The Disruption of Stability

People did not like it.

• The QTs and replies were negating hustle culture and the grindset and the hyper-individualistic entrepreneurial force that is the “I am nothing if not Work”.

• I think a lot of these points are valid - yeah its really not great to Always Be Optimizing - reading fiction and diverse subjects are both really valuable

• The inherent assertion was that self-help books are the cookie cutter template of what Success™️ is meant to look like. These books largely dont leave room for nuance, drag out assumptions, and just copy-paste-progress generalizations.

And thats a bad thing, because we should want to be our own Person, right？ As Colin Wilson wrote in A Criminal History of Mankind:

“The worst crimes are not committed by evil degenerates, but by decent and intelligent people taking 'pragmatic' decisions.”

The Disruption of the Home

But almost ironically？ Paradoxically？ Our housing structures are increasingly becoming non-individual, which sort of disrupts the whole individuation process (i promise i have a point)

• There was a really good YouTube video titled Why Everywhere in the US is Starting to Look the Same that talked about this - the Franchisation of the United States, how we seek stability in the strip malls (a McDonalds in Cleveland is about the same as one in Miami), and how we encourage societal sameness.

• Its much easier to build apartment buildings that look the same versus individual houses (much more profitable too).

• Which leads to a lot of 5-over-1s, 5 story wood-framed buildings on a concrete platform that are cheap to build, more profitable than single family homes… and look the same.

• This shows up in the advent of built for rent versus built for sale

• Because we literally just don‘t have enough housing - so it’s a tradeoff. You can live in the cookie cutter, and thats that.

We end up packaging everyone into the same apartment structure styles and say “hey this is for you, this is what you can afford, and this is where you can live”

• And its really easy for builders to build these homes - 5-over-1s are simple, quick, and house a lot of people.

• Housing is scarce - and mortgage rates are above 5% for the first time in 11-years so… good luck out there - because demand isn‘t stopping and shortages aren’t resolving.

So its interesting because we have this rebellion of sameness (“self-help books want to make you a literal carbon copy Silicon Valley Bro”) juxtaposed with housing structures that are increasingly homogeneous.

• Fear of Sameness: And I think there is so much opposition to the grindset mindset because of *that* immense fear of sameness that is showing up in housing - the loss of a sense of self-identity fading away, of becoming a dust mote just sort of blowing around. So people react viscerally to being told to do xyz, as evidenced by the quote tweets from the aforementioned reading list.

We want to remain ourselves, but its increasingly difficult to find who we are.

• If most had to point to something that underscores the sort of “4-hour Workweek, Copy Your Own Path With A Shovel and Brick” mindset that shows up in these self-help books is that people who read them want to adapt their personhood to what they think society defines as success.

• Because the homogeneity is seen as quick way to access and opportunity. Just do these five things and you can be rich too!!

That boxing of ourselves - the forcing function of becoming the reflection that you see in the mirror - skews what we actually can become. Because we become these build-to-rent homes that are homogeneous and built from different foundations but still end up looking the same.

And people… are rebelling against that, at a micro level.

On a macro level, many think that we are sort of on a similar cusp of things changing.

The Disruption of Stability

So Zoltan Pozsar has sort of been calling for a huge change, even bigger than the 5-over-1 apartments:

• Zoltans thesis, boiled down

• Weaponization of the dollar disrupts both of those.

• USD is not cool: Countries are going to shift away from the USD and go to things like the renminbi, gold, and commodities. The weaponization of the US dollar is bad, and countries are just not going to vibe with that anymore.

• Fed yikes: As a consequence, the Federal Reserve is no longer going to be able to maintain price stability which is a core thing that they need to do.

• USD super not cool: So you have state intervention (governments) that are disrupting the flow of money and how we think about structural stability because of economic warfare. Everyone‘s like “dang the U.S. is gross and we don’t want to deal with that”.

• Crisis: There is a crisis of credibility because there is an inherent assumption in the USD of 1) price stability but also 2) rule of law

• China？ Everyone is going to peace out and China will be a main benefactor from that - and the U.S. will not.

This is interesting from the sameness perspective that I spoke about for individuals-

• Things seem like they will remain the same forever: Even when I write out these words, I‘m like “oh well no, USD will be reserve currency - military power, and China’s autocratic - why would countries deal with that？”

• But things always change: Zoltan would say “well well well China is an ex ante closed capital account but the US is a ex post closed capital account so like its basically the same. Also China is the only one that can mop up the Russian commodity situation.”

See, both Zoltan, Luke Gromen, and other guys who are sometimes right about things think that the Russian sanctions are essentially the equivalent of the U.S. going off the gold standard. This is the Regime Shift, the Triffin dilemma, the reckoning of Bretton Woods III where both trade alliances and money alliances shift.

And like, maybe？

Dollar Dominance

Dollar dominance could be at risk. I‘ve talked about this before when discussing the displacement of the USD as reserve currency where the IMF was like “well it’s not going to be RMB taking over, but rather a lot of small little currencies as reserves”