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Musings Report 2020-22 5-30-20 Time to Re-Assess Your Future
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For those who are new to the Musings reports: they're 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.
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Time to Re-Assess Your Future
When I say "time to reassess your future," I am referring to this moment in history that calls for us all to re-assess our future, and also the need to make time to conduct that re-assessment.
I claim no expertise in such assessments; as per this quote submitted by my friend GFB, "I discovered that I was the world's leading expert in one thing: my experience." (Peter Schjeldahl)
As longtime readers know, I've experienced many of the same transitions millions of others have gone through: changed careers and locales, started, operated and closed enterprises, and juggled an evolving mix of jobs and self-employment. I've been unemployed and short of cash at times, and been injured on the job. Recently, I've navigated a fast-changing alternative media environment dominated by demonetization and shadow-banning.
My experience has unwittingly made me relatively comfortable with VUCA: volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. I've learned that transitions can be processes that take many years, and that fear--of failure, of the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns--is normal and healthy.
For me, the trick is to use fear as a healthy governor on rashness but not be paralyzed by fear. After all, there is no absolute security or certainty in life, as my favorite aphorisms express:
"There is no security on this earth; there is only opportunity." (Douglas MacArthur)
"We are what we repeatedly do." (Aristotle)
"Do the thing and you shall have the power." (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
"He who will not risk cannot win." (John Paul Jones)
"The way of the Tao is reversal." (Lao Tzu)
"Chance favours the prepared mind." (Louis Pasteur)
"Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm." (Winston Churchill)
"Where there is ruin, there is hope for treasures." (Rumi)
So how do we prepare our minds? One starting point is the Overton Window. This is the window of what is politically and socially possible in any given era, and as we all know, voices from the margins open the window by proposing ideas that are rejected out of hand but eventually become mainstream.
In our own lives, we can consciously pry open the window of what we conceive of as possible by following a simple planning structure I call Plans A, B and C.
I addressed this scheme recently in Crunchtime: When Events Outrun Plan B (December 4, 2019) and Surviving 2020 #3: Plans A, B and C (May 7, 2020)
The basic idea here is to formulate potential responses to three basic scenarios:
Plan A: devolution. Everything stays more or less the same but there's less of everything: less income, less stability, less reliability, less predictability, etc.
Plan B: decay. Services become unreliable, petty authoritarianism becomes normalized, homeless encampments arise in "nice" areas, Universal Basic Income (UBI) is instituted to suppress the fires of hunger and want, inflation shreds the value of "money," etc.
Plan C: Things fall apart: social disorder becomes chronic, cities and counties go bankrupt, and in Yeats' phrase, the falcon no longer hears the falconer: people simply stop heeding the authorities' orders, i.e. breakdown.
Plan A questions: What should I sell now before it loses value? What hedge do we have against a massive deflation in the value in stocks, bonds and real estate? What's our back-up plan for one of us losing our job? What can we do to not just trim expenses but institute deep (35% to 50%) cuts in our budget? How can we build social capital?
Plan B questions: Where else could we move to if we had to? What hedge do we have against inflation? What alternative sources of income can we establish? How can we serve our community / social circle to increase our value to others?
Plan C questions: Where can we hunker down most comfortably and securely? What essentials can we provide for ourselves and for others we care about? What do we need as the bare minimum to keep mind, body and soul together? What can we create, grow, nurture and share?
In my experience, things done in haste are problematic. My experience is the process of realizing the current situation is no longer working for me, pondering options for the first time, reaching clarity, making a decision to accept the risks of changing everything--this takes a year or two and perhaps longer. The actual transition has several phases, but the entire process tends to take a few years, or even as long as five years.
Events might unfold so rapidly we don't have the luxury of making five-year plans, but it's still useful to plot out the steps that are necessary to completing major transitions such as selling out and moving, establishing an alternative source of income, etc.
Planning is useful even if reality doesn't track our initial plans. As boxer Mike Tyson put it, "Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth."
In other words, if we know we're going to get punched in the mouth, we're less surprised when it happens.
I'll leave the topic of re-assessing the future with three points. The first is the intersection of four long-term trends I discussed in Four Long Cycles Align (May 19, 2020).
Point 1: We have entered a disintegrative phase of unknown duration and depth. The social mood has darkened and the social, political and economic orders are fragmenting.
The difference in the social mood of eras can be seen in the public responses to widespread electrical blackouts. In the optimistic mid-1960s, the blackout in New York City generated very little disorder and was even a source of good-humored community.
