Dec 3, 2024 11 min read

Your Life in an 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? Welcome back old friends, welcome new ones, many thanks to all, and here’s a magic puppy hug from little Snowy.

Today we’re going to continue our discussions. About life in an age of collapse. Not Sinking With the Ship. The many principles I’ve been laying out for you, from minimizing risk and maximizing agency to becoming kinetic and anticipative instead of reactive. So we can find our Havens.

We’re now in a position to begin speaking abut the larger paradigm of living through times like these. Thank you also, by the way, for the overwhelming response to booking sessions with me. Email are going out this week. If you’d like to get on the list, you’re welcome to email me at umairhaque at gmail.

You must now renegotiate your relationship with the world.

You’re already doing that. How many of you feel so weary, so drained, so frustrated, that you’ve given up on reading the news? How many have retreated and sort of gone numb? I’m not blaming you. I’m just observing, and my first observation is this.

You must now renegotiate your relationship with the world, because it is already renegotiating its relationship with you.

Times like these call for radically different selves. With different capacities, capabilities, competencies, compared to the selves that stable, linear, comfortable times call for.

This is the challenge of reconstructing selfhood, and this is what we’ve been beginning to touch upon.

Now we are going to go much further. I am going to try and teach you this week how to move through a world like this in a confident way. Not a despairing, passive, and somber one. But one that resounds with purpose, and remember how we’ve been discussing the principle of listening to your panic? How it’s telling you you need to change?

The time for that change is here now, and it is about rediscovering purpose in a world going haywire. Because if you don’t, to put it unkindly, it will now proceed to make mincemeat of you. How do we do that?

The World and You, or the Sinking Ship

I am going to teach you a mental map with which to see the world now.

It’s a very simple one, but I think it’s an accurate one, and it hides subtleties in it.

There’s a ship. We’re all on it.

It’s headed for an iceberg, as you might imagine, with my metaphor of the sinking ship.

But atop the iceberg are people, snarling and cheering on the ship, hurrying it on.

On the ship, a sense of confusion and panic prevails.

The captains can’t decide what to do, and so there’s the ship, steaming full sail ahead for the iceberg.

And in truth, there’s not just one iceberg.

Everybody on the ship knows this, and yet nobody much on the ship seems to want to think about it.

Do icebergs come in ones?

Of course not. So this ship is now headed for a series of icebergs, all of which are thronged with people, cheering on the ship’s plunge to the bottom.

The captains don’t appear to understand any of this, though they have all the charts in the world right before them.

Even if they can agree to steer clear of this iceberg, what about the next one, and the one after that?

Now.

You might imagine that your job is to get off the ship.

That’s true. It’s one of your jobs. And you must do it swiftly, confidently, and without hesitation or doubt. But you have a job before that one.

Not being made a fool of.

Icebergs Don’t Come in Ones, or What You Already Know

Let’s go back to my metaphor.

Icebergs don’t come in ones.

You can readily imagine all the icebergs we now face. So this isn’t about some kind of minor-league temporary thing, whether politics or culture or finance or what have you. This is about an uncrossable voyage.

This is what it means not to be made a fool of.

That’s your first challenge in times like these. If you want to move through this troubled, imploding world with the confidence, poise, and swiftness you need to, then you must stop letting yourself be made a fool.

That’s a little mysterious still, so let me explain it.

The Knowing

You know everything you need to know now.

That’s the strange blessing of times like these.

You’re an intelligent, thoughtful person. All of you are. Now. What most people don’t know is that they know everything they need to know.

About what happens next.

You know, for example, how empires rise and fall, through overexpansion, underinvestment, the classic sequence of hubris. You know how nations fail, as the masses grow impoverished and embittered. You know how fragile democracy is, and how it falls, as working and middle classes are seduced away.

You know the story of Weimar Germany, of the Soviet Union, of Rome, countless stories, like 1984, you’ve read Dickens, Hemingway, you know about the Great Depression, and the Great Wars.

So you know.

Times like these culminate in certain ways. You don’t need to know more than that. Nobody can say much more than that. Even I, for all my knowledge, can’t tell you exactly when and where. But we all know how such times play out. Financial crises, economic catastrophes, political degenerations, and social collapses, usually, climaxing in wars.

The Three Kinds of People and Institutions in the World Now

Now think of the ship again, and the iceberg.

