"To You, In 2000 Years" : Everything That’s Wrong, In a Nutshell

This piece is the third and final part of a trilogy essay.

Minimally edited on purpose, to keep the reasoning and flow intact.

For a lot of people, one of the culprit of difficulties in adulting is adaptation.

Moving from the formal education system, either the 12 years, 16 years, or 16+1 or +2 or whichever into the workforce professional system is the pivot point of adaptation. For almost 2 decades students have been taught that there are finish lines, checkpoints, and to do lists. From semesterly report cards to thesis defenses, there was always a schedule. Yet in the workforce, everyone is deciding their own path.

Therefore, we adapt. For a lot of us after "graduating" from a timed-formal structure, one of the easiest way we can do to adapt is to look for social circles. This made things more complex as we're not only adapting to a new system of living, we're also adapting to a new culture, new societies, new places, and with our national urbanization rate reaching almost 60% in 2024, so many of us are adapting to a new city.

As stated in the first part of this trilogy essay, the phenomenon of immigration is nothing new. From Cosmopolitan Smyrna (modern-day Izmir, Turkey) to Jakarta Metropolis 2000 years later, cities have always been a centre. A centre for trades, economy, politics, culture, innovation, and knowledge. The massive amounts of friction from those multilayered aspects breed the recipe for a better society; or in individual sense, better opportunities for better living.

But again, looking at the first and second part of this essay series, does cities, Indonesian cities specifically, still function for that?

Imagine a young freshgrad, comes to the city for work. Big chances are they will earn minimum wage, even for a degree-required roles. And taking example from Jakarta's declining minimum wage for the last decade, (equal to 5 grams of gold in 2015, but equal to 2.5 grams of gold in 2025), they basically need to work twice as hard to earn as much as someone from ten years ago to have the similar quality of life.

Everyone has 24 hours and the standard work hours for a full time job is a third of that. Adding time and energy requirement for commuting, basic sustenance and hygine, along with unpaid overtime and meetings on weekends, average workers in Jakarta left with barely enough time to scroll tiktoks and sleep, while their so called "paychecks" slips away in the first week of the month for rent, food, commutes, mandatory coffees and occasional movies. Don't forget some toxic environments some of us trying to adapt with, won't even recognize someone who isn't holding the latest iPhone in their hands, so social pressure spending is also a real cultural issue.

Nothing really accumulates at this point. Neither wealth nor assets. Cities were once places where effort turned into progress, now it's barely turned into maintenance.

After a few payrolls, it should be easy to understand. Paychecks get absorbed by the first week, and not by anything excessive. Rent takes the biggest portion, especially in cities like Jakarta where real estate prices have been completely detached from what the average worker earns. Even sharing spaces or living far from the centre doesn’t solve much, it just shifts the cost somewhere else, usually into time and transport.

Transport itself becomes another layer. Outside Jakarta, public transportation is almost non-existent, and even within Jakarta, while it is improving, it is still struggling to keep up with demand. People fill the gaps with ride-hailing, with motorcycles, with whatever is available, and all of that costs money, daily, repeatedly, without pause.

Food is not cheap either. Groceries, especially when compared to neighboring countries like Malaysia, or even cities like New York when adjusted percentage-wise to income, take a disproportionate share of what people earn. New York City monthly minimum wage sits well above $2000 while the cost of 1kg of chicken is around $4, while Jakartans earn $360 in minimum wage and paying almost $2.5 for a kg of chicken. Reflect that to utilities, phone credit, basic living expenses, and the margin becomes thinner than it already was.

At the same time, income is rarely just for the individual. A lot of us are supporting parents, siblings, or extended family members, not in isolated cases, yet as a normal thing to do. The absence of a strong social welfare system means that families absorb what responsibilites the state does not provide. What is often called the “sandwich generation” is not a middle-class phenomenon here, it is widespread, and it slows down any possibility of moving forward economically.

