Your Life and the Economy in the Age of Collapse

I’m Umair Haque, and this is The Issue: an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported publication. Our job is to give you the freshest, deepest, no-holds-barred insight about the issues that matter most.

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Hi. How’s everyone? Hanging in there, I hope. Welcome back old friends, welcome new ones, many thanks to all.

Today we’re going to continue our discussions about what precisely to do now, in this age of collapse. We’ve been going through a set of principles, from outgrowing a reactive orientation, and developing an anticipative one instead, cultivating what I call transformational intelligence, calming down and listening to your panic, which is telling you to change, and a whole lot more, in order not to sink with the ship.

Let’s apply some of that today. Many of you have asked me about the economy, so today we’re going to talk about that. I’m going to teach how to think about it well. 

And before I continue, for those of you who want to book sessions with me, about Havens, or just for general advice, like I said, I’ll begin replying to you this week. Many thanks for the overwhelming response so far.

The Survival of the…

What’s going to happen with the economy? How much on your mind should it be, as you sort of stare into the future?

Let’s rewind, because my goal here these days is a little bit different. It’s not to sort of tell you what the future holds, but to teach you how to think about the world now, so you can find your Havens, and live your life.

That’s important, because there’s a certain concept we’ve been dancing around, but I haven’t quite made explicit yet. Let me do that now.

We are now in am implosive phase of history. I mean that formally, not just descriptively, for effect. Paradigms are imploding around us, and we’re about to delve into that as we discuss the economy. But the effect of all that is something that you must now keep in mind at all times. I emphasize that because I don’t say this part out loud often, but now things have reached the point where I have to, and it must guide your decisions and choices now.

Many are not going to make it.

I know how that sounds, so let me explain, qualify, shade it in. I don’t mean it in a childish way, We All Die, Hollywood Movie style. I mean that we are now in for a very, very difficult time. It will last at least half a decade, probably closer to a decade, and possibly longer than that. 

It will feel very much like the 1930s, and some of you have already felt like that, but what’s on the horizon now is going to be eerily like it.

In that context, many aren’t going to make it. I don’t mean, again, that everyone suddenly perishes. I mean that human agency is eradicated. People’s choices become limited. Their freedom gets removed, by circumstance, deliberately, by their own folly. They suffer, in pretty terrible ways, all the hardships of poverty, despair, fear, and more.”Not making it” means many people now will never live to their potential, and I don’t want you to be one of them. 

I say that’s a form of death, and I believe that’s true.

Institutions and Economies in Transformation

But it’s not just people.

Many won’t make it, and that applies to institutions, too. How many of today’s big companies are going to really be able to weather the storms? They’re already plenty nervous. They might be around in a decade, but many of them, in a very different, a very reduced, form. Bezos cozied up to Trump, for example, because he’s basically a salesman for China at this point, and of course, Trump’s tariffs will hit one company hardest: Amazon.

So let me emphasize it. Many aren’t going to make it.

People. Institutions. Leaders.

And paradigms.

Now let’s talk about the economy, because one paradigm is now shattering before our eyes.

That paradigm is of course neoliberalism, or market liberalism, call it what you like.

If you want to just know what the future holds, that’s very simple. All of this is a recipe, an almost perfect one, for depression. In the 1920s, the government was cut, for ideological reasons. And of course, tariffs and protectionism rose. The result was the Great Depression.

I’m not saying “there’s going to be a depression.” I want you to learn how to think about this for yourself, and develop transformation intelligence, so you can anticipate, not just react, to these shocks.

So let’s try it in a more intelligent way now.

What is the “global economy,” really? It works like this. America is it’s largest consumer, by a very long way. China and a number of other nations supply Americans with stuff, artificially cheaply, not accounting for the true costs of everything from what’s basically slave labor to the environment and so on.

As a result, America overconsumes, and the rest of the world underinvests.

Now. Trump wants to turn all that inside out. And that’s understandable, because a nation can’t be the world’s largest consumer forever. Not unless it has an unlimited supply of gold or what have you. America’s been hollowed out, as we all know, because being a mega-consumer also means that there aren’t enough jobs, good ones, stable ones, like there were generations ago.

So Trump’s not wrong to want to fix this problem.

But what his team’s come up with is, as we discussed, eerily reminiscent of the 1930s.

Tariffs, trade barriers, slashing the government. 

This isn’t about “solutions” anymore. How do we fix the macroeconomy, and give people jobs again, without shattering everything? That part isn’t going to happen. This is now about your life. 

Transformational Intelligence

What happened as these dynamics took over the world last time? Everybody knows, but as we discussed, a big part of developing transformational intelligence is listening to yourself. Not arguing with yourself. 

Your gut tends to be right.

Think about it. It knows things your mind doesn’t. 

It’s alert to danger. 

It can do pattern recognition at light speed.

That is why it’s always guiding you. But you have to listen to it in times like these, or else…you ignore the danger, and then you end up Sinking With the Ship, trapped in the cycle of reaction-bewilderment-panic.

So. What happened last time?

Three events. In sequence. You know them, but I’m speaking to you this way for a reason, and it’s not be condescending or paternal, it’s to point out that even now, your mind still may be clouding what your gut already knows.

Three events. Remember them? We all know them. 

Black Friday, the stock market crashed.

The Great Depression came to be.

And that was the road (back) to World War.

