On metacultural anxiety and the smallness of the self

The sky is falling! The sky is falling!

The world spins lazily on its axis, impervious to the concerns of men, while all on its surface minuscule beings worry to and fro in their daily lives. That’s you and me, in case you were unaware.

You may have noticed a lengthy hiatus in my spewing of asinine garbage to you on this here squidstack, and that is simply because I work somewhere within the realm of finance, and the entirety of the realm of finance has been a total hellfire for the past few weeks. At least what my work touches has been particularly nasty.

Because of this, my bandwidth for actually sitting down and putting pen to paper (or finger to screen, rather) has more or less been nullified. I have multiple drafts ongoing of several articles, but every time I try and make my thoughts coherent, I run out of battery or find myself lost in space.

So instead you get this, and I hope it sates your desires while I return to normal functioning.

The culmination of watching as billions get written off balance sheets, are discovered to have never actually been on balance sheets in the first place, or are raised in funds to buy the distressed assets of others balance sheets, is my increasingly frazzled view of the world. I hope you can understand my slightly frayed faith in our institutions and conglomerates. Not that there was any huge amount to begin with. And while I don’t want to be Henny-Penny running around squarking “the sky is falling! The sky is falling!”, (when it is just an acorn landing on my head), I’ve been sufficiently rattled as to prepare myself both mentally and financially for the oncoming conditions. No, the sky is not falling (yet), and there exists multiple checks and balances, and vested interests in the powers that be that everything does not, as the French say, “go to total shit” - however! I suggest it would be prudent to be cautious with your money and risk exposure now, even more so than usual. The sky may not be falling, but it is supported by stilts made of toothpicks, spit, glitter glue, and desperation.

People far more experienced and qualified than myself have rightfully pointed out the fragility and over-leveraging of the economy for years now; that the way things are done now cannot continue indefinitely. I believe we were in for a reckoning a year or two back, if not for being staved off by the black swan event that was covid-19. At which point, everybody had an excuse to turn the money printers on and make everything run on vapour - woooo free money, loan forgiveness, industry and individual stimulus checks!! But now the party is over and the money printers have been unplugged, and all that has happened as a result of the money party is the delay (and exacerbation) of the inevitable.

Australian politician Paul Keating was infamously quoted as saying of the 1990/91 economic downturn, “this is a recession [Australia] has to have”. And universally reviled as he was for that comment, I find myself echoing it now on a global scale. The money party cannot go on. The SPAC mania of 2021 cannot go on. The crypto bullrun of 2020/21 cannot go on. The frankly abhorrent practices I have been VCs use to inflate their funds alleged value cannot go on. Tech companies only providing vapour and a dream of ever increasing profits in return for multi billion dollar valuations cannot go on. Klarna only a few days ago dipped from their previous valuation of forty six billion USD to six and a half billion USDwhile performing yet another capital raising round. Do you know why companies do rounds? It’s because they aren’t profitable enough to do it based on their incomes alone. Which begs the question, on what grounds can a company be considered to be worth 46B when they can barely make ends meet at a tenth of that valuation?

But I am no billionaire and I am no government official. At the end of the day I log off my laptop, I leave the office, I go outside and see kids coming home from school with their parents, and I go to the grocery store and buy cherries that are on special, and life trudges along its well worn path. The sky, for all intents and purposes, does not appear to be falling.

The dissonance between simultaneously existing in a corporate world that is burning at the edges, and a physical world that appears unfettered by that financial reality is jarring to say the least. I don’t have a solution, this is just my metacultural anxiety.

And the self is small. I am small. I buy my cherries on sale and I chat with the barista who knows my order from heart and my salary gets deposited and I get my books straight for tax time and I go to the gym and I force my body to absolute exertion because the overcoming of weakness fuels me and I go home and shower and wake up and I do it again.

Please look out your window, wherever you are now. You cannot see it, but all around you are the invisible pistons and gears of civil society, groaning and whirring. Mechanisms of institutions too large and complex to really be fully understood by the physiology of the human brain churn endlessly into the noisy city night to maintain the status quo. Sometimes I think all that keeps these mechanisms going is our universal social contract that we believe in their continued ability to continue. An unspoken belief that they are robust enough to prevail, that they must work so they simply do. Really, I think it is the work of an exceptional few that actually keep these going, against the apathy and outright malicious intent of everyone else involved.

The self is small.

Some years back when I was a grubby university student, I spent the summer in the lower alps in Austria, exchanging bed and board for farm work with the elderly lady who lived there. Over dinner one night (our conversations were lengthy and sometimes combative in the intellectual sense) the topic turned to economics. She told me, when she was a child in the aftermath of WWII, the industry and economy of Austria was (unsurprisingly and perhaps deservingly) dead on its feet. And how one day, a man from one of the cities had ventured out to their farm attempting to exchange a gold pocket watch for a bag of grain. Her father had refused the offer. How flimsy the concept of wealth is in times of intense strife. I think back to that conversation often when I find myself setting the value I assign to ephemeral wealth too highly. Gold jewellery is nice, art is nice, antiques are nice, my portfolio is nice. But you cannot eat gold. And when in absolute turmoil I think you’ll find it harder to find a buyer for your art collection in fair time at a fair price.

So the answer is buy land post-haste then? Land and crops and tools and the knowledge to use them. Well, yes. At least I think so, and history would appear to corroborate that stance. But if you follow me on other platforms you’ll know I’ve decided to stave off the purchase of a small country home with land until the global real estate market shits the bed. And yet. And yet! I find myself still chewing that one over. People have been calling for a burst of the RE bubble pretty much ever since things recovered post 07/08 GFC. And if those people stuck to their guns and refused to buy property until it burst, they’d be waiting nigh on a decade. Attempting to time the market is fraught with danger, and I don’t know if it’s in my best interest to try.

I am small and try as I might I cannot have a tangible impact on the trajectory of the global marketplace. What I’ve just written down has been running track through my head for days and weeks on end, and I hope by getting it down I might find some respite. So I go to work, and I trudge through the hellfire that is the current state of things, and I leave work, and I get my little groceries and little coffee and I work my body to exhaustion at the gym and continue to live my little life, all while the world continues to evermore spin lazily on its axis, unaware and uncaring of my little troubles.