Jamie Dimon wants his bank to save the American dream at a moment when many Americans are losing faith in its economic promise.
JPMorgan announced a sweeping initiative aimed at expanding opportunities for upward mobility on Tuesday. It’s “American Dream Initiative” will focus on six key areas: small-business growth, housing affordability, financial literacy, skills-based training, healthcare, and local institutions, such as schools and hospitals.
While JPMorgan CEO Dimon, who made $43 million last year, is bullish on the American promise, Americans themselves are increasingly skeptical that capitalism, at its heart, still works. A Gallup poll in September found that a record-low 54% of Americans view capitalism favorably, down from 60% in 2021.
Small business owners are among those feeling an economic crunch — 77% of small and midsize business owners said their costs have risen over the past year, according to a November report from Bank of America — and JPMorgan is first focusing its new initiative on supporting them.
Through the American Dream Initiative, JPMorgan will work to bank 10 million small businesses, up from 7 million today. The firm outlined plans to provide nearly $80 billion in lending over the next decade, along with hiring more small business bankers and consultants. JPMorgan didn’t provide specific dollar amounts for many of the other investments — it will, according to the release, “support efforts that provide better access to healthcare” and “improve affordability for hundreds of thousands of renters” — and said the initiative will roll out over multiple years.
Dimon, who has said he salutes the flag in the lobby of his global headquarters every morning, has made other big commitments recently. In October, JPMorgan announced a $1.5 trillion Security and Resiliency Initiative to boost key US industries, focusing on defense and aerospace, “frontier” technologies, energy technologies, and supply chains. Earlier this year, the bank joined the list of companies committed to contributing to “Trump Accounts” for the kids of US-based employees, saying it would match the government’s one-time $1,000 contribution to the investment accounts for eligible newborns.
Government and corporate investments in Americans’ finances come amid something of a crisis of capitalism, especially among Democrats and younger generations. The most recent Harvard Youth Poll found that 39% of 18- to 29-year-olds surveyed support capitalism, down from 45% in 2020.
Though some Business Insider readers have told us that their belief in capitalism remains strong, others have cited rising living costs, the brutal job market, and AI as factors eroding their trust in the bedrock of America’s economy.
Even some big names on Wall Street have warned that capitalism is on potentially shaky ground. Longtime Citi banker Jay Collins, who has spent decades advising government officials through crises, recently told Business Insider that AI and robotics could challenge the capitalistic system.
“We have to tweak it, remodel it, remake it to allow for this, just like we did during the Industrial Revolution,” he said.
Growing up in the suburbs of southern California, I knew a few things to be true about my family. Most importantly, I knew that all we had were each other. Unlike my friends at school, we did not have any extended family. There were no big Thanksgivings, hangouts with our cousins, or sleepovers at our grandparents’ house.
It was just us four, navigating the differences between the Western culture we lived in and the Eastern culture of our roots.
I grew up in Los Angeles as the eldest daughter of an immigrant family. My parents had left their motherland in search of new possibilities in this one. The only family they would have here was the one that they would go on to create: my little sister and me.
But all that changed when I landed a job in a different city after college.
My parents encouraged me to move
When I received my acceptance letter to a university in Los Angeles, I was reassured that I would not be too far from home. When I was not on campus, I was back in my childhood living room, catching up with my little sister over our favorite boba orders and proudly taking pictures of her high school theater performances. I was playing Chinese checkers with my mom on our dining room table, followed by walking our family pup with my dad under the palm trees.
Meanwhile, in college, my life was actively progressing. By the end of my degree, I landed a dream job that would be the first building block of my future career.
It was based in Seattle.
All my life, my parents had encouraged me to go where the opportunity is. After all, that is what led them to America, where they were able to give their children the childhood they never had. In their eyes, if Seattle was where the opportunity was, that is where I should go.
“The flight is not too far,” my mom said, “but we will miss you.”
I couldn’t shake the guilt of leaving my family
I felt a continuous wave of internal conflict. On one hand, I was excited to experience something new. On the other hand, I felt guilty for leaving my already small family.
When I asked my friends if they ever felt guilty about moving away from home, I was surprised by their responses. For most of them, it never even crossed their minds. They chose to move because they never saw themselves living in the same area they grew up in, and they knew it would not provide the industries they needed.
The author decided to move to Seattle.
