May 2022. For the last few weeks the stock market, bond market, VC markets, crypto-currencies, and anything else related to money has been taking an absolute nose dive. Tech stocks have in some cases lost upwards of 80% of their value. Inflation has been cranking at 7%-10% for the last year.

Things are bad.

The "financial gurus" have started chiming in saying that this is all a normal part of the business cycle, nothing to worry about. Great time to start buying, because **the stock market ALWAYS goes up**™.

I get that the "financial gurus" make money off of convincing people that they have some deep fundamental knowledge about the world... even so, pretending that the last 70 to 80 years is "normal" is a flat out lie.

In all of human history there was 1 prior period, late 1860s to early 1910s, roughly ~60 years that was relatively peaceful, with limited natural disasters, plagues, etc. The rest of human history has been a constant war with crazy amounts of terrible things interjecting themselves in between. Unless you're over 70 years old, what you have experienced in your lifetime has been extremely unusual in the context of world history.

More specifically to contradict the financial gurus there were countless previous companies, stock markets, countries, empires, etc that were dominant in their hay-day which have since fizzled or faded into oblivion. The easiest stock market examples are the Netherlands and Japan.

Japan in the 80s looked like it could over take the US based on its growth, then it fizzled out and stagnated. The Netherlands (VOC) was the first stock market (and massively successful for its time), which eventually went into massive decline in the late 1700s.

Right now the financial gurus are basically like: "this has all happened before™" ...what they are failing to realize, at some point it will stop being true. As Chuck Palahniuk would say: "Over a long enough timeline the survival rate of everyone is zero." The same could be said of companies, stock markets, and governments.

I don't know about you, but I've never heard of a major world power shutting down a huge chunk of their economy for over a year, printing 25%+ of their GDP, giving it away to largely unproductive causes, and then everything ended up being totally normal as a result. Sure, we're unlikely to collapse tomorrow, but the second and third order effects of the last 2-3 years have barely begun to hit us.

(Note: I did go ahead and look at The Mississippi Bubble, The Weimar Republic, Zimbabwe, and Argentina... but couldn't find money supply in the context of GDP to provide comparable references.)

Now of course I'm being incredibly cynical. While this current period of history is unusual, it doesn't rule out that it is possible to continue building a world with ongoing peace, fewer pandemics, longer individual health, greater human cooperation, and financial prosperity. We certainly have had a string of major human successes recently. Maybe this is just the beginning of a beautiful period in human history where we are able to fight against the worst parts of our nature to build a better world. My point with all of the above is: if we were to revert to the mean, eventually one of these stock market downturns will actually be the start of a collapse. Historically speaking that would be more "normal."

But back to reality... I'm going to keep on the rails for this one (recession/depression/correction/etc), and you should too... but I do so with the belief that it could all disappear in the blink of an eye. The financial gurus could use to open up a history book once in a while because THIS IS NOT NORMAL. NONE OF THIS IS NORMAL. When people start to think that it is "normal," that these hard fought battles for peace, individual liberty, and technological progress are just the natural way of our world... that's when when we will lose these things.