Keeping Your Head in the Game, or What to Do in 2025

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Hi! How’s everyone? Welcome back old friends, welcome new ones, and here’s an extra special Snowy hug to help you deal with…

Go ahead, shake your head with me. Let it all out.

These are difficult times. And your head’s probably spinning with questions.

Let me clear them up for you, so we can get that out of the way. Everything you think is going to happen is going to happen, faster and harder than you expect. Everyone who’s read a history book should grasp why. The 1890s. The 1930s. The 2020s.

Nobody and nothing can stop what is going to happen now. Nobody and nothing. It isn’t about figures, but about forces. Forces which are arrayed now to repeat a certain cycle of history, and I won’t dwell on it, like I said, everyone who’s read a book or three should be able to spell it out. And if they can’t, well, they’re going to Sink With the…

So stop wondering. Stop second-guessing yourself. Stop letting a failed set of pundits and whatnot lead you into confusion. You know what’s on the cards now. 

And that brings me to my point.

What should you do now? A lot. But first, the most important thing right now? It’s to Keep Your Head in the Game.

Let me explain what I mean by that.

The Point of No Return and the Sinking Ship

Keeping your head in the game. I’m a football fan. My favorite team is the Baltimore Ravens. They play something almost unbelievable. A beautiful game, in a sport of combat. They’re something like artistic geniuses, deeply creative. Their coach is one of the world’s geniuses, if you ask me, taking the game to a higher level than ever before. But because of all that? It’s also harder to keep your head in the game. That beautiful, creative, thoughtful game. 

And so the other night, a devastating defeat, to the hands of a much uglier game.

This is what’s about to happen to our world. It’s going to get much uglier, very, very fast now. Ugly in genuinely obscene ways, which is to say, that ugliness will be celebrated, not reviled, appreciated, not rejected. This is what happens when a world goes zero-sum.

You need to keep your head in the game.

But which game? Ironically, the one game that’s not a game at all, really.

These games are now over. Trying to change, improve, or alter much of anything, at a system, institutional, or macro level. Can’t be done now. 

We’re now past the points of no return. All of them. 

There is no going back.

Now the future is certain, in precisely the same way it was in the 1890s or 1930s. Nobody can alter its course. Nobody—not even the most powerful figures on the planet. Forces are much, much greater than that.

So many of the old games are now over. 

Let’s do an example. What’s left to teach people in an age like this? Nothing. They are going to spend a decade or more repeating all of history’s stupidest mistakes, and then some, and maybe after all that, they’ll wake up, and ask us learned and wiser minds how it all went so badly. 

Maybe we’ll even try to teach them then, but the point for now is: do you really want to waste the rest of your life on that?

Many of the old games are now over. We cannot now do any of the following things. Teach, instruct, warn, prevent. As all these modes of social organization fail, so too, you can see that science, art, and literature are going with them, because of course, they have a purpose.

There’s one game left in town.

That’s your life.

Now you have to focus on it.

And to do that, you need to keep your head in the game.

Keeping Your Head in the Game

So what am I saying? I’m trying to say, and I don’t know if I’m succeeding, that now your orientation in life, and your relationship with the world, has to change. We’ve discussed that a lot, but the need is acute now.

Keeping your head in the game means that there is nothing now we can do to prevent what is on the way, and I won’t spell out what that is, because by now, you should know, and I think we all do, whether or not we want to admit it.

What you can do, though, is design a life for yourself that’s still worth living.

That’s not going to happen for a lot of people. They are going to suffer the consequences of their choices. We’ve discussed some of the prices they’ll pay, financial, economic, social, emotional, relational. Their lives will fall apart.

So now is the time to stop being confused. To stop dilly-dallying. To stop wondering and hemming and hawing.

You need to keep your head in the game, which is about the rest of your life, and it not going to hell along with what’s left of the world, which day by day, isn’t much.

Now. All of that sounds easy, but it’s not going to be.

How do you feel today? 

Now consider how you’ll feel in a year, if you don’t keep your head in the game.

Every day is going to be more difficult and challenging than the last.