So the idea of saving doesn’t really exist in practice. It’s not something people postpone for later. It’s something that never enters the structure of their income in the first place. Whatever comes in is already allocated, often before it even arrives.

And within this condition, people try to adjust. Prices get passed around. Fees are absorbed, then transferred. Ride-hail drivers turn off their application to “negotiate” an enormously high price for commuters in rush hour. Small acts of extraction happen between individuals, doesn't necessarily out of greed, but out of survival instinct.

Work is still there. Discipline is still there. People still want to do better, to earn more, to build something for themselves. But very little of that effort turns into something that compounds over time. It circulates, it sustains, but it does not accumulate.

Effort and hard work no longer translate into security. They don’t translate into capital either. They got translated into extra profit margin for the under-regulated capital class,

and to keep the extractive system running.

Zooming out, there’s always a structure in a society’s economic system. Property regime sits at the top of that structure. In Indonesia, this position is heavily mythologized. The idea of “making it” is often reduced to owning a kos-kosan, a kontrakan, owning properties of ten doors, twenty doors, or whatever amount of entrances enough that rent comes in every month without needing to show up anywhere to do anything. It’s seen as stability, as intelligence, even as freedom. It is the pinnacle of the “Indonesian Dream” where you no longer have to work, but still receive income.

What rarely gets discussed is what that income actually represents.

That income comes from the salaries that are already stretched thin. From the same workers who are calculating transport costs, food prices, and family obligations at the end of every month. Rent is paid before anything else, obviously since everyone needs a home. And once it is paid, it moves upward and stays there.

Ownership turns into something closer to a profession. But unlike a real profession that creates value or provides expertise, Ownership is holding a position, a status. Property generates income regardless of whether any aspects of the society is improved, expanded, or reinvested. The building exists, the rooms are occupied, and payments pour in. The flow is consistent. Labor pays rent, rent does not provide value or labor, the gap remains.

No one is pointing out that landlords are good or evil, however it is imparative to look how the arrangement works at scale. When enough of the city operates under this model, the direction of value becomes predictable. What is produced at the bottom does not circulate back downward in any meaningful way. Instead, it accumulates above. Compounding and enriching one class, widening the inequality gap.

Over time, this affects economic movement. The ability to move from one position to another becomes limited, not because people stop trying, but because the structure absorbs most of what they produce before it can turn into anything else.

Cities, in this condition, (I reiterate) stop functioning as ladders.

They still attract people, they still concentrate activity. But instead of opening pathways upward, they hold people in place while extracting from that position. Work continues, value is created, but most of the surplus is collected by those who already hold assets.

What remains below is crumbs, and contested. Harshly. People normalize competing violently over what is left, because there is no other direction available.

Zooming out further, the same pattern does not stop at the city. At the national level, the structure is not very different, only larger in scale. Much of Indonesia’s economic strength still relies on extraction. Coal, nickel, palm oil, gas, etc. Industries that are capital-heavy, land-heavy, not to mention environmentally hazardous,  and require relatively limited labor compared to the value they generate. The output is large, the revenue is high, but the number of people directly benefiting from that value is small.

In order to move upward within this structure, there are only a few available paths. Extract natural resources, ezxtract labor, or extract through systems and regulation. The last one is not theoretical. Indonesia consistently ranks among the more corrupt countries globally, with its Corruption Perception Index score hovering around the mid-30s out of 100 in recent years. Bribery, informal payments, and regulatory manipulation are not anomalies. They are embedded enough that businesses often account for them as part of operating costs(again, money spent without any values gained).

At the same time, these industries do not absorb labor in proportion to their scale. Economic growth does not translate cleanly into job creation. Our GDP grown steadily at around 5% for a decade, yet minimum wage in the capital drops half in value, and our currency depreciated by more than 20%, reaching an all time high of above IDR 17.000 per USD 1, with more than half of the national workforce concentrated in informal sectors that provide bare income without any sense of security. People work, but the work does not stabilize their position.