In the economic and social decay of the 1970s, the response to the blackout of 1977 in NYC was entirely different: widespread looting and fear took hold: New York City blackout of 1977:
"The blackout occurred when the city was facing a severe financial crisis and its residents were terrified by the Son of Sam murders. The nation as a whole was suffering from a protracted economic downturn, and commentators have contrasted the event with the good-natured "Where Were You When the Lights Went Out?" atmosphere of 1965. Some pointed to the financial crisis as a root cause of the disorder; others noted the hot July weather, as the East Coast was in the middle of a brutal heat wave."
In other words, there was no one cause; rather, there was a confluence of political, social and economic forces.
Point 2: my own re-assessments always include this question: what have I been forcing, without realizing it? What would I actually welcome letting go of? What burdens have I forced myself to carry that are not as essential as I've told myself? What can I no longer carry, no matter how often I tell myself I must go on as before?
It's human nature to get locked into things that once worked, and resist realizing they no longer work and must be jettisoned, no matter how painful the transition proves for those dear to us. Whatever we're forcing isn't actually sustainable; we're only draining ourselves of the strength we'll need going forward to prop up a costly and ultimately unhelpful illusion of stability.
Point 3: real change is transformative in both values and processes, a dynamic I discussed in a 2017 essay:
Millennials Are Homesteading, Buying Affordable Homes, Building Community:
"When people say they want solutions, they're actually seeking only a specific kind of solution, one that leaves everything they have now intact but guarantees them more of something: more security, more healthcare, more education, more money, etc., but at no cost or inconvenience to themselves.
Anything that fits these parameters isn't a solution; it's magic. Magical thinking and magical fixes are endlessly appealing precisely because they don't require us to change anything or work at anything outside our comfort zone.
In the real world, solutions change core values and processes. If they don't, they're not real solutions. Fake fixes come in various types: cosmetic band-aids, alleviation of the symptoms while the disease continues unchecked, public-relations relabeling of the problem so it appears to go away via semantic trickery, and so on.
Real solutions have two parts: changes in values and operational changes in habits and processes. This two-sided structure of solutions--values and operations--is scale invariant, meaning it works the same for individuals, households, neighborhoods, towns, cities, organizations, enterprises, nations and empires. Any solution that doesn't change both values and operations in fundamental ways is just another magic trick, a simulacrum solution."
My own re-assessment began in July 2018 and continues grinding forward.
Highlights of the Blog
New Podcasts:
Meeting the Challenges of the "New Normal" World -- FRA podcast (44:21)
AxisOfEasy Salon #6: The Hanseatic League of Decentralized Crypto-States (55:44)
The Pandemic Has Revealed The Structural Fragilities Of America -- X22 Spotlight (31:55)
Posts:
First the Deflationary Deluge of Assets Crashing, Then the Tsunami of Inflation 5/29/20
Social Media's Plantation of the Mind 5/28/20
Re-Opening the Economy Won't Fix What's Broken 5/27/20
An Economy That Cannot Allow Stocks to Decline Is Too Fragile To Survive 5/26/20
TINA's Orgy: Anything Goes, Winners Take All 5/25/20
Best Thing That Happened To Me This Week
The personal messages I received from longtime readers who recently became patrons or subscribers--thank you for the kind words of encouragement.
From Left Field
The Pandemic Road to Serfdom (Joel Kotkin)
The Pandemic Isn’t a Black Swan but a Portent of a More Fragile Global System -- Nassim Taleb...
The Race to Replace a Dying Neoliberalism: The world's prevailing socio-political models aren't going to survive this pandemic. What's going to replace them?
The Math Behind Life as an Average American--just getting by....
The Bridge to the Post-pandemic World Is Collapsing: Many small businesses won’t survive, and that will change the landscape of American commerce for years to come
How the Coronavirus is Killing the Middle Class
How the COVID-19 Bailout Gave Wall Street a No-Lose Casino: While ordinary Americans face record unemployment and loss, the COVID-19 bailout has saved the very rich
Coronavirus Will End the Golden Age for College Towns: These engines of regional growth will struggle with state funding cuts, fewer foreign students and destroyed household finances.
The End of Something: On Radical Change in a Time of Pandemic
Why Our Economy May Be Headed for a Decade of Depression -- Dr. Doom Roubini ...
More than 110,000 restaurants expect to close up forever in the coming weeks
The Case for Letting the Restaurant Industry Die -- what nobody wants to hear...
The Anthropocene Reviewed (via GFB) 8 min animation on... a lot of things--just watch the first minute...
"Capitalism appears to have morphed into a 'technology', like social media, that is designed to find the clearing price for our values and beliefs." Simons Chase
Thanks for reading--
charles |
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