The world you were born into is gone. So, what now?

Maybe there were times in human history when five generations lived alongside one another at the same time, but I can’t find any mention of that before. From the last of the Silent Generation to the newborns of Gen Alpha, all now exist simultaneously on this wonderful rock we call home.

Yet deep in the hearts of all adults and teens, we know the world is changing faster than we can adapt, and it’s morphed into a different place from when we were born.

“Civilisation starts with order, grows through liberty and dies in chaos” – Will Durant

I found myself thinking about this a lot as I went through midlife and chalked it up to the cliché of the “midlife crisis”. I went on a little bit of a deep dive into the malaise I felt about the world and came up with several things that made me realise the cold fact that normality is gone. I’ll repeat for the kids sleeping at the back of the room. No More Normal.

We can all feel it

Since the Second World War, and through the creation of the post-war financial and monetary systems, we’ve had relative stability in both areas of politics and economics. Sure, there’ve been skirmishes in Korea and Vietnam, a Cold War stalemate, and ongoing problems in the Middle East, but overall, we grew as a civilisation with low debt, a lower population, and peace in a unipolar world. Globalisation then expanded dramatically thanks to the safety of the shipping routes protected by the US Navy.

Now we’ve just entered the multi-polar world with two superpowers, each with its own acolytes and trade agreements with favoured partners.  Ask anyone you know to describe how they think things are going, and you will quickly hear words like uncertainty, volatility, craziness, hostility, warmongering, complexity, and unsafe.

We all feel that something has changed, and many will point to the pandemic of 2020 as the cause, although the more observant will go back as far as the Great Financial Crisis of 2007/2008, and the extremely astute will look back to 1971, when the US came off the gold standard.

Survival in the future has to start with us grieving the old world, or the old playbook. You must acknowledge that we won’t return to “normal” or whatever that was. You cannot drive along your road of life by looking solely in the rearview mirror, or you’ll collide with everything in front of you.

Global trauma

The media has changed and grown so much as an industry that it’s hard to remember a day when we only had a few broadsheet newspapers and a few state TV channels. Now it’s wall-to-wall media on all your devices in a flood of 24/7 clickbait and nonsense opinions from biased people masquerading as journalists. Social media is the newest and most insidious of the media gang, with its algorithms and echo chambers corrupting minds into caring about all the issues on the planet.

We’re the first era of humanity to process global trauma on an hourly basis via the devices we carry in our pockets or handbags. We’re guilted into feeling for the entire planet while ignoring the teenager sleeping rough outside our local coffee shops.

The real problem of humanity is the following: We have palaeolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology – Edward o Wilson.

Evolution is a magnificent thing, just look at how we as homo sapiens have evolved over three hundred thousand years or so. Everything happened over a long period of time, granting our species the ability to adapt and change. Weakness would be weeded out, and strong genes would be carried forward.

Then we discovered hydrocarbons and a “print as much as we like” monetary system, which supercharged so much of our collective growth. Our world moves at the speed of light, while our brain is still transitioning from the horse to the car. We simply don’t have the mental and neural pathways to handle the sheer pace of change today, let alone the tsunami of information from fake friends and followers. Our “Victorian” governing and parliamentary institutions are out of touch and too slow, while we all grapple with our alien-like technology that our brains can’t process.

Throughout history, the world has always been a violent and chaotic place for us to survive in, and yet we kept adapting and progressing, so what’s different this time? It’s clear that the chaos isn’t happening in the same way as it did decades ago.  This time it’s happening in our dopamine receptors, which are always in a state of anxiety.

Economy, wealth and career

No matter where you are in the world, it’s obvious that the world’s economies are, and have been since Covid and before, in a very bad way. Growth has been turgid and slow. Most countries are bumping along the recession line, and it won’t take much to drop them into a deep one.

Global debt-to-GDP is around 235% ($111 trillion in GDP, $346 trillion in private and government debt).  Our GDP economic model, which all countries have bought into, is built on chasing profit rather than expanding to include measures of welfare and well-being (remember that GDP was just a suggestion in a 1934 report by Simon Kuznets, and was intended to measure production, not welfare). Globally, we have doubled and tripled our debt since the 2008 financial crisis, and yet we expect it to end differently than back then. At some point, the music stops, and everyone gets a chair with a mountain of debt to deal with and an inability to pass it on.

