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Musings Report 2025-36 9-6-25 There's Something Happening Here: A Different Forecast for 2035
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There's Something Happening Here: A Different Forecast for 2035
The forecast I'm sharing here for a decade hence--2035--isn't better or worse than others' forecasts, but it's different from others both in analysis and conclusions.
There's something happening here is the first line in the song For What It's Worth (1966) by the Buffalo Springfield, followed by "what it is ain't exactly clear," two lines that capture this moment in history: there are many forecasts about the next ten years, and they cover a wide spectrum, but what's actually happening is far from clear.
Many forecasters are "talking their book," meaning proponents of an investment approach are predicting the supremacy of their strategy to serve their own self-interest.
Others are based on conventional ideological beliefs or recency bias, projecting a continuation of current trajectories.
My forecast is neither an investment strategy nor a projection of current trends, as where those trajectories will actually go by 2035 is unclear.
I am confident that my forecast is based on realities that are invisible to the mainstream while being obvious to those unswayed by conventions.
Ok, Smarty-Pants, you've been predicting doom since 2012 (my book "Why Things Are Falling Apart") and yet here we are 13 years later with fantastic stock market gains and a future so bright we have to wear shades. So why should we pay attention to you now?
Let's go over my core points and then you decide if they're consequential or not in the near-term.
1. The reason why everything has kept ticking along but won't keep ticking along is two-fold:
A. The system's buffers have been consumed by the strategy of maintaining the status quo, and
B. The system's foundational values, precepts, goals and mythologies have rotted like timbers which appear strong but we find are mush once we poke them with a chopstick.
One apt metaphor for a systemic buffer is a stand of mangrove trees that anchor the wetlands, support a complex ecosystem and provide a barrier that breaks up storm surge and tsunami waves.
This award-winning photo captures the present era perfectly: a thinned mangrove buffer fronting a mountain of garbage.
Buffers can be physical, financial, psychological and social.
All of these are been thinned by maintaining a status quo that consumes but doesn't restore buffers.
The ability to borrow money is a buffer. Once an entity has borrowed all the money they can afford to borrow--what I term debt saturation--then the buffer is gone and the first storm surge will wipe out the borrower.
This is scale-invariant and applies to individuals, households, companies, states, nations and empires.
As for physical infrastructure decaying / buffers eroding, consider this excerpt from J.K. Lund's Substack, which typifies buffers being eroded to the point that the possibility of a "normal accident" bringing the system to a halt increases by degrees that are difficult to measure but could well be geometric.
"This isn't administration specific. The decay is real and it's bipartisan.
This morning I began my pointless 2.5 hour commute. The office is located in a city on the edge of bankruptcy, which keeps raising taxes, a little bit here, a little bit there, to stay afloat. It's residents are like frogs in boiling water.
There are two pathways to this metaphorical Gotham. You can drive and pay $10 in tolls on roads that are always 'under construction,' and thus ensure a soul destroying commute.
Or you can take a train which is equally depressing. The parking lot is not maintained. The station itself, no longer functional, basically boarded up. Wait in your car or freeze.
Only 3 of the 8 payment machines still work, and barely. Everyone queues up in front of the remaining machines.
Then you board a train that tops out at maybe 50 mph and sit in a car that's perhaps 40 years old. Loud, creaky, and uncomfortable.
The conductors still come around and check tickets just as they did decades ago, almost as if the digital age passed and they never got the memo.
Don't get me wrong, things could be worse. There are bright spots. But as someone who spends his morning writing about the future and the possibility of a better tomorrow, seeing all this is painful.
Too often, I fear that Americans have deluded themselves into believing they are the 'best' with everything, such that they don't realize when they are falling behind."
Whether we like to admit it or not, this describes a developing-world nation's decaying, poorly maintained, outdated infrastructure.
Financially, psychologically and socially, the buffers have thinned to the breaking point. Precarity--the cycle of unexpected crisis arising, being resolved at great expense, recovering from the expense, then a momentary stability that's disrupted by another crisis--is now the norm for many American households.
Earning More but in Worse Shape: Hardship Overwhelms Many American Families. (wsj.com)
I have often noted that wealth and income inequality have reached extremes that have thinned the social buffers to the point that fears of violence against CEOs and the super-wealthy are fueling security measures costing $27 million per billionaire annually.
