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Musings Report 2024-15 4-13-24 Choosing Your Long Game Wisely
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Choosing Your Long Game Wisely
I ended last week's Musings on the Long Game with this: choosing the right Long Game may matter more than how you play The Long Game. In other words, if we choose a risky Long Game that is nearly impossible to win, we might be better off choosing a different goal/game.
This week I want to discuss Choosing Your Long Game Wisely. Let's start with four articles that provide some anecdotal context for our decisions:
Why Are Americans So Unhappy? A silent revolution is having enormous social ramifications.
The AI Revolution and the Economy Have Killed My Highly-Skilled Job.
Older Floridians are going back to work as life gets less affordable.
‘I run out of money each month’: the Americans borrowing to cover daily expenses.
The first essay discusses the "silent revolution" in changing values that accompanied the economic trajectory from the Industrial Revolution forward, shifting from the passive acceptance of traditional values and limited agency / prospects to the embrace of individual empowerment / agency and a spectrum of prospects for improving one's social and financial status, and more recently, to a "post-materialist" focus on self-expression and identity.
These "post-materialist" values parallel the "post-industrial" / Information Economy foreseen by Peter Drucker and others three decades ago, a dramatic shift in value creation, capital and labor. In taking material prosperity (plenty of food, energy, manufactured goods and information/digital services) as a given, the "post-materialist" culture frees us to focus on our own development as individuals.
The second article explains how AI tools are replacing human workers but not equaling the quality of the humans' work: the AI tools generate lower quality results, but nobody cares because 1) they're cheaper, and the pressure to lower costs is unremitting everywhere and 2) since clients no longer see the humans' work, they don't even recognize the poor quality of the AI-produced version.
This is a powerful summary of how AI is accelerating the crapification of goods and services: quality decays and nobody even notices because they no longer have a high-quality product for comparison, and nobody cares because they're under ceaseless pressure to lower costs by any means available. This is crapification and the disruption of labor in a nutshell.
The next two articles provide evidence that our base assumption of abundant material prosperity might be misplaced, as the cost of essentials (food, shelter, healthcare, childcare, transportation and energy) and risk remediation (auto and home insurance, condo association fees, debt, etc.) are arguably on an upward trajectory that may well track the "Lost Decade" of the stagflationary 1970s while the Everything Bubble in assets is tracking the late 1920s when wealth inequality reached extremes and the asset bubbles popped, eventually losing 80% of their peak valuations.
What's different this time around is high inflation may restrain the Federal Reserve from printing additional trillions to "save the market" and soaring interest costs on the $34 trillion in federal debt may restrain additional federal borrow-and-spend programs.
Without centrally planned "saves," the economy and society will have to adjust on their own to radically different conditions: a shrinking class of workers, soaring populace of elderly, costlier resources, reversals of the deflationary trends of globalization, diminishing returns on financialization, heightened geopolitical tensions, shrinking discretionary incomes, declining local government budgets, a general decay in quality and economic activity, debt saturation (i.e. credit cards are already maxed out), higher costs imposed by reshoring and the energy transition, the generalized decline of institutional functionality, and the decay of stability and predictability as systems fray and unforeseen feedbacks unravel what was taken for granted.
My impression is that few Americans are mentally, physically or intellectually prepared for long-term hardship, instability and the failure of centralized "saves." The zeitgeist holds that the Covid pandemic and lockdown was the greatest trauma in decades. In economic terms, this seems to overlook the $11 trillion in centrally issued "saves" that were unleashed in response to the lockdown.
The 1973-74 and the 1981-82 recessions may be better templates for what lies ahead. In my view, the Covid lockdown was an exogenous shock and response, while the 1973-74 and the 1981-82 recessions were consequences of profound structural changes in the global and US economies: the first in energy costs and America's declining competitiveness and the second in the denouement of fiscal and monetary policies intended to stimulate a stagflationary economy: to end the self-reinforcing inflationary spiral, interest rates were pushed to levels that crushed borrowing and the industries that depend on credit: autos, housing, etc.
Today, that is basically every industry and every sector, including federal and local governments.
In this context, "planning for a secure retirement" via piling up financial wealth--a constantly promoted example of a Long Game goal--may fall into the category of Long Games that are increasingly unwinnable. The same can be said of any goal based on piling up financial wealth as the key to security.
Setting a Long Game goal of fostering well-being may be a wiser choice, as it broadens our goal to include everything relating to well-being rather than focusing on securing X wealth / income 20 years hence.
What is well-being? Our answers help shape our Long Game goals.
Let's start with the obvious material foundation of well-being: sufficient food, fresh water, shelter, energy, etc. to maintain a pleasant, secure life. In the conventional view, the way to reach this goal is to pile up financial wealth. For all the reasons noted above, this may become a path to disappointment and failure.
If we no longer trust the predictability of the financial systems we depend on, then the material foundation of well-being requires a different Long Game, one aimed at securing ownership and control of real-world essentials and income streams rather than piling up financial wealth entrusted to others.
In this Long Game, well-being requires not just material assets and income but agency and control of our time, for time, along with health, is our true wealth.
