Enter The Degen Condition.

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This newsletter’s inaugural post, published on Sept. 1, 2025, in case you missed it:

Welcome to The Degen Condition

You can't win. You can't break even. You can't quit the game.

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On Super Bowl XLVIII Media Day in 2014, the greatest philosopher of our times, Seattle Seahawks running back Marshawn Lynch, sat at a podium, sunglasses on and hoodie up. He was visibly uncomfortable as sports reporters rattled off a litany of banal questions, the kind his peers entertained with banal answers.

But not our boy Marshawn. After six minutes of one-word answers and grunts, the wise one, exasperated, leaned into the microphone. “I’m good,” he said. Then he stood up and walked off. Offstage, Deion Sanders approached him, mic in hand. The camera is on them and it’s awkward af. Deion asks him: “you just don’t want to talk, really?” No hesitation, stoically, Marshawn drops glorious game:

“I'm just ‘bout that action, boss."

Adding context and a response: “I ain't ever see no talking win me nothin’.” Whether he intended to or not, Marshawn cast a binary between action and talk that cuts harder now in 2025 than it did in 2014. It would prove prophetic, as the tension surrounding what it is and isn’t action, why it’s necessary, when it’s appropriate, etc. has shaped our reality since Marshawn’s meme moment.

In gambling parlance, action is a bet, or many bets. Its singular and plural forms are same. To want a piece of the action means you’re willing to stake something of value in pursuit of a gain but at the risk of a loss. It’s a term that originated in poker, but was normalized through sports betting. That journey to the mainstream is evident when we look at the numbers and the language. ESPN reported the “total action” on Super Bowl XLVIII in 2014 was $119.4 million, a record for a single day of sports betting at the time. That record has been broken every year since. Total action for Super Bowl LIX this year: $1.39 billion.

Action, in this metonymic usage, isn’t just slang—a different word meaning the same thing. Action makes the act multidimensional: it’s not just the bet itself, but also the excitement of anticipating its outcome. The distinction between act (the thing being done) and action (the doing of the thing) collapses in this form of the word. What is distilled here is the spirt of the degen condition, an idea central to degen epistemology. The casual gambler knows that action is a wager, but the degen knows even more that the wager is an action.

In a scene in Two For the Money, Matthew McConaughey’s character Brandon walks into the sports book and asks, where’s the action? It’s part of his salutation. We know he’s talking about gambling but he specifically wants to know: On which event(s) are the highest degree of betting activity taking place? What are other bettors most excited about?

The root of action is the Latin verb agere, which encompassed a wide range of meanings: to act or perform, to set in motion, to lead. From agere came two nouns: actus (a doing) and actum (a thing done). Both words folded into actio, a word with two crucial meanings in Roman society. First, in law, where an actio was a legal claim. A formal courtroom motion where a citizen exposed themself to judgment and risk. Second, in theater, where actio referred to the exaggerated gestures of an actors’ performance. Millennia ago, the word’s duality is stamped: action as (juridical) risk, action as (theatrical) display. Stakes versus spectacle. One concrete, measured and calculated. The other unquantifiable, unpredictable and visceral.

The dual life of actio persisted as it was adopted into Old French (accion) before entering Middle English as the word we know today (action). A search through the historical record of books and documents in the Google Ngrams database documents the existence of action around the 15th century, with an exponential increase in usage beginning around 1600. This upward trend culminated in a sharp peak in the 1720s— artifact of the moment in history when the English word action was, for all practical purposes, monopolized by the legal system. To “bring an action” in the 17th and early 18th centuries meant to initiate a lawsuit.

It’s almost funny now to think of action as something so formalized and tedious. Very opposite of a thrill, not very degen-adjacent. As it slipped the leash of legal jargon, action re-entered the common lexicon as a more dynamic word, finding its way to the stage (the action of a play), to the battlefield (a military action), to Hollywood (lights, camera, action!), paving the way for it’s eventual migration to the card tables, casinos and speculation markets of the world. And how it all happened is a story you can’t tell without talking about capitalism.

The word’s precipitous fall in the print record by the mid-1700s signaled not a disappearance, but liberation. Action as a legal term, a product of a pre-industrial world, was steamrolled by a new era. The Industrial Revolution’s exponential growth in commerce, disputes, and complex financial instruments revealed the old common law’s “forms of action” as hopelessly archaic, a sclerotic system unfit for the volatile, risk-fueled engine of capitalism. So the 19th century scrapped it, replacing action with “lawsuit” or “case.” In cases where “action” did remain, it rebranded for its Latinate gravitas, becoming lexical currency for the new economy’s of large-scale litigation: the “class action,” the “shareholder derivative action,” terms that evoke the sheer force of capital.

The development of capitalism decoupled “action” from bureaucratic litigation. It became a more descriptive vessel for risk and immediacy in a marketplace of goods and ideas where competition was encouraged. Around the time America joined the Western world stage as an industrial, imperial power in the early 20th century, action arrives at the card table. One of the earliest usages of action in gambling is found in the 1914 book “Hoyle’s Games.1”

This transformation from a term for a controlled process to slang for an unpredictable gamble feels peculiarly modern. It mirrors our own cultural trajectory where the slow, institutional path to power and stability feel increasingly inaccessible, even fraudulent. As more of us lose faith in the “action” of institutions, we’ve come to crave the other kind: the all-in bet, the disruptive play, the doubling down. The thrilling, high-stakes narrative that promises a different outcome, not just now, but right now. The word’s history is a palimpsest. The old meaning haunts the new one, reminding us that every bet is also a calculation, a risk with an outcome, and every action, ultimately, is player versus the house.