Wealth, on the other hand, concentrates. Indonesia’s Gini Ratio (a statistical measure of income or wealth inequality within a population, ranging from 0 (perfect equality) to 1 (perfect inequality)) has fluctuated around 0.38 to 0.41 over the past decade, reflecting a persistent gap between those at the top and the rest of the population. When placed alongside countries like South Korea or Malaysia, the difference becomes clearer. Both have lower inequality levels and, more importantly, stronger pathways for mobility through industrial upgrading and investment in human capital.

At this point it’s just a same old, classic song in repeat.

Just as labor in cities struggles to accumulate resources, the country as a whole struggles to upgrade its people. Value is extracted, but capacity is not systematically built. Natural resources are depleted, but expertise is not proportionally developed and cultivated. Economic activity “growing”, but it does not translate into a broader base of skilled, secure citizens.

This also shows up in how expertise is treated. The conversations around the term “matinya kepakaran” did not emerge without reason. Public political discourse increasingly sidelines specialists, replacing them with louder voices that carry more visibility and power than knowledge. Decisions that require depth (such as spending USD 70 millon daily for MBG, which causing rare goods, increased prices for groceries, and corruption opportunities, along with poison hazard for children, while the same amount could be used to build 2 BRT corridors in Indonesian cities DAILY) are often reduced to surface-level debates, and long-term planning is overshadowed by short-term optics.

So the question becomes harder to avoid.

Was this country built to develop its people, as stated in the constitution; “mencerdaskan kehidupan bangsa,” to advance public welfare, to create a just and prosperous society?

Or has it become a system that monetizes land, labor, and resources through new age feudalism, as efficiently as possible, treating most of its population as datapoint and tax variables and leaving them to fend for themselves?

The constitution provides one direction, while what happens suggests another. With such situation, survival mode stops being an emergency. It becomes the default setting.

With the structure working the way it does, a lot of us are like almost constantly operating in a reduced mode. Not fully depleted, but never fully charged either. Like a phone that never goes above 60%, we always put them on low power mode, always calculating what can be turned off, what can be delayed, what can be sacrificed just to make it through the day.

And everyone has no choice but to adjust accordingly.

One job is often not enough. White-collar workers, after finishing their office hours, still take ride-hailing orders at night. Many architect friends I know do side-projects at such low rates, most of the time as sub-contractors(most of the design fee goes to the broker, of course). Others sell things online, take freelance gigs, manage small side hustles that slowly eat into whatever time is left after work. The idea of work-life balance becomes irrelevant when work itself expands to fill every minutes of our waking hours.

Platforms that were initially introduced as efficiency tools evolve into survival infrastructure. Ride-hailing apps, for example. Uber, the OG, was originally built to optimize car-pooling system. So people can commute to the city together while sharing the cost. It was meant to make use of underused capacity, to make transportation more efficient. In practice many years and iterations later in Jakarta, it becomes a primary source of income for millions. Millions of families being dependent on an under-regulated private entity. Drivers are labeled as “partners,” but operate without healthcare, without social protection, while a significant portion of their earnings is taken as platform fees. Labor is absorbed, risk is externalized, and regulation is bypassed.

On the consumption side, people adapt as well. Hunting discounts, cashbacks, flash sales, bundle deals, putting these as primary economic variables instead of the whole context of a product. Daily habits start to revolve around finding the lowest possible price, even if it means compromising on quality. Products adjust downward to meet purchasing power that does not grow. And perpetually, forces everyone to be cheap, and measure everything in its price tag.

Fees behave the same way. They are introduced, absorbed, passed on, and eventually normalized. Even in system founded by public money (yes, I’m talking about QR payments). A small percentage here, a service charge there, a transaction cost somewhere in between. No single fee is large enough to trigger resistance, but collectively they shape how money moves, and how little of it stays.

All of this does not happen because people prefer it. It happens because there are no real alternatives. Living frugally is no longer a strategy, but a requirement. But at the same time, people are never allowed to become frugal enough to go against of the system entirely. Expenses remain just high enough, income just constrained enough, to keep everyone inside the cycle.