Economies will begin to fail, as global trade breaks down. Job markets will go into shock, even more than they already are. Inequality will accelerate sharply. Discontent will spike, as will distrust and hostility. Threats will turn into realities. Polities will go on fracturing. Downward mobility will explode. Prices will rise, incomes will fall, and so forth and so on.

The cycles of history repeat themselves, and we are now in a Great Repetition, if you like.

And if you don’t understand the need to keep your head in the game, how serious and real and urgent it is, then you are going to be utterly lost a year from now. Count on it, because I guarantee it. You are not going to know what hit you as the world destabilizes at a pace not seen the 1930s or 1890s. 

You will end up wondering how you lost so much and how it all fell apart so fast, and the more secure and vulnerable you feel right now, the worse that’s going to be, because these forces are going to affect all. All those, at least, who don’t have their heads in the game.

Why It’s So Hard to Keep Your Head in the Game

My favorite team, the Ravens. Playing their beautiful, stunning, improbable game, making football seem a little like poetry or music. What happened? The more like that you are, the harder it is to keep your head in the game.

You see, if you’re really just a dullard, then it’s easy to keep your head in the game. Few of us are like that, though. Still, if you don’t think much, then what is there to think about, or not, to worry over, or not?

But the more creative, empathic, thoughtful, and sensitive you are, the harder it is to keep your head in the game. And that applies to people like you and me. We’re the givers. We’re the ones who make things happen, really make them happen, even if others take the credit. We’re the creative geniuses, often hidden behind the scenes, the teachers, the artistic forces, the ones with the big ideas, the ones who feel intensely, and can’t ever stop.

So especially for people like us, it’s hard to keep your head in the game. Little things can throw you off balance, because you’re used to performing at a level most people can’t, or doing things, creating things, understanding things, teaching things, knowing things, most people don’t or won’t or can’t. 

This is the Disequilibrium Principle, if you like. It’s easier to disturb a sensitive system, and that’s what most of us are, people like you and me.

So we need to focus harder than ever on keeping our heads in the game.

Otherwise, what’s going to happen? We can spend all day whining and bitching and moaning and complaining. Gawping in disbelief. Are they really going to…? Will they actually…? We can spend our days stunned and bewildered. Even though we always knew what was going to happen.

And doesn’t that sound like a tremendous waste of time? Energy? Life?

Don’t do it. Don’t join the world in it’s self-destruction. Stand apart from it. Give yourself that gift. Have the confidence and maturity now to step away from the wreck. And one step at a time, walk away from it.

That’s keeping your head in the game.

Let me make that concrete.

If you know what’s going to happen, why do you need to do any of the following things?

• Read the news
• Check social media
• Wax outraged
• Pretend to be surprised
• Complain about the ineffectuality of this group or the stupidity of that one

Don’t get wrapped up in this foolish cycle. That, too, is being part of the cycle, isn’t it?

So what should you do?

Constructing a Richer Life

Now is the time to design your life. Last time around, I called that Lifedesign, and I sort of introduced you to a way to analyze and think about your life, and how to begin constructing a richer one.

And that is what you should be doing.

Constructing a richer life.

That can mean it many forms. You can focus on financials, of course, and that’s important. You can focus on it professionally. Or personally, relationally. You can focus on it intellectually. Maybe even just emotionally.

Or you can, as I recommend, think about all this in a more integrated way, and join all this up together, which is where the idea of Lifedesigns, vs lifestyles, comes in.

We’ll talk more about Lifedesigns soon.

For now, though, the point is simple.

You should be constructing a richer life. Every day, your life should be richer and richer, precisely because the world is going to hell. How else do you not join it, after all?

Now. Let me qualify that. A richer life isn’t just: I have more money, but I wrecked my society, because of course, money is only worth it in terms of things you can buy, and in failed societies, there are a lot of things even money can’t buy. A richer life isn’t: I’m spiritually enlightened but impoverished, unless you really like being poor, because we all need to live. A richer isn’t even, I have tons of fine designer stuff, but terrible taste.

