Carl J. Soda

With Chemist Warehouse.

We have developed a very convenient cultural belief in Australia, which is now showing up especially loudly in a certain corner of Gen Z, that ambition is suspicious, that productivity is a trap and that if you are working hard and getting ahead, you must somehow be complicit in something sinister.

Purple Pingas, the socialist from Victoria, said it plainly on an SBS panel recently.

Yeah, 100%.

So the moment you have to work to live, you are being exploited.

Let's digest this, because once you understand the way this is framed, everything else follows quite logically.

If the basic act of needing to earn a living is exploitation, then success is simply evidence of how thoroughly you have participated in a corrupt system.

Anyone who has more than you isn't admirable, they're actually the villain.

Nietzsche had a name for this, resentment.

This isn't just resentment, it's far more specific.

It's the psychological process by which people who cannot achieve, or will not try, transform that inability into a moral framework.

The person who built something becomes the enemy, not because they did anything wrong, but because their existence is an uncomfortable reminder.

The values have been inverted entirely.

Ambition becomes greed, and success becomes theft, and suddenly doing nothing, not trying, or working hard feels righteous.

The reason this framing is so seductive is that it dissolves responsibility completely.

You're not where you are because you didn't try, you're where you are because the system exploited you.

It tastes delicious because it costs you nothing.

So we've arrived at this strange inversion where the people who sacrificed and who took the risks and delayed the gratification and built something real are held in the most contempt, openly resented by people who have never had the desire or ambition to try in the first place.

For years, I've been trying to understand how we arrived at a place in this country where tall poppy syndrome has become our national sport.

We salivate at the opportunity to tear down our own homegrown success stories.