud to find a valuable truffle is hard, and so is digging past the headlines to find the real cause.
Bear with me while I explain where I am coming from. I am Generation X, born in 1979. The last of the analog generation. The last group raised without the internet. The first generation forced to rebuy its music collection over and over again, cassette tape, CD, MP3, and now streaming services.
When we wanted to talk about someone, we had to actually talk, behind their back or directly to their face if we really meant it. Verbal fights were face to face, not typed from a couch. Words had consequences. You learned to think fast, speak clearly, and only speak when you were willing to stand behind what you said, because otherwise you might walk away with a black eye, a split lip, or a broken nose.
As the internet has blossomed, I have bloomed where I was planted. I consider the internet the greatest invention in my lifetime, and now with interactive language models, the refinement of intelligence should be at its historical peak. Instead, social media influencers are ruling the airwaves, creating such amazing content as “I know a spell to summon big booty Latinas.”
I had mostly given up making short-form content because I want to make educational content. The problem with making social media content is that the attention span of the TikTok and YouTube Shorts generation is about 15 seconds. Coincidentally, it makes me smile that videos have to be a minute long in order to earn money from the TikTok revenue share program, but that is a different story entirely.
This morning an individual wanted to put me on blast because I had commented on a video, “And this is why the younger generations stay poor.” The video in question was “One Reason Why You Should Not Invest in a Roth IRA.”
Financial advice is something that should never be given, or followed, blindly. Financial literacy should be shouted from the rooftops because so many people graduate from school without ever being taught the basics of finances. The creator in question said you should not put your money in a Roth IRA because it does not allow for things like emergencies or “buying a G-Wagon.”
That sort of new-age Generation Alpha, post–neo-millennial speak is why I am never going to be a popular creator. For the record, if you ever use the phrase “G-Wagon” I am immediately going to think you are unqualified to give financial advice, and speaking as a member of Generation X, most of the people in my generation are going to think the same.
We are living in a social media influencer dystopian nightmare. These creators do not care about their audiences. They care about their clicks, likes, views, shares, comments, and most of all, profit.
Everyone has a camera. That is the cheap part. Any idiot with a double-digit IQ can make a triple-digit income because bad information spreads faster than good information. Good information is rough around the edges, full of if-thens and conditionals. Bad information sounds clean and feels easy.
Too many of these creators learn the first ten words so they can talk. They cannot give you the next ten or ten after that. If they were put on the spot their arguments would crumble faster their than confidence, yet sadly they never have to clean up their own messes.
These big trending influencers are much like seagulls. They swoop in, they make a lot of noise, they crap on everything and everyone, and then they fly away. These types of creators have not invested the time to become subject-matter experts. They have not read. They have not learned. They have not built anything yet. They are charismatic eloquent speakers recycling their confidence with no substance.
Many times, this substance-lacking content drives people to make bad decisions. Where is the creator who misguided them? Off talking about the next topic. Even if they were available, they lack the core knowledge to assist anyone with their problems.
That was today’s video. A creator said do not invest in Roth IRAs because it locks your earnings up until you are 59.5. That statement is incomplete at best and misleading at worst.
Here are the actual rules. With a Roth IRA, contributions are never locked up. You can withdraw your contributed principal at any time, for any reason, without penalty and without increasing your adjusted gross income. That includes emergencies, job loss, medical expenses, or yes, even buying something expensive.
Earnings are subject to restrictions, not the account itself. Earnings withdrawn before age 59.5 are generally subject to a 10 percent penalty and ordinary income taxes unless you qualify for one of the IRS-defined exceptions. Those exceptions include, but are not limited to, first-time home purchases up to the statutory limit, qualified education expenses, certain medical expenses, disability, and substantially equal periodic payments.
After age 59.5, provided the account has met the five-year rule, both contributions and earnings can be withdrawn entirely tax-free. No penalty. No income tax. That is the core advantage of the Roth structure.
So when someone says your money is locked up in a Roth IRA, that is factually wrong. Your contributions are liquid. Your earnings are conditionally restricted, and those conditions are clearly defined in the tax code.
Are there pages and pages of rules? Yes. That complexity is exactly why financial literacy matters, and exactly why sweeping statements made for clicks are dangerous.
Yet for a creator to tell people not to invest in a Roth IRA and then fail, across multiple videos, to explain these distinctions is reckless. Someone will hear it, repeat it, and never understand why.
For clarity, let me say this: a Roth IRA is one of the most powerful long-term investment tools available because qualified withdrawals after age 59.5 are completely tax-free.
What do I know though? I’m a guy who retired nine years ago at the age of 37, and I watch every year as my Roth IRA, which is just a fraction of my investments, grows at roughly $18,000 annually.
The real damage being done today is not from real bombs falling on real cities, as horrific as those are. The deeper, longer-lasting damage comes from fake knowledge bombs dropped every day on unsuspecting audiences. Misinformation does not level buildings, it hollows out people. It erodes trust, destroys financial futures, and quietly robs entire generations of stability, opportunity, and confidence. Real-world bombs end wars when the smoke clears. Fake knowledge bombs keep detonating for decades, passed from screen to screen, mistake to mistake, generation to generation.
That is the damage no influencer ever cleans up, and that is why this problem matters far more than most people are willing to admit.