A richer life is many, many things. It’s refinement, taste, sophistication. It’s relationships worth having. It’s happiness and meaning. It’s a purpose that endures. It’s all the stuff that the fools putting their lives in the hands of lunatics don’t have, and have given up on.

You need to be better than that. You need to have a confident, mature relationship with the world, this world, the one that’s imploding, and that means understanding where you stand. You can’t change anything now, not a single thing, that game is over. But you can design a life that’s a lot richer than the ones which are going to collapse, or already are, Sinking With the Ship.

You have to give yourself the confidence to do that. To be that. You have to trust yourself to do that and be that. And you have to let the world go now to do that and to be that, because this world is now finished, at least as we knew it or thought of it, as a sane, stable, and peaceful one.

Give yourself these gifts. Let me help you give them to yourself. Nothing that we’re talking about here is beyond your grasp, or anyone’s. Nobody’s talking about you becoming a billionaire, because that isn’t really a life worth pursuing, either. Nobody’s talking about buying a hundred mansions in the sky. 

We’re talking about a richer life in sophisticated, timeless terms, and that is the only game left in town now. Protecting yourself, and those you love, investing in organizations and systems that can make it, reserving your time and energy and attention for them, not wasting them on ones that don’t care about you, and receiving the return of that investment, which is a genuinely richer life.

This is what keeping your head in the game means now. 

You can pursue all that in a hundred million ways, and they don’t matter. Want to, I don’t know, master fine wine? Go for it. Want to have an accomplished second or third career? Go for it. Want to set up your own thing? This is the moment. Want to just invest more in relationships that matter? This is the moment for that, too.

That doesn’t matter, and it’s personal to everyone.

Looking Forward and Looking Back 

What does matter is that you understand this principle, of keeping your head in the game.

This is all that matters now.

And it matters intently and intensely. We aren’t talking about frittering your life away on idle pleasures. We’re talking about living it. Instead of wasting it, on a world that’s already self-destructing, isn’t going to stop, and is going to take a hell of a lot of people with it. We’re talking about not getting wrapped in that cycle of self-destruction, and even if it isn’t as an active participant, that’s easy, even as a passive spectator, which is much harder. We’re talking about stepping away from the wreckage, and never looking back.

Remember Orpheus? He was warned, by the Lord of Death, not to look back, or he’d lose Persephone. Love, life, meaning, purpose. He couldn’t stop himself. The rest is history, or in this case mythology.

Don’t look back. 

You know what’s going to happen now. There’s no point, no use, no meaning, nothing to be gained, zero, from looking back on each day, worse than the last, in a collapsing world, and sort of joining the cycle even by gawping at it. 

Now you must look forward.

It’s true that we can’t look forward in the old way. We can’t look forward, literally, to the economy getting better, to our polities roaring back to health, to people coming back to their senses, to peace and prosperity and truth and justice spreading through the world, and so forth, all these idle dreams we used to take for granted so casually just yesterday.

We can’t look forward in the old ways anymore.

We have to let that go now. Or else we waste our lives on it.

And we can’t look back, either, unless it’s to let history warn us.

So what can we do?

We can look forward, in a different way.

At ourselves, those we love, at our lives, what meaning and purpose we want to imbue them. How we want to live richer lives. 

That’s hard for those of us to whom meaning comes from improving or bettering the world in some way, because now, that age is over, and it’s not coming back, and definitely not in our lifetimes. So that form of meaning and purpose is gone.

And we have to look forward in new ways, now.

This is what keeping your head in the game means.

So instead of dwelling on the stupidity, pain, and heartache of it all, let me ask you a pointed question, then. A hard one. 

What are you looking forward to? I know and you know you can’t answer that question easily, and now you don’t have to lie about it, either, because we’ve been honest about just why. 

So just sit with it for a while.

Give it some room. Let it breathe. Let it germinate. Until at last an answer begins to sprout in your unconscious. That’ll take time. It won’t happen overnight.

But it will happen, and that is the challenge of keeping your head in the game.

Lots of love,

Umair (and Snowy!!)

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