Courtesy of Sherri Lu
They took possibly never living near their parents again as a given part of adulthood. Their parents share this belief and, like mine, encouraged them to carve out the life path that best suits them.
Perhaps my guilt stemmed from the fact that I was choosing to leave a city that could potentially offer similar career prospects. Would I feel the same guilt about moving away if my family were located somewhere I did not feel as warmly about?
Eventually, I did talk myself into taking the job. As I settled into Seattle, I thought about how my grandparents felt when their daughter moved across the ocean from China to America. By comparison, my living just a few states away felt minor.
“How did you feel when Mom told you she was considering leaving home?” I asked my grandma over video chat.
“She needed to make her own decisions on what she thought was best for her life, but I did secretly cry about it,” she told me. “I made sure your mother never saw because I did not want it to influence her decision.”
I made the right decision
Beyond my career, living on my own gave me the space to understand myself more deeply. I began sharing my self-discovery journey online with “Eldest Daughter Club” and grew it into a community of other women doing the same. I found different forms of family as I bridged the distance between my own.
I called my family often and planned routine trips back home. Although our in-person time was now more limited, I made sure that a larger percentage of it was true quality time.
Guilt was the feeling that encompassed the discomfort of leaving behind the familial support system that I had always counted on. In the end, support transcends location.
We must all make the decisions on what we think is best for our lives. Guilt is just a signal of what you cherish, but it does not tell your whole story. That is for us to build, wherever we decide to call home.
As Sylendran Arunagiri considered moving from India to the US to pursue a master’s degree, some friends and mentors advised him to delay his move. They warned that the US tech job market had become too challenging.
Arunagiri’s goal was to move to the US in late 2023, begin a master’s program in product management at Carnegie Mellon University, and land a Big Tech internship for the summer of 2024. He hoped this would be a stepping stone toward landing an AI-related role, ideally at Nvidia, his “dream company” because of its central role in the AI technologies he’d long wanted to work on.
However, there were several things working against him. For one, the US tech hiring landscape was already creating headaches for job seekers. Openings had plummeted from highs reached a year earlier, and industry layoffs were increasing competition for available roles.
Additionally, Arunagiri had grown accustomed to the job market in India, where he earned a bachelor’s degree and an MBA from top institutions that he said relied on structured campus placement programs to funnel many students directly into jobs. But from what he’d heard, the US was very different. Job fairs were often more like networking events than recruiting opportunities.
“You’re completely on your own,” said the 30-year-old, who now lives in San Jose.
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Arunagiri is among the many job seekers who have struggled to navigate a US hiring landscape that’s become more challenging in recent years. Amid economic uncertainty, the early effects of generative AI adoption, and a broader push to streamline operations, US businesses are now hiring at one of the slowest rates since 2013.
Still, some people have managed to break through in a challenging market. Arunagiri shared how he pursued his goal of working at Nvidia — a company he described as his dream employer — and offered his top advice for other job seekers.
Striking out on Nvidia
Many of the tech companies Arunagiri was targeting had conducted summer internship interviews the previous fall, so he began applying before moving to the US. After sending out many applications, he landed an interview with Nvidia in November 2023.
Arunagiri said the interview process went so well that he stopped applying to other internships. But after moving to the US and completing his final interview in February, he learned that he wouldn’t be getting the role — which left him scrambling to find another internship.
“I had to start from scratch, but by then many of the applications had dried out,” he said
Arunagiri was able to land an AI product manager internship based in India at the tech company Informatica. However, that summer, he found it difficult to stop thinking about what went wrong during his interview process with Nvidia — and began setting his sights on eventually landing a full-time role with the company.
A second chance at Nvidia
Upon reflection, Arunagiri suspected that his final Nvidia interview may have doomed him. He said he was lower energy than usual because he was feeling sick that day, and that he’d been hesitant to postpone it out of fear that the opportunity would be filled in the meantime. In hindsight, he said that decision was likely a mistake.
“I came off as a dull candidate, but I’m usually energetic and conversational,” he said. “I should have probably postponed it to a day that I was feeling better.”
Arunagiri decided to reach out to an HR professional from Nvidia to get insight into where he fell short, and they agreed to jump on a call with him. While they didn’t provide specific insights into his candidacy, he said they recommended he try to connect with people at Nvidia in current roles, including hiring managers and interns, to get insight into the kinds of projects they were working on and how he could better align his profile.