So resistance becomes difficult to sustain.

People are not passive, per se, we are constantly doing something. Working, adjusting, recalculating, finding ways to stretch what they have. But with all of that energy directed toward staying afloat, minimum-to-none spent to moving forward.

And slowly, without a clear moment where it begins, this is where something else starts to shift out of fatigue and exhaustion. We see less of others as people. We see others as more of a means to an end, a way, a benefit. We’re losing our dignity and compassion as a society.

Collectively, we normalize that competition is no longer occasional, it is constant. Not just in big things like jobs or promotions, but in small, everyday decisions. Who gets the better deal, who pays less, who gains more from the same situation. Discounts are chased, margins are squeezed, and over time, this logic extends beyond transactions into how people treat one another.

Comparison follows naturally. Income, assets, properties, how many doors a kos-kosan you owned has, how fast someone is “moving up.” These become markers beyond success level, but also of worth. Warm conversations shift into flexing auditions of “how badly have we extract and abuse other people for our gain this year”. It becomes normal to hear someone talk about how cheaply they secured a service, how they pushed down a price, how they managed to get more while giving less.

It’s not even hidden. It’s said openly, sometimes with pride.

There are moments where this becomes very clear. He was bragging when my uncle said to my face, who was working in architecture by the time, that he underpaid an architect to design his kos-kosan. No one realized that he's doing the wrong thing and extracting values from another person who's trying to make a living, while he's building a kos-kosan to compound his wealth even more, and treated it as a smart decision. Not as something questionable, but as something worth sharing, and celebrated, even. The extraction is right under our nose but it is no longer recognized as a problem. It is seen as efficiency.

And no one reacts.

Because everyone is operating within the same logic.

Movement becomes individual. People climb, but mostly alone. Because cooperation feels unreliable. Trust becomes expensive, and helping someone else often means falling behind, even if only slightly. And when the margins are already thin, even small losses matter.

Solidarity, in this condition, starts to feel inefficient. It does not provide immediate return and cannot be easily measured. So it gets deprioritized, along with empathy. It appears when it is affordable, and disappears when it is not. Over time, it becomes something that has to be calculated, not something that comes naturally out of human nature.

Collective solutions begin to feel unrealistic because they require a level of trust that no longer exists. Everyone assumes everyone else is also trying to maximize their own position, and most of the time, that assumption is correct.

The city, in this sense, stops being a shared space for advancement.

It still gathers people, still concentrates activity, but the relationships inside it change. Instead of being a place where people build together, it becomes a place where people try to extract just enough to move slightly ahead of the next person.

A lot of people want to become “the one at the top.” To own assets, to collect rent, to stop working while income continues. But very few stop to question what kind of system makes that aspiration possible in the first place.

And how it abuses everyone else for it to work.

Over time, this does not just stay in economics. It changes how we behave, especially with each other. With our own working class.

It shows up in small moments, often too small to notice on their own. A passenger giving a low rating to a driver over a minor inconvenience, because “that’s the standard.” With zero consideration of hardships of others. People expecting a level of service that does not match the price being paid, with justification “ya salah sendiri pasang harga segitu”. Getting frustrated at surge pricing during rain, while not questioning why surge pricing exists in the first place, or what kind of system makes it necessary, or even who pulls the strings to allow such inconveniences “must happen”.

On the other side, drivers turn off their applications, negotiate prices directly, push rates higher when demand spikes. Not solely out of greed and they are trying to exploit, but because that is one of the few moments where they can regain control over their income, although with very unfortunate means.

Both sides feel justified as both sides are operating under pressure. And both sides end up extracting from each other.

It is, of course, not limited to ride-hailing.

In offices, supporting roles quietly expand beyond what is written in contracts. Security guards, cleaning staff, take on additional tasks without question, because refusing is not really an option. It has been normalized long enough that it no longer stands out. “I can only be grateful to have this job, I cannot lose it”, a literal gratitude turned into abuse by lack of empathy and compassion.