Ultimately, the ship will hit the iceberg, and at that moment, who knows? Perhaps those left on the ship, and those snarling at them from the berg, will attack one another.

So what? Both of these groups of people are going to sink.

That’s true for institutions, not just people. See how many CEOs are getting fired? Intel’s just did, and that was just after Stellantis’s, one of the world’s largest carmakers. They didn’t—amazingly—see the writing on the wall. Being the captains of the ship is no guarantee you’re even seeing much, these days.

There are three kinds of people and institutions in the world now. Those on the ship, who are confused and bewildered and will hesitate too long. Those on the iceberg, cheering on the ship sinking. And those who are going to resolve not to Sink With the Ship.

Which category do you want to be in?

The Knowing and the Fool

Now. Let’s go back to being made a fool of.

You know everything you need to know. About ages like these. Everything. The pattern, the sequence, the events. Nobody can say more than that, like where or when. Depression, Black Friday, World War, whatever, doesn’t matter, the point is, you grasp the essence of the form.

Everybody does, at least those of us who I suppose have high school level educations.

And yet most of us are being made fools of. We allow ourselves to be made fools of.

It goes like this.

You say to yourself, but that can’t possibly be. And so you seek out those who confirm your biases.

And so there people are, being made fools of.

If that doesn’t make sense, let’s go through a few examples.

The Dems. There they are, and the very figures who led them to utter ruin are still bickering over who did it. The answer is: they did.

But they’re fools, and what happens when you listen to fools? You become one.

Renegotiating Your Relationship With the World

So. The first mistake of not being able to construct a modern self is this one.

Self-delusion.

You know what’s going to happen, in probably more detail than you want to, and everybody who’s read say more than three history books does. But then you play the game of self-delusion. You listen to fools, because they prey on your biases. They tell you what you want to hear.

Just like they did to the Dems.

And bang, before you know it? There you are, stricken. Bewildered. Stuck in the response of reaction-confusion-panic. How did it all go so wrong?

You let yourself be made a fool of.

Now think of all those CEOs. Stellantis sells cars. Anybody with half a modicum of sense could have told it to plan for industry-wrecking tariffs. But it listened to those who told it what it wanted to hear, the usual management consultants who soothed its fears away with sweet lullabies of AI and what have you.

Bang, there it is. It’s been made a fool of.

I could go on, but my point is: it’s not just you.

It’s everybody, which is why I highlight this as the first step you need to take in becoming confident, and reclaiming your agency.

It’s become normal, de rigueur, just habitual, to be made a fool of.

How many articles and columns did you read today from people who got everything wrong for the last few years? Decade? Two? So what are you even doing? This isn’t about politics or intellectual games. It’s about your life.

If you’re wasting it this way, you will never gain wisdom. You will remain trapped in the cycle of reaction-bewilderment-panic.

You must stop letting yourself be made a fool of.

That means giving up on self-delusion, which we’ve just discussed. It also means giving up on self-deceit. And it means, further, not suffering fools.

The Purpose of a Fool is to Make You a Bigger One, or Bad Choices Compound

Pod Save America etc, to use another example, led the Dems to utter ruin. And yet people still sort of are there, sort of in despair but addicted to it, even after all that just happened. LOL. Why? I suppose people of a certain kind want to appear smart.

I have a neighbor like this. He listens to podcast after podcast. You know the ones, I’m sure. And if he sees me on the street, he just sort of launches into it.

Hey, you said this, but these guys said that.

Even to about last year, I’d sort of reluctantly smile, and try to play along. Hey, he’s my neighbor, after all. So I’d stand there, and try to discuss with him, and explain to him. But in my mind, I was thinking, most of the time: man, why do you waste your time listening to fools? Don’t you want to…grow? More intelligent? Wiser? And yet his life is sort of crumbling away the more he does this, because when you’re led by fools…you know the principle by now…you become one.

Now, I don’t have time for it. Energy. I shrug when he launches into his sort of thing. They said, what do you say? I just smile and make a joke. He’s perplexed. He doesn’t understand yet that this isn’t a game. It’s his life. But it’s also mine, and I don’t have enough of it left to spend on fools.

Not him, perhaps, but certainly, the legions of people he’s quoting, who he wants me to debate with him.

I don’t have enough of my life left to waste it on fools, and neither do you.

