AG #002: 3 Forces Working Against Your Business Right Now

AG #002: 3 Forces Working Against Your Business Right Now

Only 17% of Americans trust the government. Homes cost 7x the average salary. Your attention is under siege. This isn't random.

Episode Summary

In this episode of The Anti-Generic with Anna Powers, host Anna Powers breaks down three colliding forces reshaping how we work, earn, and build - the Erosion of the Institution, the Marginalization of the Middle Class, and the Atrophy of Attention. You'll understand why building a business feels harder than ever, what happens when all three forces collide in the Age of Fragmentation, and what contrarian perspectives can help you rise above it.

Question of the Day

Which of these three forces have you felt most in your own life - the erosion of trust, the squeeze on the middle class, or the battle for your attention? Drop a comment below.

Key Take-aways

• Trust in government, healthcare, and corporations has collapsed to historic lows
• Wages failed to keep pace while housing and healthcare costs tripled
• The attention economy is destroying your ability to focus and compete
• When all three forces collide, we enter the Age of Fragmentation
• Understanding these forces is the first step to building despite them

Timestamped Outline

0:00 Three forces reshaping the world

0:50 Force #1: The Erosion of the Institution

1:11 Why only 17% of Americans trust the government

2:27 How the pandemic destroyed trust in healthcare

3:41 Corporate downsizing and the end of job stability

5:34 Force #2: The Marginalization of the Middle Class

6:41 Income vs. home prices - the math doesn't work

8:39 Healthcare costs squeezing the middle class

9:50 Force #3: The Atrophy of Attention

11:00 Jonathan Haidt and The Anxious Generation

11:37 The Age of Fragmentation - when all three collide

13:47 Three contrarian perspectives coming next week

Links & Resources

• Subscribe to The Anti-Generic newsletter - https://www.saraannapowers.com/anti-generic
• Contact Anna - anna@saraannapowers.com

Connect & CTA

Subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts.

Every week, The Anti-Generic shows you how to use AI to grow your business without sounding like everyone else. Human-first, AI-amplified: https://www.saraannapowers.com/anti-generic

