Generation X was grew up under the threat of a potential, worldwide, nuclear Holocaust at any time. A holocaust that never happened. Not yet, anyhow. What can I say, it made us a bit jaded.
Generation X, of which I'm one of the older members, was the last generation to be raised in the Industrial Age, when the factories of America were still thriving. By the time we hit our teens, and the first Millennials were being born, the factories were closing down, and we were visibly in the long transition into the emerging Information Age.
By the time the Millennials started hitting their teen years, the internet came along, and democratized communication around the world, in a way that had never happened before in human history. At that time, the earliest Gen Z kids were being born. Gen Z was born into a fully digital world, with Web 2.0 in full effect from childhood, and social media and smartphones coming along in their childhood years. Through all these last few decades, the pace of social and technological change has been steadily increasing. The power brokers of the Industrial Age world have been desperately clinging to what power they could, while the paradigm shifted around them.
There come times when the slow grind of change builds up pressure, and a major, sudden shift happens. An earthquake in society, you might say. A major inflection point.
The pace of changes becomes social inflection points when a great deal of change happens in the mentality of large numbers of people. Or changes in mentality that have already happened make themselves known. It looks like this weekend, June 13th through June 15th, 2025, will be one of those major inflection points in human society in the United States, and perhaps around the world. Pay attention kids, we are all living history this weekend, however things play out. I'm simply calling attention to the importance this weekend will play in society overall. And somehow, it all starts with a Friday the 13th. Crazy.
Here are a few songs to set the mood for what looks to be a pretty crazy weekend, one way or the other.
Blogger's Note- Monday, June 16th, 2025- It turns out that all those AR-15's owned by 2nd Amendment activists have been completely useless in preventing the drive toward authoritarianism in the United States of America.* The push by the American Right away from a constitutional democratic republic, and towards an authoritarian state, continues. Guns are useless in a war of ideas and culture. The NRA is MIA in the fight to preserve democracy. But we all knew that already.
Was this weekend, June 13th-June 15th, 2025 an actual inflection point in the United States, or society as a whole? Time will tell if democracy or authoritarianism wins in the U.S., and elsewhere...
* Just for the record, I am 100% for legal gun ownership. If you own guns, you need to be a responsible gun owner.
OK, how many of you kind of feel like this guy, after 2020, 2021, and the first few months of 2022? This is Tom Hanks in the movieCastaway, where he lives out a Robinson Crusoe couple of years, on a desert island, after a plane crash. "Wilson" is the volleyball, made by Wilson, that he paints a face on, and becomes his best friend on the island. This is near the end of the movie where he builds a raft, trying to get out where a ship can find him and save him.
Give yourself a pat on the back. Or if you're not that limber, have someone else do it, then give them one. You're still here. In the last 2 1/2 years, you have survived a 100 year pandemic that killed over one million Americans, AND you've survived an economic Depression. Yeah, Depression with a "D." Really. That's not including all the personal stuff you've been through, like job loss, working at home, not working, sick and dying friends and relatives, stressed out relationships from all this chaos, and The Great Toilet Paper Scare of the Spring of 2020. Seriously, if you feel a bit like Tom Hank's character in the scene above, that's OK. I think we all kind of feel like that at this point.
Going back to the first few posts of this blog, June 28th, 2017, I've been thinking and writing about huge problems and issues I saw coming in the future. In late 2017 or early 2018, I started writing about a huge economic downturn I saw coming in the next 2-3 years. As usual, "the experts" said it could never happen. Then it happened.
As an amateur futurist my whole life, I've always looked years ahead, wondering, and trying to figure out, what would happen in 2-3-5-10-20 years. Along the way, I've come across a few theories talking about long and ultra-long term trends that play out in societies over decades and hundreds of years. I've been watching economic and social trends, to some degree, since the late 1980's. As we worked through the 2010's, I began to see all of these trends start to merge. For whatever universal reason, many long and mid term trends were coming together in this period of time.
What that told me was that we were heading into a really, REALLY crazy era. The decade of the 2020's made a good reference period. I began calling them the Tumultuous 2020's. With my background, observing, and reading lots of books most people don't find interesting, I realized that we were not just in for a big economic downturn, but there would also be social, business, education, communication, and daily life changes. In short, it appeared to me that this decade in particular, would be one of the biggest periods of change in modern history.
In late July and August of 2019, when the Federal Reserve lowered interest rates, I knew we were getting close to the economic collapse, and I wrote a couple of blog posts about it (this one and this one). A month later, the Repo Market crisis in banking happened. Most people barely noticed, but that was the real beginning of the Depression. About six months later, Covid-19 hit U.S. shores, bringing a 100 year pandemic to us, something none of us were truly prepared for. That was not just a widespread medical issue, but business shutdown to reduce the Covid spread sparked the major part of the economic collapse.
