The other day I was at the park with my daughter and my mother-in-law. She looked over at a row of condos and asked me how much I thought they were going for. "Probably $700,000, minimum," I said. She laughed. "Oh my goodness. In my day those would have been fifty, maybe a hundred thousand."
That number does something to you. You hear it and your whole body goes, are you serious. Because the math is right there. If you'd bought back then, one or two or three of them, you'd have handed the next generation a completely different life. Generational wealth, just sitting there, and everyone walked past it to go do something ordinary.
It's easy to be annoyed at them for it. My husband and I do it too. If only your parents had bought when they could have. But when you actually ask them why they didn't, the reasons are never stupid. They were making a lot less money. They were risk-averse. They were immigrants who'd just gotten here and were not about to bet the little they had on a hunch. Sometimes it was as simple as one partner not being interested, or being scared, or the timing being wrong. From here it looks like they squandered something obvious. From where they were standing, there was no obvious. There was just a normal Tuesday and a house that felt expensive at the time.
I think we're standing in one of those doorways right now.
I genuinely believe that around now, 2026 or 2027, is the moment our kids are going to point back to. The AI one. The year it all became possible and most people were busy with something else.
There's always some guy in the headlines who built a whole company overnight and made an absurd amount of money off it. And sure, that's a signal that something real is happening. But honestly, that's not why I'm writing this. A billionaire is a lottery winner. Nobody reads about a lottery winner and decides to go buy a ticket.
The thing that actually gets me is smaller and much closer to home. It's that the cost of trying just collapsed.
Think about what an idea used to require. You wanted to start something, and you needed money, a developer, maybe an agency, a website, a sales funnel, months of work and a whole team of people to pull it off. So you didn't. Not because you didn't have the guts. Because the entry fee was real, and you were broke and tired and raising small humans. It was never courage I was short on. It was the entry fee.
That fee is basically gone now. The ninety minutes I get after bedtime used to be worth nothing in business terms. You can't hire a team in ninety minutes. You can't build a product. But now, with the tools that exist, you can actually start making something real in that window. The same ninety minutes that used to be worthless is suddenly enough.
And this is exactly the point where I have to be honest with myself, because I've felt this feeling before.
This is the same voice that told me to buy bitcoin. The same one that said buy property, have kids sooner, get in before everyone else does. It's been wrong plenty of times, and it costs me nothing but a little FOMO every time I ignore it. So I have to ask myself: is this actually different, or is it the same old fear of missing out, just wearing a nicer outfit this time?
I keep landing on one thing, and it's the reason I think this one might be real. The window doesn't close because the skill gets harder. It closes because the room fills up. Right now the room is not full.
My kids are three and one. In a blink they'll be twenty-one and twenty-three, and I don't want to be standing next to them then, listening to them ask, "Mom, why didn't you build anything? It was right there. You had the tools, you had the time after we went to bed. Why didn't you try?" That's the exact conversation I have with my own parents about those houses. I don't want to be on the other side of it.
I'd genuinely rather have tried and failed than have never tried at all. That much I'm sure of.
The only part I haven't figured out yet is what, exactly, we try next.