He eventually connected with about five Nvidia interns, who he said provided valuable insights. Those conversations helped shape the personal AI-related projects he began pursuing and sharing on LinkedIn in hopes of standing out.
After the summer, Arunagiri dove back into the job search, eager to land a role before he graduated in December 2024. He knew that if he didn’t land a job within 90 days after graduation, his F-1 visa restrictions would force him to return to India.
In September 2024, he submitted a cold application for a technical product marketing role in agentic AI at Nvidia —a role he described as his “dream AI role” at his dream company. He was asked to interview starting in October, and around the same time, he was also invited to interview for a more junior product management role at Microsoft.
Read more about people who’ve found themselves at a corporate crossroads
Advice for other job seekers
In December, with his graduation looming later that month, Arunagiri received offers from Nvidia and Microsoft within days of each other. Given that Nvidia was his dream employer, the role checked a lot of his boxes, and the pay was higher than Microsoft’s, he said the decision was fairly easy — and he accepted Nvidia’s offer. He said that so far, working at Nvidia has been “everything that I’ve dreamed of.”
Arunagiri believes that his LinkedIn presence helped him stand out. During the interview process, he said, the hiring manager told him that he’d reviewed his LinkedIn profile and noticed the projects he’d been working on, including small experiments with new generative AI tools and models he’d shared publicly.
He has a few pieces of advice for job seekers. First, he said, time management is key, particularly because applying for jobs and connecting with people can be time-consuming. Second, he said, never compare your job search journey to anyone else’s, since a variety of factors can influence how it plays out.
Rather than quietly applying and networking, he recommends sharing tangible projects publicly — such as posting about AI tools you’ve explored and linking to projects on LinkedIn or a personal website — so hiring managers can see your work.
“You need to find something that sets you apart from others,” he said.
When Alyson Isaacs joined Meta in 2022, she only had about $200 in her savings account. A six-figure salary offered a chance to rebuild her finances, but her ultimate goal lay outside Big Tech.
After college, Isaacs “completely drained” her savings on a startup she’d co-founded, and found herself grappling with her next career move. After weighing her options, she decided to follow the advice of a mentor: go to “startup rehab” — in other words, takea full-timejob.
“You can always get a job at a Big Tech company,'” said Isaacs, who’s 28 and lives in San Francisco.
About four months later, she landed a product manager role at Meta in the company’s Quest for Business virtual reality division. But her entrepreneurial itch never left, and she eventually began mapping out the best path back into the startup world.
“There are ways you can be entrepreneurial,” she said of working at Big Tech, “but it’s very much not the same.”
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Over the past year, I’ve interviewed more than a dozen workers who, like Isaacs, chose to quit their jobs at major employers — in some cases without another role lined up. While some eventually landed at another large company, others stepped away from the corporate world entirely — joining a smaller business, launching their own venture, pursuing a career pivot, or focusing on personal priorities like parenting.
They’ve become outliers in an economy where workers are quitting at one of the lowest rates in the past decade — a trend driven by a hiring slowdown that’s left some clinging to their jobs with few appealing alternatives. Those who have called it quits told me they did so for a mix of reasons: concerns about job security, shifts in workplace culture, entrepreneurial ambitions, or a desire for more meaningful work. In short, they wanted greater long-term agency over their careers.
Isaacs shared how she decided to take the leap back into entrepreneurship — and offered advice for others facing a similar career crossroads.
Preparing for a return to entrepreneurship
After leaving her post-college startup, Isaacs took a month to reset. She then spent two months interviewing at smaller companies to fine-tune her résumé and sharpen her interview skills. Eventually, she applied for a role at Meta and landed the job. She moved from the Berkeley area to San Francisco and started in May 2022 — about a year after graduation.
While Isaacs didn’t have firm plans to return to entrepreneurship, she knew that if she ever went down that path again, she’d need to be financially prepared for life without a steady paycheck. So she started living well below her means, including living in a less expensive area, going to a basic gym, cooking at home, and avoiding shopping sprees.
“I saved so hard because I knew that this wasn’t going to be the end game for me, and I wanted to start my own thing again eventually,” she said.