The "Spanish Flu" pandemic of 1918-1920 killed an estimated 17-25 million people, perhaps millions more. The current Covid-19 coronavirus crisis, in worldwide effects, was the worst pandemic since. It has killed over 6.2 million people worldwide, and more than a million here in the United States. You survived it, so did I, and so did the rest of us still around. That's a big deal. It's not something we were prepared for, and it changed everyone's lifestyle in some way, across the board. Remember March 2022, "Just wear a mask for two weeks and we'll get through this." Yeah, we had no idea what we were in for, which is a good thing in many ways. But we're still here.
That acute medical emergency led to massive work shutdowns, and millions of people losing their jobs, some temporarily and some permanently. Somewhere over 100,000 small businesses went out of business, and nearly all other businesses, small, medium, and large, struggled to get through it. That was another big blow to all of us. The Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the official measure of all things purchased in the U.S., dropped over 32% in the Spring of 2020. That was about the same as the huge drop during the Great Depression of the 1930's. A drop in GDP of more than 10% IS an economic Depression. There's an official definition, though they avoid it today, and that's one of the two criteria that separates a recession from a depression. So you, me, and all of us have survived an economic depression. And a 100 year pandemic, AND all the other personal stuff that's happened, in the last 2 1/2 years. If you feel like you've been through the ringer, you have. We all have. So give yourself a quick pat on the back, you have survived two really big, global catastrophes, since 2020 rolled in. And you've survived all the drama in your personal life, caused by those issues, and other issues, as well.
Is it over? No. This decade is still going to be crazy, all kinds of crazy. But you made it through some serious shit. We all did. We should be much adaptable now, and much more able to handle what else happens in the next several years. The good part is, as old ideas, old industries, and old institutions collapse around us, we get to build a new world, in a sense. There's a lot more change coming, but we can help create that change. This is one of the greatest times in modern history to try new ideas, build a new business, or create needed, or to work for meaningful social change.
In a sense, it's a Do It Yourself world now. What do you think needs to be built? Get to it.
Metamorphosis from a caterpillar to a Monarch butterfly. In my opinion, this is the kind of transformation all of society is in right now.
Just a reminder to the more geeky readers that, from October 2019 to April 2020, I wrote a 20 chapter book/blog thing online called Welcome to Dystopia: The Future is Now- Book 1. At the time, late 2019, I believed we were going into a great depression, a 5 to 7 year economic downturn, along with major social transformations predicted by a couple of ultra-long term theories I believe are pretty solid. The Repo Market crisis was a month old when I started writing this. Covid-19 hadn't even popped up in China, it was not on anyone's radar here in the U.S.. The stock markets were hitting all time highs, and the conventional wisdom was that there might be a minor recession in late 2020.
I disagreed, I saw us heading into "The Tumultuous 2020's," a time of unparalleled economic, technological, cultural, and social change. Here's a quote from chapter 20, written in April 2020, about six weeks into the Covid era:
"Change. Our current Dystopia is massive change. We are in a period of societal change unlike anything in our known history. Several aspects of human society are changing, all at once. And that's hard. As adaptable as we'd like to think we are, we humans don't like change. But change is here, it's big, and it will keep happening for some time to come, like it or not. The downside of this is that what we call "normal" is collapsing around us. The upside is that we, as humans on Earth, get to build something new."
"Dystopia," as I refer to this 20 chapter beast of a book/blog thing, goes deep into ideas few have even heard of. I got things wrong as I looked forward from what is now the "pre-Covid Era." I dramatically underestimated how much money the Federal Reserve would create to prop up the banking system, major businesses, and Wall Street in particular. So the economic part is playing out different than I expected. But I got the change part right.
"Dystopia" can be read by single chapters, it's more a bunch of essays than a non-fiction book with a well-defined through line. Or, if you're a glutton for pretty big ideas, you can try to read it all, straight through. I just wanted to remind people that's it's out there, just chillin' on the interwebs, waiting for adventrous brains to come check it out. It was written at the end of the "old times" and the very beginning of the "Covid era." And it was written by me, a man who was homeless for four of the six months I was writing it. If you want to check it out, click the link above.
Borrowing this great scene again, this time with the further appearances by Fawkes. Dumbledore's phoenix, Fawkes, goes up in flames, and is reborn. In the last post in my personal blog, I predicted a major event will happen this month that will make it obvious that we're in for a serious economic downturn. I think we're in the verge of a "Lehman Brothers moment," something in the business or economic world to make it obvious things are NOT as they should be.