Money printing continues to widen the wealth gap, as companies and people close to central banks get first dibs on cash to buy all the assets. Do a deep dive into The Cantillon Effect to further grasp this insidious practice. A side note here. It has always amused me how people demand taxes on the super-rich, while failing to demand changes or outright abolition of the central gangsters who lend the money into existence. It shows how far the masses have been propagandised to focus on the people who made a profit rather that then insidious creatures who provide them with the money in the first place.

It’s obvious that the wealth gap is widening, but inflation and the funnelling of wealth upwards are hollowing out the middle classes, who remain the powerhouse of any great economy that needs constant debt and consumption to survive. When the middle class cannot consume and spend, the system collapses.

Another major system design flaw is that we used to buy things (as opposed to renting or leasing nowadays) that would last for decades. My parents got a large fringe as a wedding present, and it easily lasted for more than forty years. When it broke, we called a guy, and he came around and fixed it. Obsolescence has been built into the earn-to-consume GDP model, so young couples nowadays can expect to have to get 3 to 4 fridges in their forty years together. The waste created through this mechanism is astounding, and the planet is paying the price.

Back then, we owned record collections, our own books, physical things, whereas everything is rented, from cloud companies, then streamed to us. It’s all sold to us as convenience, but the goal here is to get us addicted to renting from an ever-shrinking group of elite providers. For a fascinating read on this topic, look at Yanis Varoufakis’s Technofeudalism.

 Career paths of old were upward, linear, and predictable. A hyper-specialisation concept of one degree, one lifelong career. All this has changed now.  Technology has always been deflationary, with the goal of driving down costs in the area of the corporation’s highest expense: labour. With the AI disruptor bashing down the gates, things are certainly heading towards uncharted territory when it comes to the old playbook of traditional education and corporate career paths. I have a feeling that those already on the treadmill will have different choices to make than younger folks who have yet to get sucked into the rat race. While the future may look shit for them (the old playbook is over), they’ll have many other great opportunities to build a life for themselves if they push really hard into entrepreneurship and become multiskilled with multi-revenue streams.

Those in the system will have to assess the impact, start unlearning, and then learn other skills that can either keep them in their industry or help them quickly pursue other opportunities. The danger here is that people who’ve been working for twenty years or more have their identity fused to their job. The “I am a…insert your career here” statement has become how people define themselves. What do they do when their job no longer needs their knowledge or experience? Don’t believe the hype or political spin. AI will not create anywhere near enough jobs that it will replace, or else it wouldn’t be the perceived threat now, would it? It will create a whole new suite of AI jobs for sure, but it’s the inevitable pace of job losses that will sink economies.

Globalists and politics

Thanks to the pandemic, we saw the globalist elite slip out of the misty veils of conspiracy right onto the front page of the news. Brazenly proud of keeping control from secretive meetings, they came out of the closet, into the Great Reset world they wanted. Countless minions regurgitating the “Build Back Better” script, proving the control they wielded amongst national leaders, in the money markets and of course, the green lobby. With God complexes, they pursue the global control that their wet dreams are filled with. Controlling money and governments, and therefore the voters, is the process, all the while lining their pockets as they steal from the masses.

I’ve been around the sun more than 55 times, so I can say with certainty that I have never seen a political class of global leaders so weak and facile. Career men and women who are addicted to status and power, without accountability for their mistakes. The first mantra they spout is that they do things because they care about their voters. And as you now know, they just don’t.

Once great nations, now stand ripe for civil war because everyone is too afraid to offend anyone. I pointedly mention the United Kingdom here because I’ve lived here for more than 28 years and have seen it decline into absolute irrelevance in terms of democracy, diplomacy, economy, and society. To be fair, the same could be said for the entire European continent, too.

As you read this, we’ve slipped from the stability and safety of a unipolar world into the uncertainty and volatility of a multipolar one, and all the fun that that’ll bring. The powers are shifting, and this always makes everyone worse off because while the unipolar world was complex, we had rules and institutions that gave us guidance on policies, finance, careers and rigid life plans.

With the globalist elite slowly taking over institutions within the unipolar construct, thereby corrupting themselves in the process, they’ll also soon begin to struggle and fall because alliances and allegiances change and break down, causing their power to evaporate. All civilisations collapse, and the current patterns say it will happen again soon.

