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Musings Report 2018-7 2-17-18 The Tidal Forces of Our Lives
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For those who are new to the Musings reports: they are basically a glimpse into my notebook, the unfiltered swamp where I organize future themes, sort through the dozens of stories and links submitted by readers, refine my own research and start connecting dots which appear later in the blog or in my books. As always, I hope the Musings spark new appraisals and insights. Thank you for supporting the site and for inviting me into your circle of correspondents.
The Tidal Forces of Our Lives
Time is of course linear--it proceeds in one direction, forward. We can return to the past in our minds, but not in reality. Aging is a vector from birth to death.
Many systems, natural and human, are cyclical: night and day, tides, weather, markets. Our inner states tend to swing between occasional extremes--depression and euphoria--but most of our day-to-day experience oscillates in the middle band between extremes.
We differentiate between natural systems and psychological states: everyone experiences natural systems, but only some people experience various psychological states.
In philosophy, we use the word ontological to denote something that is core to our being, as opposed to a psychological state that varies between individuals and groups.
I think correspondent B.D. recently described a core dynamic of the human experience, i.e. something every human experiences: our sense of the costs and benefits (the trade-offs) of every relationship and context is in constant movement, swinging like a pendulum between the sense that the benefits/rewards are high and the drawbacks/costs are low, and the costs/drawbacks exceed the benefits.
Another analogy is the tides, which ebb and flow. the difference is that tidal flows are predictable, while the ebb and flow of drawbacks and benefits in our lives are not.
Here is B.D.'s brief description of this dynamic:
Something I have learned as I’ve gotten older is that long-term relationships, especially familial, have as many drawbacks as they do benefits. The benefits and drawbacks have a pendulum swing rather than concurrency.
In my view, the tidal forces of our relationships and positions--our job, our field of endeavor, our home, our locale, etc.--are not necessarily causally connected. In other words, the ebb and flow of each of these core elements of our lives may be operating independently.
For example, while the benefits of my romantic relationship might be high, the benefits I'm getting from living in a locale/region might be at low ebb.
If the sum total of these tidal forces is neutral, the coping mechanisms we've developed enable us to maintain our equilibrium without too much hardship/cost.
But if enough of these various tidal forces overlap in an ebb flow, our internal buffers thin and our existing coping mechanisms are no longer adequate.
We experience an existential crisis: our life is no longer working, our soul is being drained by forces we can't quite identify because they are not simply psychological states. We're unhappy in some profound fashion, and the opacity of the sources increases our confusion and the sense that something's wrong that can't be fixed by adjusting our usual coping mechanisms.
We are then forced to seek new more effective coping mechanisms or we have to make some sort of change that reverses the tidal flow, that eases the extreme of high cost/drawbacks and low benefits we're experiencing. That often means changing a relationship, job, house, location, etc.
Our coping mechanisms are typically acquired subconsciously in childhood or youth, and as a result we're not necessarily conscious of their workings or their limitations. This is the source of this week's quote from Carl Jung: "Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate."
Developing new understandings of our core selves and our often unexamined (and limited) coping mechanisms is the goal of self-analysis--slowly bringing the unconscious and subconscious to light.
Happiness stems from living a life of purpose and meaning in activities, relationships and contexts that align with our core self. This conceptual analogy of tidal forces ebbing and flowing helps us understand why we may be feeling dissatisfaction when costs/drawbacks far exceed benefits. When a number of these tidal happen to overlap, we feel as if our life is out of balance.
Our coping mechanisms are internal, and our positions/relationships are in the real world. Sometimes modifying one will restore a sense that our life is back in alignment with our core selves, sometimes both must be consciously analyzed and modified. In some cases, we might realize doing nothing is the solution; the tide will reverse and the hardships of extremes will ease with time. In other cases, we may decide to throw over most of what we have in favor of a new start.