Isaacs also prepared for a potential return to entrepreneurship by spending about five hours a week angel investing, which involved scouting and backing startups. After about a year of saving, she began making a few investments, each under $10,000. She said the experience helped her build a network in San Francisco’s startup scene and spot gaps other entrepreneurs could exploit — insights that helped shape her own business ideas.
The final phase of Isaacs’ preparation was soaking up everything she could from her time at Meta, including transitioning to a product manager position at Instagram — one of Meta’s subsidiaries — in 2024. She said the roles gave her knowledge and experience that entrepreneurship alone couldn’t provide.
“Traditional entrepreneurship was just flying by the edge of my seat and seeing what worked,” she said. “But I needed that level of expertise to go farther in my career.”
The question was when to make the leap and leave Meta. Isaacs said the death of her father in 2024 weighed heavily on her thought process.
“That really triggered this thought in my brain of, ‘Is being a product manager at a Big Tech company what I want to do for the rest of my life?'” she said. “And the answer was resoundingly no — I wanted to do something on my own and prove myself.”
By mid-2025, Isaacs found herself thinking more and more about a startup idea in the consumer AI space — and struggling to focus on her job at Meta. On July 1, she resigned; the next day, she began working full-time on her startup, which she described as an “agentic AI solution for personal wellness.” The company is currently in stealth, meaning the team isn’t publicly sharing full details while the product is still in development. She said she and her two co-founders are testing the product with users and plan to open a pre-seed funding round in the spring.
Read more about people who’ve found themselves at a corporate crossroads
Advice for others weighing big career moves
Isaacs said she knows many people might hesitate to give up a Big Tech job. But she believes some underestimate their chances of finding a new role or building something themselves — and end up stuck in jobs they don’t enjoy.
“It’s kind of like dating,” she said, adding that if you anticipate a bad dating pool, “you’re going to stay with your bad ex.”
Isaacs said she wasn’t worried about resigning from Meta, in part because she’s a “super optimist” about her career. If her startup doesn’t work out, she’s confident in her backup plan — the same one she relied on after her post-college startup opportunity fell through.
“Leaving Meta wasn’t scary for me because I was like, ‘I can always get another job in Big Tech,'” she said.
Isaacs has a few pieces of advice for other aspiring entrepreneurs. She recommends connecting with as many people as possible who are relevant to the venture you want to pursue — and looking for ways to help them, whether through angel investing, advising, or offering support.
“You kind of create this flywheel of people helping you if you help other people first,” she said.
Additionally, even if your end goal is to build a business, Isaacs said having experience at a big-name company can give you valuable credibility as an entrepreneur.
“I needed to be undeniable as a founder, and having a big-box name brand on your résumé gives you that undeniability,” she said.
I was living the dream — flying internationally nearly once a month for my work as a travel writer, crisscrossing the globe to cover incredible destinations.
Invitations like cruising the Norwegian coastline and then jetting off to a buzzy restaurant opening in Las Vegas were too good to refuse, even if they were happening back-to-back.
Meanwhile, the frequent long-haul flights, indulgent meals, packed itineraries, and erratic sleep schedules were quietly taking a toll on my health — I was gaining a substantial amount of weight and frequently feeling exhausted.
I just told myself that less-than-stellar health was just the price of admission for this sort of career. After all, my job consisted of bucket-list-worthy experiences, like hiking in Peru and going on safari in Kenya!
It took me several years to admit to myself that I couldn’t keep living this way.
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As much as I love traveling, doing it nonstop wasn’t great for my physical or mental health
I love traveling, but it can be exhausting.
Meredith Bethune
In reality, the job of my dreams consisted of overnight flights where I’d get little to no rest, then hit the ground running as soon as I arrived at my destinations.
After I’d fly back home from some trips, it would take me nearly a week to recover from jet lag. My stress levels were often cranked up, dealing with flight delays, deadlines, and navigation across different states and countries.
With grueling daily schedules on the road, I rarely had time to answer emails. I’d come home to a full inbox and even fuller calendar.
The regular exposure to dry air on planes wasn’t helping my immune system, and neither was all the stress. I felt like I was constantly getting sick with colds, flus, or whatever was going around.
Meanwhile, my diet wasn’t balanced or nutritious. It largely consisted of indulgent meals on press trips, where I felt pressure to try everything so I could write about it.
Saying no felt awkward, even when I knew I’d feel better if I could set firmer boundaries.