We were promised a global village with all its convenience, connectivity and technology. Instead, we now have toxic digital tribes where we only get placed in front of people who agree with us. This fragmentation means that any collective action needed at the national or global level will fail, and continue to fail. It feels like the world is imploding because we don’t share a common reality anymore, and seem doomed to stay trapped in this spiralling digital tribe of individualism

Health

I’m not sure who needs to hear this, but we’ve become fat and lazy with our diets of sugar and prescription pills. As we struggle amid the comfort crisis, we continue to grow softer and more self-involved in a world that has normalised individualism over the group. All civilisations that do that collapse rather quickly.

We’ve moved from one crisis to another, as we no longer find strength in stoicism and walking off our problems as our ancestors did, who, it turns out, were a hundred times tougher than we are. Don’t agree? Well, what were you doing when you were 19? Sitting in a muddy trench, in a foreign land, fighting with honour for your country, watching your friends die next to you. Didn’t think so.

Somehow, we’re in a twilight zone where, unless you have a plethora of self-ascribed victimhoods that “cripple” you, and you cannot get out of bed, you are clearly not normal. Everyone has to have a trauma that helped them on their journey, and they all need a shrink, a life coach, a fitness coach, a nutrition coach, and an AI assistant that tells them they are wonderful all the time. So many dark clouds are building up on the horizon that are going to test us, and most of those people stuck in the Cult of Self (from Tasha Eurich, Insight) are going to get washed away in the hard times ahead.

Health has become an industry now. I know this because I am part of it as a coach.  You used to go to the doctor when you were broken, and it cost a tenner. Now we have apps and wearables that tell us we are about to experience some event or illness no one has ever heard of before. We run around telling anyone who will listen about our ailment, as if their opinions will ever heal you. It’s self-centred and delusional, but more importantly, it’s changing our worldview from “everyone suffers” to “only my suffering matters”.

One thing that has got worse is that we used to have clear boundaries between work and life. Now we’re working all the time, bringing work home not just on the occasional weekend to meet a deadline, but every day. There is no time to switch off.

Mental health has deteriorated at such alarming rates since social media raised its Medusa-like head. We used to be community-driven and knew all our neighbours by name. Now we are individualistic, with thousands of followers on our phones, none of whom give a crap about you. We’re lonelier than ever before.

So, what can you do about it all

Controlling the controllable:

Let’s start with what you cannot control. You cannot control the vast majority of what’s happening out there in the world. Tattoo that onto your brain. Get over the sanctimony that you’re so important that you need to be involved in solving every distant crisis, war, inhumanity, or other planetary fart that bubbles up. Your opinion doesn’t matter any more than the pawn or rook has a say in the chess player’s decisions.

It’s not about “not caring” or being empathetic for others in the world. It’s about your old palaeolithic brain (and emotions) not being able to handle thousands of followers sharing 24/7 news items that keep your stress hormones in the red zone all day long. Start by making a list of things you cannot directly control, then actively control how you react to them. Here are some examples:

• War on another continent
• Your government’s actions
• People of opposite political or societal beliefs
• Getting angry at politicians or celebrities
• Getting angry at the news.

There will be many who are seething right now with righteous indignation because they care about everything and everyone. By championing every cause, they show they are part of the “saviour delusion” club. They sit there in their pyjamas on the couch with biscuit crumbs all over the place, new coffee stains on their tops, covering last night’s pizza stains, as they smirk at their smartphone at the hurt that they caused to some opposing fool who knows nothing, unlike them. We don’t matter in the grander schemes, even though the algorithmic echelons tell us to take up digital placards and march for [insert some moral topic]. You are special and can change the world, which is what you’ve been told, failing to realise we’re all lowly chess pieces being pushed about according to some chess player’s game plan.

Again, for the people at the back. It has nothing to do with not caring. It has to do with a world that has changed so much that you’ve failed to see you’re being played, distracted, and kept in a state of fight-or-flight to serve someone else’s bidding, be it a government, a dictator, an institution, or a global religion.

Take control of your life by controlling your thinking. Take care of people in your local community first, and the rest will unfold on its own. Start going against the common consensus for a while, no matter how scary. It will liberate you.

Opting out:

Say no to things that everyone else expects you to do. Delete apps from your phone. Learn how to be a digital minimalist. Say no to taking work home or doing Zoom calls in your private time. Actively have a plan each week to do things that make you happy. Set aside some time every week for yourself, and make everyone in the household or family group understand this. Being constantly “busy” is a self-imposed martyrdom that means you’re missing out on chances to change or pivot your life away from chaos.