One alternative is to use frugality and unconventional lifestyle choices to secure ownership of essentials, our agency and control of our time. Needing less and figuring out how to fashion a low-cost way of life that we own and control is a far more predictable source of material security and agency than piling up money and trusting it will retain its value as the financial system becomes unpredictable.
Fashioning a low-cost way of life is not easy. As the articles above illustrate, costs we assumed were stable can suddenly double--condo association fees, home insurance, home repairs, auto repairs, etc.--and essentials such as property taxes and food can also steadily climb at rates that far surpass increases in our income. Sadly, our system also generates crushing medical bills and outlandish valuations for land and houses.
Once our Long Game goal shifts to securing a low-cost way of life that we own / control, then we can start researching options and making progress. If history is any guide, those with cash when financial bubbles finally pop will be able to buy assets at much lower prices: cash is king when speculative frenzies implode, as they always do.
Taking care of one's health via eating real food and modest fitness regimes is cost-effective. So is acquiring skills to do many of the things we pay others to do. Thinking through ways to own essentials (water catchment, solar panels, growing some food ourselves) and networking with local producers is also low-cost. Widening our skillsets to include ways to earn money that we control is also cost-effective.
All of these manifestations of needing less, wanting less and owning / controlling more of our lives are based on adopting a different perspective on the way our economy and society function.
In the mindset of financial wealth goals, we presume that everything we need and want in the future will continue to be available for purchase in a quick, anonymous financial transaction as it is today.
If we project the trends outlined above, transactions may well become less predictable than relationships: some essentials may no longer be for sale in an anonymous marketplace, and the key to obtaining them may be to build reciprocal relationships of sharing, trust and conviviality. In other words, money may not longer be all it takes to get what we need. We may need to widen our understanding of well-being from purely financial to human-scale living (what Ivan Illich called conviviality).
From my perspective, the distillation of all human life to markets and atomized financial transactions is a major source of the social decay we witness around us, a dehumanizing reduction that feeds the detachment, derangement, distraction, depression, anxiety and disillusionment so many are experiencing. Where exactly is the purpose and meaning in an endless series of atomized transactions?
The net result of this reduction of human life to transactions in a market was described by novelist Michel Houellebecq in an interview: "I have the impression of being caught up in a network of complicated, minute, stupid rules, and I have the impression of being herded towards a uniform kind of happiness, toward a kind of happiness that doesn't really make me happy."
Rather than assume that money will buy whatever we want--for example, someone to care for us in our declining years--we might need to expand our definition of well-being to include fostering relationships of caring that may help us find someone willing to help us because we helped others in a network of reciprocal sharing / aid.
We might focus less on obtaining institutional services and more on doing what we can to foster our own health and support our body/mind's self-healing.
As Illich explained, one of the perverse dynamics of the post-industrial economy has been the professionalization of tasks people once did for themselves: nobody changes the oil in their vehicles, they take it to a professional. Nobody cooks from scratch, they go out to eat. That our bodies are designed to heal themselves is often set aside in favor of medications and consultations with medical professionals. Yes, having access to healthcare services is an important component of well-being, but so is self-care.
What we once could learn on our own has been professionalized. Rather than accredit ourselves with self-learning and experience, we must now go into debt and invest years of effort to get accredited by an insanely costly institution.
All this professionalization has made us increasingly dependent on securing incomes high enough to pay the institutions and corporations we now depend on.
This professionalization is paralleled by a perverse reduction of everything in life to a market analysis: if I raise $10 of green beans in my yard and I could have made $40 in the same time driving for a ride-share company, then I "wasted my time" growing vegetables packed with nutrients because I could have made more money working to increase the profits of a corporation.
That the average person spends six hours a day on social media and entertainment is perfectly fine because that's "leisure," while growing food that could be purchased in a supermarket is "work." (Never mind the nutritive content of the supermarket product is low; price is all that matters.)
In buying everything in a transactional society, we've lost most of what it means to be human. The same can be said of social media, which is the reduction of human life to atomized textual/visual transactions aimed at gaining a anonymous audience's attention and approval.
It seems to me that well-being includes human-scale activity that cannot be bought or replaced with a professional service. Cooking from scratch is an example that anyone can do should they choose to do so. As you'll see in the photos below, I recently made 3 1/2 quarts of tomato soup from scratch--8 pounds of heirloom tomatoes collected from our gardens. This probably took about three hours, I didn't really keep track. I didn't need any additional "entertainment" (music, TV, etc.) as the process is absorbing as it is, enjoyable in being cognitively undemanding. There's the sound of the knife on the cutting board, the aroma of the tomatoes, onions and garlic roasting in the oven, the loud whirring of the blender and the wonderful scent of the finished soup.
I'm not bragging here: this is not a difficult process. We don't need a diploma from the Culinary Institute of America to make this simple soup--anyone could do it. It's a very forgiving recipe, not fussy at all, yet it yields a superior result. Just chop the ingredients into chunks, spread them in a baking pan, bake for an hour, scrape them into a pot and simmer with chicken broth (or vegetarian equivalent), add simple seasoning, scoop into a blender and you're done. It's a good recipe to teach kids how to cook, as it's simple and uses a variety of basic techniques. Here's the recipe I use.
