Problem-Vein

We often hear that if you’re willing to adapt, you’ll get a job. If you get a job, you must have done something right. If you don’t, you must have done something wrong. You didn’t try hard enough. At least, that’s the usual explanation.

We don’t usually think this way about things outside our control. No one blames themselves for the rain, or imagines there was a button they failed to press. But when it comes to employment, we often behave as though such a button exists. If you’re jobless, there’s always something to improve: skills, experience, connections. The checklist is endless. So you can never prove you’ve tried hard enough.

Consider the California Gold Rush.

In 1848, gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill in California. A lot of people went there to dig for gold. In the early days, gold was close to the surface and easy to dig up. You could even find gold grains in the riverbed silt.

But as more people came, the easy gold became harder to find. Those who came later had to dig deeper. They needed more time, more money, and more equipment. Gold mining had relied on simple individual tools, but now it began to require capital, with methods like hydraulic and underground mining.

This way of thinking puts all the attention on personal ability and personal choices, but misses a more fundamental variable: the amount of gold in the mine is not infinite. The longer people dig, the less gold is left, until digging for more gold simply isn’t worth it anymore. So if we look at the timeline, the same person with the same skills can enter the same gold mine at different times and get very different returns.

The formula becomes:

“Vein conditions” × “individual effort” = returns

It is not “individual effort = returns,” as we once believed. So we can look at broader industry patterns and today’s job market the same way.

Behind every job, there are problems we know how to solve. The amount of those problems is limited by our level of technology. That’s the problem-vein.

Not every problem belongs to that vein. There are still many problems we can’t solve simply because we don’t have the technology yet. For example, today we can’t just type into a chat box and have the chatbot give us AGI, or give us $1 billion tomorrow.

When opportunities begin to shrink, the relevant question changes: how much value is left in this mine?

Or perhaps the better question is: under current conditions, how much value can humans actually extract from this mine? Once the vein itself is overlooked, everything starts to look like a problem with the miners.

So, it’s time to find a new vein.