Confidence in the future is a type of buffer. With AI--correctly or incorrectly, it's too soon to tell--promising to replace human labor, then confidence has been replaced by financial nihilism. Once again, the buffers have already disappeared, increasing the odds that the next storm surge brings the system down.
AI Is Wrecking an Already Fragile Job Market for College Graduates. (wsj.com)
As for the "wealth effect" of the stock market, it's an illegitimate perpetual motion machine that was illegal two generations ago, as corporations apply their market gains to buying more of their own stock, pushing valuations ever higher, generating more capacity to buy more of their own stocks.
That this is fraudulent "growth" that only enriches the top 10% who own 90% of the stocks is obvious but no one dares state it so bluntly--a reflection that our moral buffers washed away long ago.
American Companies Are Buying Their Own Stocks at a Record Pace. (wsj.com)
That the wealthiest few have the means to place the winning bid in the auction for political influence is also a sign that the limits on buying political power are gone.
Silicon Valley Launches Pro-AI PACs to Defend Industry in Midterm Elections. (wsj.com)
It's not a secret that it's becoming unaffordable to raise children, and this is the collapse of multiple buffers.
The Price of Parenting (10-part series) (wsj.com)
The hubristic confidence that collecting and analyzing data will solve all our problems is also a form of buffer that's collapsing.
Larry Ellison’s Half-Billion-Dollar Quest to Change Farming Has Been a Bust. (wsj.com)
I've mentioned the collapse of durability and quality many times, most recently in The Collapse We Accept Without a Whimper.
In terms of timing, many of the buffers protecting the status quo began collapsing around 2015-2016. It was around this time that durability fell off a cliff. Perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, this is also the time when homeless encampments expanded sharply in many urban areas.
2. The other core dynamic of the past 16 years since the Global Financial Meltdown and rescue of the status quo in 2008-09 is invisible in the conventional realm, but it explains a great deal about the banquet of consequences being set.
The authentic purpose of economic sectors has been replaced by financial predation.
The purpose of housing is to shelter households. Now housing is just another globalized, financialized asset whose purpose is to maximize profit and capital gains. So thousands of dwellings have been snapped up and converted to short-term vacation rentals (STVRs) which remove housing from the pool available for shelter.
The original idea of Airbnb was to "monetize" your home by renting out a room to visitors. The owners lived onsite and were present to handle any difficulties. Now absentee owners own dozens of units and have zero interest in the problems their profitable visitors are generating for permanent residents and the community.
"We're Losing Our Community": Short-Term Rentals Are Ruining Three Rivers, Residents Say.
Global wealth has also discovered US housing as a sought-after "asset" to land-bank for capital gains, i.e. buy and leave vacant as it's troublesome to rent the properties out to people seeking shelter.
The US housing sector has been prostituted to serve global capital.
The same substitution of profiteering for the original authentic purpose is also evident in healthcare. Two generations ago, hospitals served the community's needs for medical services, and fees were based on covering costs. Many were community-owned.
Now healthcare is just another sector to exploit to maximize profits and gains by any means available, including fraud, overbilling, needless testing, medications and procedures, and so on.
Revealed: UnitedHealth secretly paid nursing homes to reduce hospital transfers.
The original purpose is now nothing more than a screen to hide blatant profiteering, predation and parasitic exploitation.
This same mechanism is visible in higher education, Big Tech and many other sectors: the original authentic purpose of the economic activity has been replaced by mechanisms of "going through the motions to maintain the appearance of authenticity" while the behind-the-screen focus is on maximizing self-interest by any means available.
The entire economy is thus a hollowed-out shell of Ultra-Processed Life in which destructive distractions are deployed to mask the profiteering, moral bankruptcy and decay.
3. The status quo is now a series of "going through the motions to maintain the appearance of authenticity," while stripping out all the elements of anti-fragility (redundancies, secondary supply chains, senior staff, middle managers, etc.) as needless costs.
As a result, there's nobody left who knows how to restructure the system from the ground up or modify it in fundamental ways. And even if those people still exist, the subsystems and skills needed to overhaul the system have been lost.
In other words, there's no way to restore an authentic healthcare system because the entire set of subsystems, values and experiential tacit knowledge needed to do so have all been phased out, decayed or disappeared. These foundations are called social technologies, as opposed to physical or digital technologies.