While this isn't quite "entertainment," it isn't "work," either. It's something we no longer have the means to describe because it falls outside the marketplace of transactions and spectacles.
Yes, we can watch a carefully edited display of someone else making the soup on TV, but that contains nothing of the actual experience.
It's impossible to replicate the taste of this soup except by making it from scratch with homegrown tomatoes. It cannot be bought, unless you paid someone to make it, and then you'd miss out on the entire experience of preparing it and the immense satisfaction gained from planting the seedlings at the start, picking the tomatoes, doing the prep and at the end, tasting the soup.
If this isn't an essential part of well-being, then I don't think we're talking about well-being, I think we're still stuck in a simulacrum of well-being that depends on paying for something in a transaction--what Guy Debord described thusly: "Such processes and their ramifications ultimately mean people cannot truly experience life for themselves: they have become spectators, bound to an impoverished state of unlife."
There is more to well-being than material security and comfort, and setting a Long Game goal of well-being means designing a life that recognizes this and enables the intangible aspects of well-being in day-to-day living. Here are a few examples of many.
Having sources of beauty nearby is an under-appreciated aspect of well-being. This can be a view from a window of a vista or a leafy garden, or artwork, live music or dance, untrammeled Nature, or resting beneath a magnificent tree. So much of modern life is ugly, an ugliness we no longer even recognize, even as it silently debilitates us.
Listening and being heard are aspects of well-being that have been crowded out by work and ever-present screen distractions. One of the most tragic vignettes in the article on the elderly having to go back to work to make ends meet was the couple who lost their treasured time together due to their re-entry into the labor force.
Having the agency to work together as a couple is another overlooked aspect of well-being.
There are many other examples, but our culture has little recognition of well-being because it's simply not profitable. Instead, we've been persuaded that the "peak experiences" of life are transactional: what counts as "my best life" is paying $500 for a concert ticket and spending thousands of dollars getting there, or some other "bucket-list" spectacle that is worthy of selfies. Then we return to a daily life of rent/debt servitude with very little authentic well-being.
In focusing on well-being, we're choosing to enhance the 95% of our lives that aren't costly transactions or selfie-worthy transactional experiences. Rather than being customer-spectators in a sensationalized competition for attention, we're participants in our own private creation of meaning and agency.
Since self-generated well-being isn't profitable, it's unconventional and takes far more effort than a conventional path. The rewards are often intangible and unworthy of the gaze of others: "Our age has brought an awful bondage to the opinion and gaze of others, which now manifests itself in insatiable demands for recognition."
Despite the difficulties, we can choose a different direction, and that's why choosing a Long Game goal wisely is important.
I frequently talk about self-reliance and differentiate it from self-sufficiency. But there is one aspect of self-sufficiency in well-being, and that's feeling that we have enough inside ourselves to handle whatever lies ahead. Some of this confidence comes from having a variety of experiences, of course, but another source of this confidence is having a wide variety of skills: come what may, some of our skills will apply or be valued by others.
What if our Long Game goal is well-being? What does that mean for us? These are questions worthy of contemplation and thoughtful answers.
Highlights of the Blog
Sound Money Vs. Fiat Currency: Trade and Credit Are the Wild Cards 4/11/24
Could US Treasuries Become the Trade of the Decade? 4/9/24
Staving Off Revolution 4/8/24
Best Thing That Happened To Me This Week
Made tomato soup from scratch--not the first time, but it's still something to savor--both the journey and the destination.
From Left Field
NOTE TO NEW READERS: This list is not comprised of articles I agree with or that I judge to be correct or of the highest quality. It is representative of the content I find interesting as reflections of the current zeitgeist. The list is intended to be perused with an open, critical, occasionally amused mind.
Many links are behind paywalls. Most paywalled sites allow a few free articles per month if you register. It's the New Normal.
‘Vital for looking after the soil’: fears as UK earthworm population declines
Therapists Told Us The Signs That You Grew Up With Emotionally Immature Parents
What's Good for General Bullmoose...(via Tom D.) --"If you're looking for a point when it all went wrong with the American economy, the murder of Time Inc. at the hands of Levin & Co. is a good place to start."
Wealth Gap And The Road To Serfdom--good charts and explanation....
Vegetables are losing their nutrients. Can the decline be reversed? (via Cheryl A.)
Global fertility in 204 countries and territories, 1950–2021, with forecasts to 2100: a comprehensive demographic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2021 (via Mark S.)
Prince, Villanova Junction, live 2011 (6:35)
Covid changed how we spend: More YOLO splurging but less saving.
Modern Living Is Stripping Our Gut of Healthy Bacteria.--not enough real food, too much processed 'food"....
Is society caught up in a Death Spiral? Modeling societal demise and its reversal. (via Ben S.)
(TG/HDL-C) Ratio as a Risk Marker for Metabolic Syndrome and Cardiovascular Disease-- TG/HDL under 2 is good, under 3 is okay....
The new science of death: ‘There’s something happening in the brain that makes no sense’
"A republic cannot succeed, till it contains a certain body of men imbued with the principles of justice and honour." Charles Darwin
Thanks for reading--
charles |
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