Assuming you live in the US like I do, definitely watch this video and read Dalio's book (I bought 2 copies) Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Ord

Assuming you live in the US like I do, definitely watch this video and read Dalio's book (I bought 2 copies) Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order by Ray Dalio (2022) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xguam0TKMw8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xguam0TKMw8 Basically we're on the downward part of the cycle of wealth. That has NOT happened in our lifetimes, but it's happened many times before to other countries (Netherlands, Britain, China). Some things go in 150 or 250 year cycles and they're hard to see. Basically the idea is that in the long term, countries need to actually produce wealth in accordance to how much money they print. HOWEVER, the problem is that you can actually get away with NOT doing so for 50+ years -- the span of more than one generation. Particularly if you have the reserve currency of the world, as the US currently does. Dalio links a lot of our ills to Nixon's untethering of the dollar in the early 1970's. That reminds me of a good tweet -- What if your entire personality depends on low interest rates ? The idea there is that the habits and culture we've grown up with have been enforced by this distortion of wealth. --- To create wealth as a country, you need education, rule of law, cooperation, trust, etc. There has to be real output, and people have to push in the same direction. But if you can just print money instead of doing the work of those things, then why bother getting educated? Why not just rip people off? Why not rip off the government? They're just printing it anyway. So the social order is hugely affected by monetary policy. TBH I didn't come around to this until ~2020 ... In 2016, everyone I knew thought the sky was falling ... But I was living in wealthy area with a good job. Now that I'm a bit removed from that, I see that the rest of the country is having big problems I think Jeff Bezos has said -- "I don't worry about next quarter -- it was already determined 5 or 10 years ago". Unfortunately the social trends for the US were determined 40 or 50 years ago. But that doesn't mean everyone should give up and do nothing! Don't be a nihilist Honestly software is one of the places where you can create real wealth (not fake, extractive riches) with a few people. People in other industries aren't so lucky (Related to a previous comment about gambling and crypto: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33910537 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33910537 -- if huge portions of society engage in NEGATIVE SUM games, then that has consequences. I conjecture that gambling is commonly banned because societies that banned it are the ones that survived. Others went down in flames.)