This is the sort of situation we’re in.

Now. I’m not saying “all of that’s going to happen!! Everyone, panic!!” I’m saying something very, very different.

Understand how much you already know. Respect it. Give yourself the power to be this knowledgable person, and you have a much, much better chance. Of making it.

Because if you understand that these are the things we now run the risk of—and that’s the key, we’re speaking here about risks, not “going to happens” in a childish way, but risks, probabilities, possibilities—then you also immediately grasp what I mean by: many aren’t going to make it.

Now we are practicing Transformational Intelligence. See that? You’re already doing it. You knew about these three events, and all you needed was a bit of freeing to let yourself place them in our world today, and relate them to what’s happening now.

The Economy and You in an Age of Collapse 

So let’s keep practicing TI now.

What do you think the chances of these three events are?

Maybe it’s…low. Maybe you assign just a small probability to a Black Friday style crash. That’s OK—I’m not telling you, I’m trying to teach you. Even if there’s a small probability, that means that you could run the risk of getting wiped out, right? So you still have to take it pretty seriously. And you have to think very very hard now, about my principle: many won’t make it.

The immediate response of a lot of people will be: where do I put my money! 

That’s the wrong response. It’s not transformationally intelligent. Let’s practice this new skill, employing the principle above.

Many won’t make it. What does that mean in this context? I’ve already given you a clue. In one sense, it means companies, individual stocks. But it also means more than that. It means that many asset classes won’t make it. Do you want to be stuck holding a an index fund if you think there’s even a 10% chance of a Black Friday? Do you want to be holding crypto, in that event, thinking it might be good insurance, but of course, if everybody piles in, what happens when they pile out? Those are just questions. The point is to employ the principle.

Many won’t make it. Who will? That’s where you put your money. Not in a simplistic way. In a considered, reflective, serious one. You need to believe in them, and they need to have a plan, a strategy, a Bible, if you like, for surviving the next decade. But how many companies have that? 

If I look at, say, some of the world’s best run companies, formerly, the truth is, even they’re pretty badly run today. Starbucks doesn’t have a Bible to survive the next ten years. Coca-Cola doesn’t. Nike doesn’t. It’s not a coincidence they’re all being hammered right now.

They’re not learning to be Transformationally Intelligent. They’re not employing the principle of many won’t make it. They’re just…doing business the old, tired way. And right about now, they’re terrified of tariffs, trade barriers, having to shift production, and so on. Not wise. Why didn’t they see this coming? I did, I taught you to, and so here we are discussing what to do next.

That’s not point scoring. It’s pointing out to you how vital this skill of TI is, and yet how little it’s practiced.

So part of TI is kind of a funny, recursive, meta-style thing. To practice it, we look for those who will make it, because they have it, too. Now think of the question again, where do I put my money. If I say, look for institutions that have TI, isn’t the answer already much, much clearer?

Now you can immediately sort the wheat from the chaff, and it’s immediately clear that so, so many institutions are at serious, almost profound risk, because they don’t have anything resembling a strategy or a plan. At most, they’ve sort of jumped on, LOL, the AI bandwagon, as if that’s going to save them, and they made a mistake to do that, because of course, that isn’t even going to save them from the first round of tariffs, let alone what havoc that creates, which goes back to our Three Events.

Surviving the Next Decade

So all of that’s a way to think about the world now. You can book a session with me if you want to go into it further, but here I wanted to take a moment to teach you how to think about all this well for yourself.

You don’t need to know more than you already do. The challenge is listening to yourself. Not second-guessing yourself. In future posts, we’re going to call that different model of selfhood, made of new kinds of confidence and creativity.

Here, though, in this example, which I think is a good one, what I’ve pointed out is that you have more than enough knowledge to understand what comes next. Let me make that even clearer. Even those who voted for Trump know that tariffs will raise prices. Incredibly, they’re the same people who voted for him because inflation was too high. LOL—doesn’t make sense, right? We all laugh in despair, because it’s so idiotic but of course, this is exactly the principle of many won’t make it in action.

People do all kinds of things. They are self-deceitful and self-destructive. They are taught to be malicious, and turn that anger and hate inwards, and make these sorts of foolish choices, imagining themselves to be the ones who are going to exempt, somehow, from the very chaos they’ve unleashed.

Does it ever work out that way?

You must be smarter than that now. Smarter than them. That doesn’t mean exploiting them, but it does mean making clear boundaries in your life now. I won’t join this ship of fools. I’m not going to jump off the cliff. I am walking this way, now. I’m not sinking with the ship.

These boundaries are about choices. Those choices come from anticipating the next set of shocks to roil our world. Those will come faster and faster until all this culminates in what it always does, which is an event so cataclysmic that at last, people have no choice left but to come back to their senses. 

It’s anyone’s guess what that event will have to be.

But now you have Three Events to choose from. Will it have to be a Black Friday? Another Depression? A World War? That part we don’t know. What we do know is that the risk of this sequence goes on accelerating, every day now, because people are making collective choices that are profoundly self-destructive, and imagining that somehow, they won’t have to pay the price. 

They will. The only question is whether you’ll join them. I hope that helped, and as for booking a session with me, we’ll set up an automated system to do it soon, for now, you can as always just email me (umairhaque at gmail). 

Lots of love from me and Snowy, and I know that was a little brutal, but. I want you and yours to be among the ones that do make it.

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