Credits

Host: Anna Powers © 2026 Sara Anna Powers. All rights reserved.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey there, it's Anna Powers, and you are listening to episode two of Anti-Generic. This is the podcast and YouTube where I'm sharing all about AI and how you can use it while still keeping your distinct voice that makes you who you are in the marketplace and makes you actually attractive to your ideal clients. Now, last week in Anti-Generic, we talked about some things that I never shared before, including how I stubbornly resisted adopting AI for nearly two solid years and lost major momentum in my business before going all in and embracing the opportunities that are present right at this moment all around us. So today I'm gonna share what I'm seeing right now in the marketplace and three distinct colliding forces that are reshaping the whole world. Force number one is what I'm calling the erosion of the institution. And I'm gonna give you just a little pre-warning here that these three forces are not gonna feel super positive and lovey-dovey, but I'm not gonna leave you in doom and gloom, I promise. Okay. But the first force that we're gonna talk about is the erosion of the institution. We are living in an age where we no longer feel that we can depend on our major institutions. We used to have trust in our governments. We believed that leaders had our best interests at heart, but now only 2% of Americans trust the government to do what's right, quote, just about always, end quote. And only 15% believe the government will do what's right, quote, most of the time, end quote. That's wild. That that means only 17% of Americans actually have confidence and trust in our government. That when I was growing up in the 80s, we believed, you know, we say the Pledge of Allegiance, and we believed it was here to support us and protect us. That's not the case anymore. This uh graph that I cited in a written, uh, a written newsletter that I just sent out to my email list, um, which you can join, by the way, if you go to Sarah Anna Powers.com forward slash antigeneric, you can grab, uh, you can sign up and get all of the weekly newsletters that I send out. So I showed a graph that just illustrated the massive decline of trust in our governmental institutions in America. And basically it just highlights the decline of our citizens' belief that our government will look out for us. Now, the recent pandemic not only eroded confidence in our leaders, but it also throttled the hope that we place in our medical professionals. Too many people were forced to birth their babies alone, forbidden from holding a loved one's hand while they passed, and isolated from both compassion and companionship while medical professionals scolded us to trust the science. When that science then came under scrutiny as incomplete or even in some cases inaccurate, little to no accountability was taken. And you know, if you were in the US during the pandemic, you might have experienced some of that. You might have experienced, I had a number of friends who were pregnant during the pandemic and their spouses were not allowed to be in the delivery room with them. And it's just people who were losing loved ones, and yet their loved ones have to take their dying breaths alone because of this uh fear of the spread. And then when new information comes out about the spread, then no one ever apologizes or takes accountability for all of the pain that was caused by the messages that were being put out, and frankly, the shaming that was done to a lot of people. It's not just the government and the medical institutions that are whose whose credibility and whose our trust has been diminished in. It's also large companies. So large companies are now downscaling, and we can no longer reliably depend on being employed throughout our professional life by one institution, retiring to a gift of a gold watch alongside our pension, like many of our grandparents did. Again, I was born in 1980, and so when I was coming up, I would hear my grandparents talk, talk about their careers. My grandmother taught at one university for 48 years, and that's just how it was. Most of our grandparents worked for one company for the majority of their life. You did not flip around and jump around, and now that's almost unheard of. Job change, I didn't pull any specific statistics for this, but just um think about all the people that you know in your circle. People change jobs all the time. People are downsizing, people are getting let go of, they're getting fired, or their um their work environment is so untenable that they're almost forced to quit and find a new position. And that's just common now. Whereas decades ago, there was confidence in our corporations and in our in they were institutions that also were here to protect us. A Wall Street Journal article from last summer found that over the past decade, one in five companies in the SP 500 has shrunk its workforce, reflecting a long-term trend of corporate downsizing and the erosion of the idea that large firms can reliably provide stable long-term employment. The erosion of the institution reaching our governments, our health care, and our corporations has had a destabilizing effect on our economy, and there's no turnaround in sight for the health of any of these institutions. So that's the first force I wanted to cover. The second force is something that I'm choosing to call the marginalization of the middle class. Now, I've already shared, I was born in 1980, so now you know how old I am. But my family always considered ourselves solidly middle class. My parents both worked full-time, my mother as a teacher, my father as a CPA. Neither of them ever made six figures until I was in college. So that would have been the early 2000s. Yet for all of my childhood, we were able to live in a safe neighborhood in a four-bedroom, three-bath home on a nice lot that my parents purchased. And I even went to a private school. Now, I didn't have a lot of extras as far as name brand clothes. I was always shopping the clearance aisles. We didn't take fancy vacations. We didn't drive luxury vehicles and have all those, you know, upper middle class things. We were solidly middle class, but we always had everything we needed: two reliable Hondas in the driveway, shout out to Honda, and enough money put away to cover any kind of emergencies or repairs, those things that inevitably pop up in the course of everyday life. So out of curiosity, I pulled some numbers about the median income in my community in Mississippi in 1990 compared to the median home price here in 1990. Now, back then, the median income in Mississippi for a two-parent household was roughly $35,000 a year. The median home price in Mississippi in 1990 was roughly $45,600. Now, for those of you who are in New York or California listening to this or watching this, I know again, Mississippi