This is self-deceit. Pretending that for the sake of being seen as smart or what have you, you go on pretending. Listening to the failed paradigms, imbibing the old ideas, sort of just sitting there, and letting that stuff soothe away your never-ending panic, which we all feel these days.

Bad choice.

This will never lead you to become the kind of self that’s going to make it in this age. What happens the longer you spend debating the kind of tedious stuff my neighbor does? You don’t get off the ship, do you? Maybe you even start snarling back at the people raging from the bergs.

Bad choices compound.

Don’t get into this cycle. Rid yourself of it. Make a clean break, and make it now.

So what am I saying to you? Who should you listen to?

Who You Already Are, and Recognizing Yourself in the Broken Mirror of a Collapsing World

You.

Now let me put all the above in a more thoughtful, and positive, way.

You are a thoughtful, intelligent, and resourceful person.

You know all you need to know to begin making the moves you need to make. Maybe not all of them, but certainly enough…

Not to be made a fool of.

But if you think of yourself in the way that we’ve been taught to now for such a long time, as a passive consumer—remember my neighbor—a victim, a spectator…then you will undoubtedly end up being made a fool of.

You see, the world is now full of those who want to make a fool of you. It’s a curse of times like these. Of course it’s easily seen to be true on one side, but it’s just as true on the other. Have all the liberal pundits and whatnot made anyone even the slightest iota smarter? Not one bit, because everybody who listened to them is even more trapped than they were before, LOL.

In times like these, the charlatans come out. The snake-oil salesmen emerge. Figures of all kinds come out of the shadows, from under the rocks, and they all have just one purpose, to make a fool of you. Doesn’t matter much in the old sense their “divisions,” are they left or right, rich or poor, do they have fancy degrees or not, etcetera.

But you must remember the first principle. There is nothing that you need to be taught to understand the predicament you’re in, or even how it’s solved. Nothing.

You don’t “learn” how to solve the predicament you’re in, that we’re all in, from some textbook. You create the way out, as we’ll discuss, and you do that by being kinetic. By anticipating, not reacting. By maximizing your agency. And step by step, you forge a path away from the Sinking Ship.

There’s no magic bullet. There’s no magic formula. It is hard work, perhaps the hardest of all, because you’re challenged to reconstruct your self. In deep and profound ways. Even more challenging, to do it fast.

The only kind of person that surviving in an age like this comes naturally to? It’s the sort of figure above, the charlatan. But of course in the end, they Sink With the Ship, too, because there they are, at the last moment, selling their illusions.

The Foolish and the Wise

You must now become wise. Remember one of our principles? Many Won’’t Make It.

That doesn’t mean knowing everything. It means knowing the limits of your ignorance, but also the power of your knowledge.

—You know what you need to know, in all the ways that matter, about times like these.

—What you don’t know, nobody does, such as when and where.

This is wisdom. From wisdom comes power. That power is expressed in agency. Even I can’t teach you things that are unknowable. But I can teach you how Not to Sink With the Ship, because that already something you are capable of.

You must see yourself now as this courageous, intelligent, thoughtful, and resourceful person. That is who you are. Those elements, joined together in new ways, knitted together through kinesis, ignited by anticipation, not dulled by passivity and reaction—they are wisdom. That is what wisdom is.

See yourself as this person. Recognize yourself as this person. Do not spend one instant more of your life on, with, for fools. Those who are going to Sink With the Ship, whether they’re on it, or on the bergs, doesn’t matter. Don’t waste one iota of your precious time or energy bickering or squabbling with them, in any way, and that’s not about political sides, it just is. That is reaction. Reaction is what we must transcend now.

Recognize yourself as someone who is wiser than you know, but sees yourself, probably, in the wrong way. Don’t let yourself be bewildered and confused by fools, because the only job of a fool is to turn you into a greater one.

As you begin to see yourself this way, only then, really, I think, do you become capable of the kind of intense action, reflection, contemplation, and anticipation that times like require. Then you begin to become the self this age challenges you to become.

I’m not saying that’ll be easy. But I am saying that you must start now. The time for the old ways, my friends, is over. Now is the time we voyage to new shores, and leave those who wish to sink on the old ones behind. We cannot help them anymore.

Deep inside, you know that.

Let your self-deceit and self-delusion end now. Reclaim your agency and take back your power. One more instant of your life gone as the ship heads for the bergs? Even that’s too much.