Sometime in the last forty years the institutions that used to carry risk on your behalf quietly handed it back to you, and they did it while telling you that you had just been set free.
The clearest case is the pension. For a good stretch of the twentieth century a large employer would promise you a defined benefit, a monthly cheque for the rest of your life after you stopped working, and the company carried the risk of making that maths work. Most of them froze those plans decades ago and swapped in the 401(k) and its equivalents, which is a polite way of telling you that you are now your own pension fund, personally responsible for guessing how long you will live and what the market will do across the four decades in between. Whether you happen to retire into a boom or a crash is now your problem, and it was handed to you as control over your own money. The political scientist Jacob Hacker called this the great risk shift years ago, and the striking thing is how steadily it has kept going since.
Follow the same move through everything else. The stable job with a stable employer became the contract, the gig, the role that is technically self-employment so the company carries none of the obligations that used to come with having staff, and that got branded as flexibility and being your own boss. Employer health coverage in the United States became the high-deductible plan, where you are now a cost-conscious shopper for your own care in the middle of an emergency, and that got branded as consumer choice. The bank teller, the travel agent, the checkout clerk, the petrol attendant, all of them slowly became you, doing the work yourself through an app or a kiosk for free, and that got branded as convenience. Even the question of what is true got offloaded. The institutions that used to stand behind a shared set of facts stepped back and told you to do your own research, as if an ordinary person with a phone and a full-time job is equipped to independently verify epidemiology and foreign policy in the gaps between shifts.
Every one of these was narrated as a gift. More freedom, more flexibility, more empowerment, more choice. What actually happened each time is that an institution which used to absorb a risk decided to stop, handed the risk to the individual standing nearest it, and kept the savings for itself.
From where I am sitting this looks a little different than it does from inside the rich world. In much of the world, India included, the safety net the West is busy dismantling was never really built in the first place. Most people here have always been their own pension, their own insurance, their own backstop, leaning on family because there was nothing else to lean on. So when I watch the West discover the gig economy and the self-checkout and do-your-own-research, it does not read to me as a brave new frontier. It reads as the rich world converging slowly downward toward a condition the global majority has lived in all along, insisting the entire way down that it chose this and that it feels like progress.
None of it required a conspiracy. An institution that holds less risk is cheaper to run and worth more to its owners, capital markets reward the firm that has shed its obligations, and once one company in an industry offloads, the others have to follow or get undercut. The language of freedom did the rest, because it is much easier to accept being abandoned when someone calls it independence.
The catch is that risk does not vanish when you offload it. It just relocates onto the person least able to carry it, and then it accumulates. A whole population privately managing risks it has no training for and no real power over ends up quietly terrified most of the time, and convinced that the terror is its own fault. The retiree who guessed wrong on his fund blames himself. The patient who could not decode the plan blames herself. The worker who cannot make the numbers add up on gig income assumes everybody else has it figured out. Each person is handed a job they cannot do well, because nobody can do it well, and then each person is told the outcome is on them.
That is a dangerous thing to do to a society across a long stretch of time. You take people, you load them with responsibility for outcomes that are mostly settled above their heads, you pull away the institutions that used to share the weight, and you tell them the whole time that this is what freedom feels like. For a while they believe it and turn the blame inward. Then at some point they stop believing it, and the blame turns outward and goes looking for someone to hold responsible. We are somewhere in the middle of that turn right now, and a lot of the politics that confuses people makes more sense once you see it as the sound of a generation realizing the backstop was quietly removed.
I do not have a clean fix. The honest first step is smaller than a fix and in some ways harder, which is to refuse the story while you are still living inside it and to call the transfer what it actually was. Something got taken from you and handed back with a bow on it. Knowing that will not restore your pension or your stable job. What it does is stop you spending your one life ashamed of a risk that was placed on you on purpose, and that turns out to matter, because a person who knows the weight was put there deliberately carries it very differently from a person who believes he simply was not strong enough.