At the same time, systems that are meant to serve the public slowly become inaccessible to the people who need them most. Online-only queues, cashless payments, digital forms, application-based services. Efficient on paper, but hardly inclusive. Difficult to navigate for the elderly, for those without access, for those who are not familiar with the interface. The burden shifts quietly from the system to the individual, as the system somehow managed to relieve of its responsibility to design infrastructure that’s inclusive and efficient at the same time. Again, it’s us who has to adapt.

And also again, no one reacts. Because it is now considered normal.

Inconvenience becomes justification, where small acts of discourtesy become acceptable as long as they save time, save money, or reduce effort. Cutting lines, ignoring others, refusing to engage, all of it framed as efficiency.

Even language begins to reflect this shift. Value reduced to a price, and roles reduced to labels that remove responsibility. “Partner,” not a worker. “User,” not a person.

Nothing here is dramatic on its own and that is exactly why it works. Because these actions accumulate, repeated daily, across millions of interactions in each city. They reshape what is considered acceptable through habit and conditioning.

Extraction does not only move money, it also dramatically changes how we see each other.

Personally, it has become difficult for me to say that this is accidental.

However, no one really sat down and designed this whole grandeur-of-a-system from the start(debatable). And no one in their right mind would’ve voted to live like this, to constantly calculate, to extract and be extracted, to measure everything in cost and return. It did not arrive all at once. It built up slowly, decision by decision, convenience by convenience, adjustment by adjustment, enablement after enablement.

But now it is here. And more importantly, it is being sustained. More specifically, we, sustains it.

Not because we cherish it but because most of us no longer see a way outside of it, nor to not recognize it clearly enough to question it. For a long time, it was easier to focus on getting through the day than to step back and understand what kind of system we are actually operating in.

We learn how to navigate it, we learn where the margins are, we learn how to benefit from it, even if only slightly. And in doing so, we also help maintain it.

This is where it becomes uncomfortable.

Because it is no longer just something happening to us. It is something we are participating in, even if we don’t fully intend to. Every time we nawar berlebih, trying to push the price down without thinking, every time we justify unfair treatment as efficiency, every time we accept a system that excludes others because it is convenient for us, even every time we simply judge and punish others just because we’re in power to do so, we reinforce the same structure that limits us. And this is why it is difficult to change. Because this system is embedded, it’s so familiar. Too familiar. We wouldn’t have any idea otherwise. It fits into daily life, it works just enough to continue, it does not collapse, it just continues extracting.

So the question is no longer whether the system is fair or not, but whether we are willing to recognize it for what it is; A broken, corrupt, extractive system of a civilization designed to squeeze each and every one of us.

Because once it is recognized, it becomes harder to justify, harder to ignore, and harder to participate in blindly.

Initally I planned this essay trilogy to be about cities. About what they were supposed to be; a place people could go to and become something more than where they started. Not solely richer, but more stable. More capable, more secure, fulfilled. A core of civilizations where effort accumulates,and time builds into something.

That idea did not come out of nowhere. It existed for a reason. Cities were built as centres, of economy, and also of possibility. You come in with labor, you stay long enough, and eventually you move. That was the exchange.

But looking at everything now, it becomes difficult to say that cities themselves are the problem. Why? Because they are not separate from us. They are a mere reflection.

What we see in Jakarta, or Bandung, or any other city, is the same structure repeating at a higher density. The same logic bred from society, just with physical visibility. Effort that does not accumulate, ownership that matters more than contribution, survival that replaces growth, people slowly learning to extract from each other just to stay in place.

And after a while, it starts to feel normal. Because it is familiar. Because it works just enough for us to continue, as we have learned how to live inside it.

That is the part that should not happen.

The normalization of a broken system should not happen. The quiet acceptance that this is how things are supposed to be. That this is what cities are supposed to be. That this is what living looks like.

Because it isn’t.

At least, personally I think it isn’t.

Good luck on your Monday.