Your Life and the Economy in the Age of Collapse
Photo by Aidan B / Unsplash
What’s going to happen with the economy? How much on your mind should it be, as you sort of stare into the future?
by Umair
The Survival of the…
What’s going to happen with the economy? How much on your mind should it be, as you sort of stare into the future?
Let’s rewind, because my goal here these days is a little bit different. It’s not to sort of tell you what the future holds, but to teach you how to think about the world now, so you can find your Havens, and live your life.
That’s important, because there’s a certain concept we’ve been dancing around, but I haven’t quite made explicit yet. Let me do that now.
We are now in am implosive phase of history. I mean that formally, not just descriptively, for effect. Paradigms are imploding around us, and we’re about to delve into that as we discuss the economy. But the effect of all that is something that you must now keep in mind at all times. I emphasize that because I don’t say this part out loud often, but now things have reached the point where I have to, and it must guide your decisions and choices now.
Many are not going to make it.
I know how that sounds, so let me explain, qualify, shade it in. I don’t mean it in a childish way, We All Die, Hollywood Movie style. I mean that we are now in for a very, very difficult time. It will last at least half a decade, probably closer to a decade, and possibly longer than that.
It will feel very much like the 1930s, and some of you have already felt like that, but what’s on the horizon now is going to be eerily like it.
In that context, many aren’t going to make it. I don’t mean, again, that everyone suddenly perishes. I mean that human agency is eradicated. People’s choices become limited. Their freedom gets removed, by circumstance, deliberately, by their own folly. They suffer, in pretty terrible ways, all the hardships of poverty, despair, fear, and more.”Not making it” means many people now will never live to their potential, and I don’t want you to be one of them.
I say that’s a form of death, and I believe that’s true.
Institutions and Economies in Transformation
But it’s not just people.
Many won’t make it, and that applies to institutions, too. How many of today’s big companies are going to really be able to weather the storms? They’re already plenty nervous. They might be around in a decade, but many of them, in a very different, a very reduced, form. Bezos cozied up to Trump, for example, because he’s basically a salesman for China at this point, and of course, Trump’s tariffs will hit one company hardest: Amazon.
So let me emphasize it. Many aren’t going to make it.
People. Institutions. Leaders.
And paradigms.
Now let’s talk about the economy, because one paradigm is now shattering before our eyes.
That paradigm is of course neoliberalism, or market liberalism, call it what you like.
If you want to just know what the future holds, that’s very simple. All of this is a recipe, an almost perfect one, for depression. In the 1920s, the government was cut, for ideological reasons. And of course, tariffs and protectionism rose. The result was the Great Depression.
I’m not saying “there’s going to be a depression.” I want you to learn how to think about this for yourself, and develop transformation intelligence, so you can anticipate, not just react, to these shocks.
So let’s try it in a more intelligent way now.
What is the “global economy,” really? It works like this. America is it’s largest consumer, by a very long way. China and a number of other nations supply Americans with stuff, artificially cheaply, not accounting for the true costs of everything from what’s basically slave labor to the environment and so on.
As a result, America overconsumes, and the rest of the world underinvests.
Now. Trump wants to turn all that inside out. And that’s understandable, because a nation can’t be the world’s largest consumer forever. Not unless it has an unlimited supply of gold or what have you. America’s been hollowed out, as we all know, because being a mega-consumer also means that there aren’t enough jobs, good ones, stable ones, like there were generations ago.
So Trump’s not wrong to want to fix this problem.
But what his team’s come up with is, as we discussed, eerily reminiscent of the 1930s.
Tariffs, trade barriers, slashing the government.
This isn’t about “solutions” anymore. How do we fix the macroeconomy, and give people jobs again, without shattering everything? That part isn’t going to happen. This is now about your life.
Transformational Intelligence
What happened as these dynamics took over the world last time? Everybody knows, but as we discussed, a big part of developing transformational intelligence is listening to yourself. Not arguing with yourself.
Your gut tends to be right.
Think about it. It knows things your mind doesn’t.
It’s alert to danger.
It can do pattern recognition at light speed.
That is why it’s always guiding you. But you have to listen to it in times like these, or else…you ignore the danger, and then you end up Sinking With the Ship, trapped in the cycle of reaction-bewilderment-panic.
So. What happened last time?
Three events. In sequence. You know them, but I’m speaking to you this way for a reason, and it’s not be condescending or paternal, it’s to point out that even now, your mind still may be clouding what your gut already knows.
Three events. Remember them? We all know them.
Black Friday, the stock market crashed.
The Great Depression came to be.
And that was the road (back) to World War.
This is the sort of situation we’re in.
Now. I’m not saying “all of that’s going to happen!! Everyone, panic!!” I’m saying something very, very different.
Understand how much you already know. Respect it. Give yourself the power to be this knowledgable person, and you have a much, much better chance. Of making it.
Because if you understand that these are the things we now run the risk of—and that’s the key, we’re speaking here about risks, not “going to happens” in a childish way, but risks, probabilities, possibilities—then you also immediately grasp what I mean by: many aren’t going to make it.
Now we are practicing Transformational Intelligence. See that? You’re already doing it. You knew about these three events, and all you needed was a bit of freeing to let yourself place them in our world today, and relate them to what’s happening now.