I love this country. Being American is a privilege. Part of that privilege is having the means to travel around the world. I’ve seen first hand that the majority of people on earth have close to no opportunity. America has a surplus of every ingredient needed to be a great country. Here is the uncomfortable truth: we are not a great country right now. We have been riding a very seductive merry-go-round of fast living and easy money for the past 20 years. It doesn’t work. You can only accelerate so much with NOS until you hit the wall. America is on the fast track toward failure.
As Chamath recently put it, we are near the apex of a rollercoaster and are facing an unavoidable plunge. To make matters worse, there is a wall at the bottom that we either hit or sidestep. Chamath details the options in the clip below but I want to focus on something else.
How did we get here?
If we dissect American behaviors, we will uncover cancerous habits everywhere. The pernicious commonality amongst our bad habits is they all originate as yesterday’s “solutions”. A prime example is looking at how we deal with our own pain.
Most of us no longer have the stomach to undergo real pain and suffering. The vast majority of Americans have never witnessed war first hand. Our school systems’ response to fighting on campus is immediate expulsion. We spend billions fighting the War on Drugs to “keep us safe” and simultaneously make billions enabling our most highly educated PhDs to write prescriptions for opiates and methamphetamine to quell the pain. All in the name of increasing comfort and avoiding pain.
America for the past twenty years has enjoyed a cupcake existence. And it was a delicious 20 years. But our cupcake has been quietly molding for 10 of the past 20 years, starting with the 2008 housing market collapse. Today, the cupcake has rotted through entirely. What started as a sweet indulgence now confronts us as a health risk. We are the cupcake. The health risk is to America.
It is human nature to choose comfort over pain. Life is always relatively hard, so we tend to choose the path of least resistance. We chose the path of least resistance through two relatively easy decades. So life became too easy. We stopped caring. We became soft.
And when people become soft it is like an erection: 99% of the time it’s not a problem, but when called upon for duty that 1% of the time, our softness becomes our failure.
Our government has assisted us by pumping us full of cheap tickets to ride the Merry-Go-Round guaranteeing we soften up. And right now we are in a terrible position. And with all the finger-pointing I’m reminded of two scenes from movies borne from our previous 2008 collapse below. A reminder that all parties are complicit in this game of lies.
Our government leaders and people in positions of power and authority supposedly act in our best interests. We assume they uphold their end of the bargain and enforce checks and balances. In reality, their behavior is much closer to this clip from the movie The Big Short from the 2008 housing crisis.
Once the people at the bottom uncover the cartel advantages at the top, we feel wronged and react in disgust. And while we all play the victim, we also conveniently ignore our active participation as accomplices in this dirty equation. This sentiment is perfectly summarized by the character Will Emerson in the movie Margin Call.
We’re stuck with an erectile dysfunction issue in a moment hopeful of a great performance. Some point the finger at other issues, others point the finger at themselves. We have been soft for a long time but only now have we become aware with certainty that we have a problem. And here’s the insane part about modern life: most people recognize the problem then quietly request a prescription for Viagra. And the pernicious cycle perpetuates.
We solve all of our personal problems with solutions made by others. And that’s possible because we all have just enough cash or a seemingly unlimited well of credit. At some point we stopped relying on ourselves for the answers to our problems.
There is no end to these “pernicious solutions” discovered today that add another brick in the wall we hit tomorrow. Let me be clear, not all solutions are pernicious. And I don’t want to come across as self-righteous or act as if I am above any of this. I am right in the thick of it with the rest of you. We are all living in quicksand. In simpler times, when previous generations were faced with difficult problems, they inherently understood the only way to move past those walls required payment in pain and suffering. They paid that price with effort instead of dollars because they had no other choice. Today, we all leverage easy money to access advancements in technology that provide us with an escape hatch called convenience to short circuit what was previously paid for in individual grit.
Instead of solving our own problems through enduring the painful process of personal effort, we short circuit it with easy money and justify our behavior by overvaluing the benefits of speed and convenience while simultaneously underplaying the value in personal growth.
Easy money immediately puts a patch over our problems. That sounds pretty good. And again, this is why our Merry-Go-Round is so deceptive and destructive. Here is the truth: when we avoid pain and suffering we stop growing and start atrophying as humans. This opportunity cost is our blindspot. Our reliance becomes more weighted on technology with each passing day. And whether our predecessors were aware of it or not, their repeated payment in pain and suffering meant they came out the other end stronger. In our repeated cycle of pain avoidance, we guarantee through a compound payment that we will come out the other end softer. And as I posited in a prior post: “which side of compound interest are you on?”
Isn’t it masochistic to personally suffer if we don’t need to?
I’m not advocating for mindless personal suffering. I am focusing on the challenges in our lives where we voluntarily substitute easy solutions in lieu of personal growth. In our defense, we should only shoulder 50% of the fault, but we will end up paying the full price. The other party at blame is our overlords. Governments made money too plentiful and easily accessible, playing the role of our enablers. Markets that are continuously pumped with more money has given us all ample opportunities to buy a little bit of everything. I don’t believe it’s masochistic to opt into pain when there is an opportunity for personal gain. I do think it’s masochistic to avoid pain and atrophy our future selves. If we keep fooling ourselves into believing we are the best country ever because have all the solutions to all of our problems, that is the Merry-Go-Round talking.
You know this is the truth because you personally don’t know anyone creating any solutions. Solutions in America are like billionaires, they all seem so close, a friend of a friend, just one lucky break away from being me. We have full access to a plethora of solutions yet no exposure to the original creator. That is the problem. We reach for the solution at arm’s length, and when it works we stop short of inquiring about the inventor’s journey. Maybe we do that unconsciously because we know that story is filled with pain and we only want the answer. Because that inventor’s product is simply a solution we want while their story is the inspiration we need. We celebrate the solutions the great minds of our great country have made without undergoing the painstaking process of attempting to discover the solutions ourselves. Because we know deep down that it is a journey of pain. By purposefully removing pain from our personal lives we actively forgot what it meant to be an American and turned into a drunken fleet of Homer Simpsons. This is what it means to be an American…
This is not a gloom and doom piece.
As I mentioned at the top, America has an abundance of everything. This coming recession will harden us whether we want it or not. We should be grateful to live in America right now because we have full access to all the components required to grow and become stronger through the painful time ahead.
This means if all the problems highlighted are everywhere we look so are the answers. We just need to swivel our chairs, crane our necks, better yet take a few steps backward to reveal a whole new set of options. In other words, substituting purchased solutions with earned answers start with pain and ends in growth. And when you repeat that it leads to rich compounding growth. This adjustment in behavior is the difference between softness through atrophy and hardness through self-sufficiency. To take responsibility for ourselves and be our own backstop in life instead of allowing others to magic wand away our pain is an American ethos to strive towards.
The next time you are faced with a decision that can lead to personal growth, think twice before reaching for the ready-made solution. Be your own solution. Be the hero of your own story.