No wonder human life is complicated. Even if we feel we are "the same"--and of course we're not, as we're dynamic beings, aging and adding experiences--the complex mix of tidal forces ebbing and flowing is the ontological sea we inhabit.
Summary of the Blog This Past Week
Our Approaching Winter of Discontent 2/16/18
The Ghosts of 1968 2/14/18
What Just Changed? 2/12/18
Best Thing That Happened To Me This Week
Recorded a first-draft version of my song "The Next Revolution" with my mentor S.T. Excellent fun as always. Our recording philosophy is wabi-sabi: play and record live, with all the rough edges left intact. In this value system, the rough edges that are typically considered "mistakes" are the actual craft.
Market Musings: The End of Stability
Short-term traders can't afford to be influenced by macro-economic trends or opinions about those trends, as these long-term forces have less pull on market fluctuations han technical factors.
Long-term investors, on the other hand, can't afford to get obsessed with daily market fluctuations, as they're making a bet on secular trends that take months oryears to play out.
My sense is the 9-year run of Bull-trend stability is ending as a result of a confluence of macro dynamics:
1. Central banks are under pressure to reduce, end or reverse their unprecedented monetary stimulus, and the consequences are unpredictable, given the market's reliance on the certainty that "central banks have our back" is ending.
2. Interest rates / bond yields may well plummet in a global recession, but if we look at a 50-year chart of interest rates, we see a saucer-shaped bottoming in play. Technician Louise Yamada has been discussing the tendency of interest rates/bond yields to trace out a multi-year saucer bottom for over a decade, and we can now discern this .
Even if yields plummet in a recession, as many analysts predict, this doesn't necessarily negate the longer term trend of higher yields and rates.
3. The global economy is overdue for a business-cycle recession, which is characterized by a retrenchment of credit and the default of marginal debt. The "recovery" is the weakest recovery in the past 60 years, and now it's the longest expansion.
4. The mainstream financial media is telling us that everything is going great in the global economy, but this sort of complacent (or even euphoric) "it's all good news" typically marks the top of stocks, just as universal negativity marks secular lows.
5. What happens to markets characterized by uncertainty? Once certainty is replaced by uncertainty, markets become fragile and thus exposed to sudden shifts of sentiment. This destabilization is expressed as volatility, but it's far deeper
than volatility as measured by VIX or sentiment indicators.
Market participants have become accustomed to an implicit entitlement: that investors / speculators will earn consistently positive returns on their capital, as central banks and governments have both the power and the will to "save" participants from losses.
This entitlement is ending, as both the banks'/states' power and the will to maintain a permanent bull market in stocks and bonds are eroding, and I suspect few participants have a strategy for a permanently riskier environment going forward.
From Left Field
RESTORING BRITAIN’S CLOSED RAIL LINES COULD RECONNECT AND REVITALIZE HUNDREDS OF TOWNS
Inside Asia's bitcoin economy: Crypto startups scramble amid regulatory pressure
A Literary Road: Trip Into the Heart of Russia In the land of Tolstoy, Turgenev and now Putin, what are the stories Russians are telling themselves?
The five-paragraph fetish: Writing essays by a formula was meant to be a step on the way. Now it’s the stifling goal for student and scholar alike.
China reassigns 60,000 soldiers to plant trees in bid to fight pollution
The entirely unnecessary demise of Barnes & Noble -- the dominance of Amazon is not inevitable; B&N may be self-destructing via short-term thinking /poor management.
Hallucinatory 'voices' shaped by local culture, Stanford anthropologist says
Real Estate Bubbles: The 8 Global Cities at Risk
What Is The Difference Between Fundamentalists and Evangelicals? (via laserLefty)
What is the Christian perspective on war? (via laserLefty)
Is America A Christian Nation? (via laserLefty)
Inside the Two Years that Shook Facebook--and the World -- long-form essay, worth the investment of time if you want to understand why the Facebook revenue/addiction model is at risk.
"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate." Carl Jung
Thanks for reading--
charles |
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