No Need To Be Chicken Little: The Sky Is Not Falling (Yet)

If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Follow me on this one, any of the below look like an attention grabbing headline:

• 5 Reasons Why the Stock Market Will Crash!
• 10 Reasons Why The Global Economy Will Tank!
• 3 Reasons Why There Will Be Civil War!
• 4 Reasons Why an EMP Will Wipe Out The Grid!
• 28 Reason Why There WILL be Nuclear War!

Click Bait.  Right?  Maybe?
Could any one of the above mentioned things happen = Absolutely.
Are they completely out of our control = 100% accurate.
Should we focus our energy on low probability, high impact events = Probably not.
Should we even try to prepare for such events = Potentially (on the low end).

Here’s the deal, if I predict that the stock market is going to crash every month for 5, 10, 15 years…it’s probably going to happen and then I’ll be like “I told you so.”  On a long enough timeline however we eventually recover from these events and life goes on.  Housing crash, Tech crash, Ebola, Covid, Gulf War, GWOT to name a few and here we are still going about our daily business.  Remember a few times when the Stock Market lost over 1000 and people were saying: “this is it.”  See below.  I don’t particularly worry about what the market is doing these days but it seems to be a prime catalyst for sky is falling type activities.

It goes up, it goes down

Let’s just say a nuke goes off somewhere and you witness it, which leads to Civil War and all money being worthless and the grid being wiped out.  Well you got what you got and it’s going to be whatever it’s going to be.  My point here is if you spend the majority of your time bouncing from crisis to crisis thinking that “this is the big one” it’s really no way to live, instead of being on an even keel just facing things as they come.  This does not mean to shun preparedness, heck I’ve written about it for over a decade.  What this does mean is that for the most part all of these things pass and we’re right back to where we were, on the extended timeline most things work out.

The Reality Check

I know, you’re going to hit me up with all of the statistics and facts about how things are getting worse.  I’m fully with you in that many things all seem to be on a downward trend.  The state of our economy, the state of our government, wars and rumors of wars, corporate greed, increasing debt amongst households and sedentary lifestyles making people increasingly dependent on anyone but themselves.  I haven’t been to Zero Hedge in years but something about: On a long enough timeline, survival is zero (or something like that).  Or to put it how Mark Steyn did: Something that cannot go on forever, will stop.

It’s not great out there and there are any number of things to keep us preoccupied with the next end of the world scenario.  Those type of headlines sell, middle of the road and common sense type stuff often do not.  Could you dig back through 12 years of archives on my site and find spots where I got in a little deep, of course you could (we are all susceptible to it at some point).  Yet the vast majority of the time I think it’s incumbent upon us to try to remain level headed even in the face of extreme pressure / odds, because that is the mentality we need to actually survive and thrive.  Go watch Free Solo sometime and observe the mentality that Alex Honnold has while doing absolutely insane climbs without ropes.  You think that guy cares if the market plunges?  Hardly.  He lived in a van for years eating ramen noodles.

The Bottom Line

Things are good, things are bad.  Things are up and they are down.  We have emotions and react accordingly and I too have fell into the trap occasionally of being over the top.  Yet at some point we must return to center.  My Ex Wife was a Nurse and when Covid started she had me all sorts of messed up in fear about this thing, until she left and then I really started thinking for myself.  It was then that I was like, wait a minute here (puts on thinking cap, not a mask) and got back to a reality I was comfortable with.  Stay the course, it’s never as good or as bad as you think it is.