I’ve been able to see many places through my work as a travel writer.
Meredith Bethune
On top of all that, I wasn’t exercising. After all, press trips run on tight schedules. I’d return to the hotel late, wake up early, sit in a van for hours between stops, and finish the day with a multicourse dinner.
Some fellow writers managed to fit in workouts, but I didn’t. It wasn’t a priority for me then.
All the travel felt isolating at times, too. I was spending most of my days with publicists, fellow writers, and guides. They were all lovely people, but not permanent fixtures in my life.
My closest friends lived far away, and I kept postponing visits because I was always either traveling or catching up from being away.
Meanwhile, my parents were getting older and needed more support.
After nearly a decade of jet-setting, by 2019, it had become undeniable that my mother’s memory problems went beyond normal aging. Finally, I felt compelled to take my health seriously.
My mother’s diagnosis felt like a wake-up call to prioritize my well-being
Eventually, I realized I couldn’t travel so much without facing some consequences for my own health.
Meredith Bethune
By that time, my mother’s cognitive difficulties had progressed so much that she no longer seemed like herself. And though her official Alzheimer’s diagnosis came later, by then, it was just a formality. We had already known for years.
There wasn’t anything I could do to stop my mom’s Alzheimer’s from progressing, but I threw myself into researching the disease so I could know more about what the future held for her and, eventually, me.
I worried whether a similar diagnosis — one millions of Americans share — could be in the cards for me someday.
Though it’s not preventable, some studies and members of the medical community suggest that certain lifestyle changes, like being physically active and managing blood sugar and blood pressure levels, may lower one’s risk of developing some forms of the disease or delay its symptoms.
Even if I couldn’t prevent a future diagnosis, I knew finally taking care of my body and mind would be good for me. All that nonstop travel had been quietly wrecking my health, and the way I’d been living and working wasn’t sustainable.
I feel much better now that I’m traveling way less
I can’t control the future, but I can at least prioritize my health.
Meredith Bethune
It’s been over five years since I significantly cut back on travel.
I exercise almost every day and try to regularly follow a balanced diet. I’ve since lost over 50 pounds and sleep much better.
When I do go on trips, I do so with more intention and a lot of focus on the Northeast, close to home.
I probably take an overnight or weekend trip within driving distance about every six weeks. I still fly for work once or twice a year, but I’m no longer constantly on the road, and my body feels the difference.
When I go on bigger trips, I actually feel like I have more opportunities than I did before. Recently, I even hiked the Grand Canyon rim-to-rim, which I would never have attempted back when I was out of shape and constantly feeling drained.
Giving up on my dream job wasn’t easy, but I want to feel good and stay in great shape for as long as I can — even if that means finding peace at home instead of abroad.
A top Silicon Valley investor has an antidote for “quiet quitting.”
Bill Gurley is a general partner at venture capitalist firm Benchmarkand the author of “Runnin’ Down a Dream, How to Thrive in a Career You Actually Love.” Gurley told Neal Freyman and Toby Howell on the “Morning Brew Daily” podcast that aired on Sunday that it is “horrific” how some people are actively disengaged at work, but the heart of the matter is that people “aren’t ending up in the right place.”
“We developed this mindset where you push kids toward economic safety — doctors, lawyers, jobs where unemployment is low, and salaries are high,” said Gurley. “But we’ve pushed a lot of kids into what I call the ‘career industrial complex.'”
Gurley said that the “career industrial complex” means pushing children toward a “résumé arms race” of standardization and credential accumulation, rather than encouraging curiosity and exploration.
A simple test as to whether you would be successful in your dream job, said Gurley, is whether you would be willing to learn on your own time.
“I like to say, you know, if you have three episodes of Breaking Bad left, would you study this instead?” said Gurley. “Like, does it compete with what you do in your free time?”
Gurley added that he once did a survey where he asked 10,000 people if they would choose a different career if given the chance to go back in time, and 60% said yes.
Gurley’s comments came as workplace trends such as “job hugging” and “quiet cracking” emerged in 2025.
While workers feared layoffs and the prospects of landing new roles dimmed for many young professionals.
A Gallup poll done in 2024 found that employee engagement in the US fell to its lowest level in a decade, with only 31% of employees feeling engaged. Additionally, workers under the age of 35 are less engaged compared to other age groups.