is hugely different from some of those, but I'm I'm pulling the numbers from where I am. And then I'm also going to share a little bit of data on other states. In 2020, the median income for Mississippi for a two-parent household had risen to $54,000. So it had not even doubled versus uh, because remember it was $35,000 in 1990, and then it had risen by 2020 to $54,000. So it hadn't even doubled. Yet the median home price in Mississippi that same year had risen to $125,500. So the median home price, remember, in 1990 was $45,600. And it had risen over 30 years to $125,500. So it had nearly tripled. So again, income hasn't even doubled, but home price has tripled. Okay, so you can quickly see the ratio. I pulled the ratio of the average home price divided by annual income. It jumped from 1.3 in 1990, just 30 years ago, to 2.32 as of 2020. And that's in Mississippi, which we're known as a very poor state. I hate to say that about our state, but that's just what we're known as. I pulled the data from several other states around the country, and in some places, this ratio has risen as high as seven, meaning that homes are valued at seven times the average annual income of a two-parent, two-person household. Of course, housing is just one economic indicator of the health of the middle class, but the data is showing that it is becoming harder and harder to quote get by on the average American's salary. And it's not just housing that's out of reach for many. So is healthcare. For lower income workers, health insurance premiums now gobble up nearly one third of their take-home pay. In 2025, excuse me, the average annual premium for employer-sponsored family coverage was $26,993. Said differently, your annual health insurance premiums cost as much as a new car. And that's just the cost for the premiums, not for the sky high deductibles and the out-of-pocket additional expenses that most Americans are covering. The rising cost of healthcare and housing are just two indicators of the marginalization of the middle class. People are either being pushed into poverty at an alarming pace, or there are a rare few individuals who are taking the opportunity to elevate themselves to the upper class, but the middle is shrinking and fast. So now we've covered the first two forces that I want to just talk with you about today. And the third force is something that I'm calling the atrophy of attention. Now, I don't have to cite a single study here for you to know exactly what I'm talking about. Attention spans have shrunk massively over the last few decades and they continue to decline. Americans check our phones hundreds, hundreds of times per day. An average screen time can clock in as high as five hours or more daily. If you don't believe me, because I know that is a staggering statistic, your phone has a setting where you can check your screen time. Take a look, and I bet you'll be surprised at how high it is. I know mine shocked me. Even though I run a digital business, so I am on my phone a lot for my business. And to add on to that, every time we're pulled away from our work to check a notification or return a text or scroll on social media, it takes as long as 20 minutes to refocus on our original task when we finally come back to it. Jonathan Hait's excellent book, The Anxious Generation, details how this shrinking attention span is playing out in our children's mental health, noting a measurable erosion in their ability to focus, read deeply, and apply themselves. Ask yourself, when is the last time you went an entire day without looking at your cell phone or browsing the web? I personally cannot name a day like that. And I'm guessing you may not be able to either. If you can, let me know. You can message me at Anna at Sarah AnnaPowers.com because I want to know who you are and how you're doing it. So these three powerful forces that I have now covered all combine to have created what I'm calling the age of fragmentation. The erosion of the institution and the marginalization of the middle class, in essence, mean that the game of success is getting harder to play. Now, I know success has a lot of different definitions for a lot of different people. So I'm personally defining success in this context as having a meaningful career that provides well for your family and allows you at least some time for leisure and the ability to maintain and even improve your health. The atrophy of attention means that you're constantly distracted while you're trying to play this game of success at the exact moment that it's getting harder and harder to win. We are now living in a time period that I'm calling the age of fragmentation. All at once, we're experiencing decreased trust in our institutions and their ability to give us a safety net, the shrinking of the middle class and the socioeconomic comfort that came along with being a part of it, and a constant battle to focus, a constant battle for the ability to focus on anything that will help us move ourselves into a better position. Our society is fracturing, and many of us aren't quite sure yet where we fit in this new order. But what we do know is that we have to figure it out quickly, or we risk being like a broken shard of glass that gets discarded and just swept away into the trash. I know that is a very dramatic simile, but I literally broke a crystal water glass that I was trying to clean earlier. And so it's just fresh on my mind. It's just like, you know, you have this beautiful glass and you you break it, you fragment it, and those pieces just all go in the trash. And what I want to do with these weekly dispatches is help you avoid being like that shard of glass that gets swept away. I want to help equip you to be one of the few who's gonna last and build for the future something that will continue to last. So at the risk of ending this week's note with doom and gloom, I'm gonna pause here, but don't worry because I'm gonna come back next week and I'm gonna share with you three specific contrarian perspectives that will allow you to see that you do still have options to elevate your life and your work despite these three major forces that are actually acting against you. I promise you there is hope. So make sure to join me again here next week to see exactly what I'm talking about. I am for you always. And listen, if you have felt any of the three major forces that I described in your own life lately, I would love for you to send me an email at Anna at Sarah AnnaPowers.com and let me know which one you've been really feeling because I am deeply passionate about and committed to helping you solve for that. But I need to know what specifically you're struggling with for me to help craft the best solution and bring you the best information that will help you move forward. That's all for this week. So I hope that you will join me for next week's dose of anti generic, and I'll see you soon.