4. The Waste Is Growth Landfill Economy funded by ever-expanding debt is not a sustainable economic model. The collapse of durability and quality has accelerated a replacement cycle paid for by borrowing money at interest: the faster the "product cycle," the faster the debt rises.
Changing the form of "money" won't change any of these forces, as they're the result of factors that aren't limited to finance or economics. Moral decay isn't reversed by changing "money." The new "money" will simply provide a new medium of moral decay.
What is the trajectory of these four forces?
If history and human psychology are guides--and there really are no others with any track record of utility--then by 2035 the pendulum will be swinging to a new extreme on the other end of the spectrum.
In my analysis, the pendulum of buffers eroded, moral decay, social decay, extreme wealth and income inequality, the auctioning of political power, precarity, unaffordability and the substitution of profiteering, predation and parasitic exploitation for authentic economic purposes have reached extremes that guarantee a swing of the pendulum to an extreme at the other end of the spectrum.
This pendulum swing will include the following to a degree of intensity and scale that cannot be predicted as it will be the result of interactive forces and feedbacks that could self-reinforce or moderate the confluence of forces.
1. A revolt against wealth, finance, debt and speculation.
2. A revolt against the auctioning of political power.
3. A revolt against planned obsolescence, profiteering, predatory practices and parasitic exploitation.
4. A revolt seeking limits on invasive, addictive, centralized out-of-control technologies, including every manifestation of AI and robotics.
5. A revolt against highly concentrated, centralized power, in both the private sector (corporations, banks, etc.) and governance (state and federal agencies).
6. A cultural revolution that seeks to eliminate addictive dependencies on junk food, mobile phones, social media and other technologies and restore authentic economic value and moral norms.
This can all be summarized as society breaking free of the shackles of centralized finance and technology and arising to place common-sense limits on power, finance and technology, for the good of our shared interests. One way of summarizing this is Secular Reformation.
We'll check whose forecast was more accurate and who was way off the mark in September 2035.
Highlights of the Blog
The Garbage Time of History Is Global 9/5/25
Entitled, Demanding--and Shunned 9/3/25
Labored Daze 9/1/25
Best Thing That Happened To Me This Week
I received this email from longtime reader Neil H.
"While I love all your writing, what I find particularly insightful and wonderful about your work is your sharp, Balzac-ian sense of human types, of human character in all its facets and variety, and of how people relate to one another.
I don't mean this to say merely that you are a great observer of the people around you (like the repairman in the most recent piece), but that you observe with tremendous empathy.
I don't think you find much joy in chronicling the decline of 'real' connections between people in 2025...you're no Mencken, who would no doubt cynically chuckle that 'this is what people really are like, when all the inhibitions are stripped away..' -- you have too high a respect for the importance of basic human connection, something we should all be trying to protect and foster, to ignore what is going on, or wish it away."
Thank you, Neil, for sharing your humbling praise and keen insights.
Here's a snapshot of a variety of kai choy being cleaned for stir-frying:
What's on the Book Shelf
The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution Is Transforming Currencies and Finance (Eswar Prasad)
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. At a reader's suggestion, I'm identifying links that are free/not paywalled..
Futurist Adam Dorr on how robots will take our jobs: ‘We don’t have long to get ready -- it’s going to be tumultuous’ (paywalled)
Vienna has been declared a renters’ utopia – here's why -- social housing (paywalled)
I went on my first cruise -- here are 15 things that surprised me about this type of travel (free)
$1 Trillion of Wealth Was Created for the 19 Richest U.S. Households Last Year (paywalled)
The Reckoning Our Sector’s (non-profits) Narrators Don’t Want to See Coming (free)(via David D.)
6 Factors That Describe China's Current State (free)
Andor, Trump and Our Revolutionary Times--Jon Stewart (1:31 hours) (free)
Making hand pulled noodles (lagman) (3:24 min) (free)
The trouble with AI art isn’t just lack of originality. It’s something far bigger (paywalled)
George Harrison’s Lentil Soup Recipe ‘Tastes Better the Next Day’--Mary Frampton and Friends Rock and Roll Recipes (free)
I did yoga in Italy with my favorite wellness influencer: Inside the world of creator-led retreats (free)
In Myanmar, a rush for rare earth metals is causing a regional environmental disaster (free)
Top 10 Stolen Guitars: A Short History (26 min) (free)
"Give up philosophy because I'm an old man? It's at the end of the race that you break into a burst of speed." Diogenes
Thanks for reading--
charles |
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