Around the time action as a legal term declined in popular usage, Adam Smith wrote extensively in The Wealth of Nations (1776) about speculation—a word that was also undergoing its own capitalist rebranding. Before then, it simply meant making predictions, but not necessarily with a financial dimension. It wasn’t a bet, yet. By the 1770s, however, the act of trading with credit became common practice in England banks2, essentially a kind of proto-futures and options, resulting in a crisis early in the decade that Smith had a front row seat to.

It’s in this emergent capitalist economy and political structure, in industrial Britain and its colonies, where speculation and action both dive into degeneracy. Smith profiled a figure he called the “projector”—an early modern merchant who risked fortunes on uncertain ventures: shipping expeditions, colonial trade routes, enslaved human trafficking, the usual. They were essentially gamblers, but ones whose action could theoretically fund innovation and make markets more efficient. But like all gamblers, their actions have the potential to endanger speculators and spectators alike.

Though Smith was ambivalent to speculation—the first institutionalized modern form of gambling—he didn’t condemn it outright. He framed it as a kind of wager, a risk that could veer one into ruin but ultimately produced a net positive effect for society. For Smith, trading futures and extending credit were engines of the free market, and degens were welcome on the train.

Today, 250 years later, the newest form of projector has arrived: the prediction market bettor. Like their earlier speculating ancestors, they make big and small wagers on outcomes that haven’t yet materialized, treating the future as something that can be calculated and staked.

Karl Marx saw what Smith was eating and put some sauce on it. Where Smith saw speculation as adventurous, sometimes reckless, behavior, Marx saw it as the logical final form of capitalism: the commodification of time itself. In Capital Vol. III, he writes:

“Interest-bearing capital is the perfect fetish form of capital, where it appears to generate value by itself, without mediation by the production process. It is the sale of a claim on future surplus value.”

For Marx, the speculation of his era was seeding of a future where financialization takes over every corner of society. What Smith called the rashness of projectors becomes, under industrial capitalism, the attempted enclosures of uncertainty. While Smith imagined speculation as side quests for commerce, Marx anticipated rightly that speculation would become the main storyline. Action, the wager on what is to come, has become a commodity itself.

“Clap for your freedom, dog, that's what's happening
My spit take critical political action
The hustle is a puzzle, each piece is a fraction
And every word that's understood is a transaction”

- Black Thought (The Roots) "Sacrifice"

Hannah Arendt believed that life without action was barely life at all. In The Human Condition, published in 1958, she conceived the full modern life to be one comprised of a balance between three things: labor, work, and action. Labor was necessity, the endless cycle of hunger and bread. Work was fabrication, the building of tables and cathedrals, things that could outlast the hands that shaped them. But action was the one thing that resisted capture. It was unpredictable, irreducible, born of the human collective spirit, of plurality. “The frailty of human affairs is bound up with the unpredictability of the outcome and the irreversibility of the process,” she wrote.

For Arendt, action was collectively practiced, a moment when people stepped together into the unknown, bringing unforseen things into being. It is always risky, always exposed, always beyond calculation. To mistake politics for engineering, she warned, was to kill it. Action could not be managed like work, or commodified like a product. Once you tried, its meaning was destroyed.

Within the same decade as Arendt’s The Human Condition, Erving Goffman published

Goffman’s worldview recalled the more primitive definition of action as performance, where the casino is a stage for drama (sometimes comedy, often tragedy). “Placing oneself in jeopardy during a passing moment,” he wrote, was the essence of action. One placed themself in jeopardy, motivated equally by the need to prove their grit than to gain a profit. It is a defiance to the uncertainty Arendt proposed we fight with, not against; a choice to risk something of value to prove one’s conviction.

In Buddhist philosophy, the very word for action reveals its profound stakes. Drawn from the Sanskrit karma, which simply means ‘action’ or ‘deed,’ the term is elevated from a mere description of doing into a universal law of cause and effect. Here, action is not primarily about risk or speculation. Or freedom from determinism or whatever Western philosophical concept is popular this month.

This is action not as a wager on an uncertain future outcome, but a deterministic law of ethical consequence that shapes the actor from the inside out. While the gambler takes action to master chance, the karma enjoyer acts to master the mind, from which all action springs. As the Dhammapada makes clear: “Mind precedes all mental states...”

This view subsumes and reinterprets the others. For Arendt, action (praxis) is the highest human activity because it introduces novelty and freedom into the world. For Buddhism, the most crucial action is that which introduces freedom from the cycle of suffering. Goffman’s "action" is a performance for an audience, primarily other degens, risking reputation for clout. The primary audience of the karmic act is (please withhold laughter) the universe itself. In this light, all worldly action—political, economic, or social—is ultimately measured by a single standard: does it sow the seeds of suffering or of liberation? To which the degen would probably answer: both.

1. The passage reads: “No ‘action’ can be had on a bet until the card bet upon appears. If it does not appear after a turn has been made, the player is at liberty to change his bet, or to remove it altogether. Each bet is made for the turn only, unless the player chooses to leave it until he gets some action on it.”
   - from "Faro" in "Hoyle's Games," A.L. Burt Company, New York: 1914

2. Surprise, the same folks who ushered in capitalism also ushered in degeneracy and grift. See: British Credit Crisis of 1772-1773: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_credit_crisis_of_1772–1773