When I was a kid, they drilled into me that being academically successful will get you into the top schools, and get you the best jobs.

Cut to me now in my 30s, been job hunting for the past year after being laid off from my previous job for not meeting their standards three months after one of my parents died, and having the gall to try to set boundaries against doing installs back to back.

Grades don't mean shit if you don't have the following:

Interview skills (aka the ability to BS your way through an interview), Experience (sad that those who start working in high school are ahead of the game, when really kids shouldn't have to be put in situations to start work that early), Connections (it's not what you know, it's who you know)

Barely had any of these when I graduated from college and spent close to 6 months trying to find a job from there.

You have to solve basic logic before you can cognitize the natural immunity to that which will never be real.

Just make soap instead of being a leaf in Serenity.

Yeah! Why don't we just switch to one of the other economic systems we've used in the past that was completely free of exploitation?

Wait...

1 house, sure, but only companies with 1 employee? That's just entirely impossible without reverting back to a straight global federation of luddite city states, which would be slim pickings to the first technologically superior predator state (which they will be, since making rockets and guns at a rate necessary for warfare generally requires companies with more than one employee).

The optimal system can't just be an ideal spherical cow, it also has to compete with adversarial predatory nation states that don't follow your ideals.

I am a financial/business advisor to a small law firm. They have the best secretarial/paralegal team in the county. They also pay the highest rates in the county, have damn good profit sharing and have for as long as I've advised them. I told them that it's what would happen. They didn't hire different people, just the folk there felt valued and (I didn't tell the lawyers this bit) probably like they owned the means they were producing. A little woah. But I like to think I made some good bosses out of them.

or i could just find some people to start a co-op with??

Under capitalism, it is almost by definition. Glad you're having a better time than the rest of us, but your personal anecdote is irrelevant to society at large.

You would not be employed if it wasn't profitable. Which also means the surplus value of your labor, above and beyond what you're being compensated for, is going to your employer. That's exploitation. It's mandatory in most employment under capitalist economics.

The problem is that under capitalism, which is a competitive ecosystem, over the short term those qualities are selected against, and it constantly, naturally, seeks continuous vertical integration which necessarily puts the wealth and power into fewer and fewer hands over time.

Now you can claim this can be prevented with regulation, but in practice that will only slow the process since even slow centralization of wealth leads to people with vastly disproportionate wealth, and therefore influence over regulatory policies, which they will degrade over time (once again because the corporations which do deregulate themselves will be more selected for in a naturally selective ecosystem than those which fail to do so).

Capitalism as a system basically rewards the most unethical practices in it's ecosystem with more power.

The ultimate reality is nothing is likely in your lifetime except societal collapse from climate change.

What you do next is up to you, there is no saviour or solution coming. There is doing the best you can today, and trying to build up local community, skills, and bonds that may help you.

so what you're effectively saying here is "why should i bother if i won't personally profit from it", which i'm not sure is something you can be reasoned out of.

We should work toward anarchy because it's the ring thing to do, if we don't do it then who will? It's like voting, if you don't vote for a small but good party then who will?

What do you mean?