Fiat is engineered for depreciation. Nobody with actual power denies this, they just profit from the churn. Step one, "understand the problem", is honestly the most radical act you can do. Because the minute you see the architecture of inflation, you stop blaming yourself for never "catching up". The hamster wheel was never built to reward hamsters

You say knowledge first, and you are right, but the dark joke is that information itself is now a commodity. Every click is monetized, every "finance tip" recycled. Distinguishing between signal and noise is a skill nobody taught in school. And Bitcoin, love it, hate it, doesn't matter, just the willingness to consider an alternative system is an act of intellectual independence. But Bitcoin is just the loudest signal for a global anxiety: people are exhausted by inflationary regimes and hungry for non-state solutions. How to "diversify" when every asset class is shadowed by politics, algorithms, or collective panic?

Financial discipline? Sure, but most people are forced into "discipline" by necessity, not virtue. Self-help books rarely talk about the fact that in many economies, budgeting is just a fancy word for chronic stress. That is where your last line actually hits home. The system is unstable, but you can reduce chaos at the micro-level: tune your habits, curate your information diet, be radical about risk. The era of passive saving is gone. Active skepticism, active adaptation. That is the only hedge that works in a world where the rules change mid-game