You cannot serve others, including those you love, if you are spinning and spiralling all the time. The safety briefing on every flight tells you to put the oxygen mask on yourself first before trying to help others. Understand this, then do it. On the social treadmill, we’ve been groomed to never stop running. The greatest skill you can have in the new world is to learn how to say no, then head off to the bar and enjoy some “out of digital reach” time. Move away from the stampeding herd and its panicked thinking. Stop being a sucker who follows every trend out there, and for fucksakes, stop trying to keep up with the Joneses.

Employment has changed forever:

Learn and understand this. Maslow’s laws have been perverted over the past 100 years. Your existence has been bound to your work. If you don’t work or have a job, you cannot survive. While this won’t change overnight, we will see a major shift in this with AI if it continues on its current trajectory. Understand that your worth in the world has changed completely, as all knowledge (and the money you earn from it) will eventually go to zero. You won’t be paid for what you know or what you’ve done. Understand this, and start using AI to reinvent yourself.

If your employment no longer defines you or is your purpose, who are you going to be now? That’s the exciting journey that awaits you. The “one degree, one career” model is over. If you’ve had your own career for a while, your ability to unlearn and learn is where you will find real value. Something I coach people on is understanding that entrepreneurship will eventually become king. You need a portfolio of distinct skills (preferably not all complementary) to help you build resilience and self-reliance.

Decline of the centralised world:

I’ve already covered the multipolar world we’ve entered into, so the old globalist notion of a global community is over. Stop wasting your time trying to unscramble these eggs. Peace and security will eventually come from a decentralised, not centralised, world, although we probably have a few wars to get through first.

Your country, your province, state or county, your town and community, your friends and family will be where you find your peace. Yes, there will still be alliances and allegiance out there, but it will seem chaotic to the insecure who demand total safety.

While the old world was safe and stable, it was also rigid and stifling. The new world will be very messy, but it will offer great opportunities to those who don’t wait to ask permission.

Embrace the chaos:

The world you were born into is gone, so you have two simple choices. Stay as you are, believing someone will come to rescue you. Or, stop playing the victim of this inevitable transition and become a pioneer of whatever comes next.

En masse as a population, it seems we’re suffering from cognitive overload or mental exhaustion. This has led to paralysis, anxiety, and a feeling of being “stuck” even when we know we should be moving and growing. The easiest solution is “aggressive ignorance” by choosing not to care about every news event or trend that happens every second around the world.

Become an un-deplatformable person. What do I mean by that? Well, your many skills, your physical health, and your direct relationships are things no subscription service can turn off.

Focus your “survival” efforts on building equity in things you actually control in your life. By way of a weird example, being able to play a vinyl record again is so wonderful. It’s slow, it forces patience, and you cannot simply skip ahead to the next song. It makes you listen to songs you don’t really like, so you listen for things you can offset for the inability to skip forward with, like online music. You discover the ability to analyse your music taste again, and not be force-fed shit like a goose being fattened for foie gras. The record is yours. You own your music and don’t “rent” it from someone else who can go bankrupt, taking all your playlists down with them.

The cushion between us and the realities of life has all but disappeared. Being constantly switched on to every detail, every second, has destroyed the neural pathways that allow us to sit alone on a forest bench for an hour without distraction. Sitting quietly to make sense of our lives.

Your new institutions:

In the old world, institutions (the school, the company, the government, and the church) provided that cushion against all that can go wrong in the world. They were firstly the shield, then a safe haven providing you with education, stability and guidance.

Today, that cushion is gone. You are now your own institution now.

• You are your own HR department (Mental and physical health).
• You are your own R&D department (Education).
• You are your own Security department (integrating into your community).

It’s a lot of weight to carry for someone not used to carrying it, but it’s also the ultimate form of agency. You can start to take on some of the load and get stronger under the weight (resilience), or you can trustingly wait for shit to hit the fan and have it all dumped on at once, crushing the life out of you. That’s the harsh choice to make. Wake up or be crushed in your sleep. I know, all this seems so dour and negative, but it needs to be.

The party is over, and we’re in for a tough and messy hangover.

Resilience isn’t toughness, but the ability to look at all the dark times on the horizon and trust in yourself, that despite any failures or body blows you’ll receive, you have the strength and knowledge to keep moving forward.

Only the resilient in the new world will make it with some degree of comfort.