Meditations
The post-Bretton Woods World Reserve Currency system that your world depends on is starting to unravel. These are unprecedented times you live in. The society in which you’ve come of age in is in a free fall off the cliff of a bygone Golden Age—you just haven’t woken up to the reality because it’s yet to hit the pavement.
Banks are melting. It’s the calm before the storm.
Being a passive beta saver will net you almost 7% amidst a backdrop of 6% inflation (it’s much higher than that in real terms). Meanwhile, wages aren’t keeping up with inflation.
Too much of our youth spend their golden years shackled to jobs they’re indifferent about, relegated to cogs in a machine, and giving away fragments of their souls every hour that they watch the clock just so that they can leave 15 minutes early to get back to what they’d rather really be doing.
The risk-tolerant thinking person will inherit the Earth. You’re living in an era where alpha-seeking NEET wear their unemployment and dropout status as both a badge of honor and a bragging right. They live comfortably outside of the corporate rat race. The glass ceiling is for others complacent about living inside glass houses. These are the new aristocracy, as Milady’s Charlotte Fang calls them.
Few understand—or trust—that the universe conspires for your success if you follow the North Star of your bliss. If you want to be doing that thing you can’t help but think about but you aren’t sure if you can make it doing it but do it anyway, the universe will throw you a life raft.
If you’re too risk averse to take the leap, then you’ll never know.
You stand at the edge of a chasm that’s growing wider every day. You are living through the greatest wealth transfer in world history as the global market teeters at the precipice of Keynesian financial collapse. There is little time left.
Market inefficiency is opportunity. All wealth transfer markets happen in contexts of rapid development. It’s money on the table for anyone sharp and risk tolerant. Either you make it big or get pushed out by the players who do as it formalizes.—Charlotte Fang
As news of Silicon Valley Bank’s insolvency roiled through the news just weeks ago, getting wagies to wonder whether their employers could make payroll, my longtime friend and wagie, Wendy, asked for an ELI5 to make sense of the situation. As I prefaced it with how the Fed has a dual mandate to temper inflation and unemployment, I watched her eyes glaze over, flickering back on when I wrapped with “which results in you paying $8 for a carton of eggs.” Then she asked something so utterly flabbergasting but made total sense if you were in her shoes, “What good is this information to me if all I get is worry over something I have no control over?”
Why Wendy, I’m so glad you asked.
The state intends to reduce their populations into slave cattle. This is what the contemporary culture war comes down to: the state is highly interested in extinguishing tech-enabled anarchist freedoms as it undermines their stranglehold on the propaganda complex, an existential necessity to hold power in democracy. Freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of the market, freedom of spirit.
A wedge is being driven into the middle class. You are in danger of falling on the wrong side of the chasm.—Charlotte Fang
In the Information Age, if you have no power, no fame, no fortune to your name, your best edge in the modern era is information. Access to lots of it will only get you so far until you can parse through a firehose of mostly noise, evade psyop landmines put forth by players infinitely better at playing the game than you, distill it down into pure signal, then extract the nectar of information asymmetry.
Complaining about abusive words on content platforms while ultimately asking for bans on “disinformation” from the fact checkers is a non-thinking person’s way of admitting that they don’t have the internal faculty of doing the above and, as such, must outsource the responsibility to the authority of certified “experts”. “Tax me harder, daddy,” they’ll say.
Freedom starts with free thought. Indolence there will leave you spiritually, mentally, and materially poor for the rest of your life.
To be free in an unfree world, you will get nowhere unless you rise like Morpheus from his drug-induced stupor (social media addiction) while surrounded by Agents (distraction) and reject the stock programming of the state which reduces you, your friends, and your family into mindless and fearful human cattle.
Closing Meditations
Crypto is the greatest wealth transfer opportunity accessible to the common man in history. Dynasties are made this generation. — Charlotte Fang
Crypto democratizes the lucrative right to create wealth—a right which, prior to the advent of cryptocurrency, was an exclusive right of governments and their Central Banks. In the blockchain era, if you are entrepreneurial, intelligent, and resourceful, then you too can wield that power.
Let’s assume that you are one of those resourceful NEETs that Fang refers to as the modern aristocracy. To what ends do you maximize wealth accumulation other than for the sake of maximizing wealth?
In the American inflationary boom between 1960–1968, it was observed that fringe, “unproductive” work such as financial services or administrative work received much of the benefits of early inflation. For this sector of the economy, price inflation grew by 27%. Contrast this with the “productive” work of the manufacturing and commodities sectors, price inflation grew by only 6%.
The conclusion is inescapable that very much of the frenzied economic activity of the American boom must have been for all practical purposes useless. Nonproductive fringe activities, like the overhead of a business, are all useful to a degree, but only to the very limited extent that they help to increase the output of the productive activities by more than the cost of the overhead.—Jens Parsson, Dying of Money
The global economy saw a similar boom between 2008–2022, where much of the frenzied economic activity happened over speculation about future productivity. However, during this time, genuine technological breakthroughs like the invention of the blockchain would change the course of humanity as electricity. and subsequently, the lightbulb had.
My question to you is: if wealth is not an end but a means, what’s your end?
If wealth is an end, then by definition, that is parasitic.
Financial freedom should be no more than a lubricant that allows you to optimally navigate life. It allows you to create whatever output you were brought to this Earth to produce. There is no other one like you so no one but you can add to the pool of societal value that only you are uniquely suited to do.
How does one find happiness? It must be to be in ikigai. If you’re not in ikigai, then set your path on a course to the relentless pursuit of it until you’re there.