It is part of the natural order of things that there are times when something old must die, it simply must collapse, it must go up in flames, its time is over. And then, also part of the natural order of things, that at that point, something new will be born, and will grow in its place. The mythical phoenix is a symbol of that period of change. I think we're at a major point like that in Western society as a whole. Writing that last post, I realized, I see this next recession as the flaming of the phoenix. While tough economic times are hard for most everyone, I see the potential for something great to be reborn from the economic ruins.
"May you live in interesting times."
-Ancient Chinese curse
If you read my personal blog much, you know I've been drumming on about this coming recession for a couple of years now. The reason is because I see this next economic downturn as much more than a slow economic period. Being the weirdo I am, I've been drawn to little known and often overlooked social theories, and ultra long term trends. There are several long term trends ending right now, in our little piece of human history, and the best way to describe this time is a transition of many transitions. That's why my overall theory is something I call, The Big Transition. Not a creative name, but it fits. We truly do live in "interesting times."
On one hand, we are simply near the end of a bull run in our stock markets, and in the real estate markets of the most vibrant urban areas. The stock prices and real estate prices (in prime areas) have been going up since early 2009. The stock markets have been nearly stagnant for the last year ans a half, but hover near the high water mark. Things are overpriced, and we're heading into a recession that will shake out, prices will drop dramatically, some businesses will collapse or go up in flames (if they have good insurance), and new ones will be born.
On another level, we are still in the long transition from the Industrial Age to the Information Age. The rise of many new technologies, particularly communications, computers, the internet, and biology, are rapidly changing what's possible in many ways, and changing our everyday lives, the way we interact with each other, who it's possible to interact with, and how business and organizational structures work. We're leaving an economic model based on factories in nearly every town, making physical goods, and selling those goods in mass market stores nationwide and worldwide.
We're going into an economic model based on nearly every person having a voice in society, a model where every person carries a small device that is a phone, a publishing company, and a TV studio, and a comedy club all in one. One person can now share funny cat videos with a stranger next door and another in Spain, publish a video or blog post that can be viewed by billions, and can sell a homemade item and ship it to South Africa, or nearly anywhere else. It's a world of tiny niches of interest, of many and multi-cultural voices, and a world that's extremely scary to a lot of people. It's a world where old business models from the Industrial Age are collapsing, and where new, tech-enabled business models, are being created, and disrupting the old. It's a world where the old school power structures are straining to keep control, while many of their long hid secrets come to light. We're in a period of massive change at a frightening pace. In a word, it's chaotic.
On yet another level, the United States of America, the grand experiment created unlike any other, where any individual, with hard and smart work, could create a business or idea, and move up in society, has reached a point of peak corruption in many businesses and political scenes. After a full, generation of seeing the rich get much richer, while the lives of the majority of people have stayed financially stagnant, or have gone down, the common people are pissed off. The average people have had enough, and we've been seeing the beginnings of a worldwide populist movement. The people, in the U.S., and everywhere, are remembering they have the numbers, and ultimately, the strength, to change things to a more fair system. It's never pretty, and it can be brutal (like in Hong Kong at the moment), but it will keep happening.
On yet another level, America has been built on the idea of common people as business people. Originally (after stealing the country from the Indians), Americans were farmers, traders, and shopkeepers, creating their own destiny. Born in the early stages of the Industrial Age, America saw, and dominated, in the rise of the factories, and reigned as a super power in the late Industrial Age. But with that came the rise of jobs, and most Americans went from being small businesses in the late 1800's (whether a farmer or shopkeeper), to being workers, punching a time clock ,and relying on a paycheck. Now, with the rise of new technologies over the last 50 or so years, many Americans are turning back into entrepreneurs again, or trying to. So that's another major shift that's happening.
Another transition is that we've been a country that looked up to the business people for 350 years. But now the common people are rising, and standing up to the large scale corruption in many businesses, and other institutions. As that rise bubbled under the surface, a new mentality has been rising to dominate the American collective psyche. This is what P.R. Sarkar, philosopher and theorist from India, calls "The Warrior Mentality." These are people who prize physical abilities and courage, more than the salesmanship and manipulation of Industrial Age business culture.
People doing scary and courageous shit have been slowly and quietly rising up in stature for several decades now. Some of these people are the obvious, when you think of the core values of courage and physical ability, the soldiers, police, firefighters, and professional athletes. We all know these jobs take physical ability, and courage, at different levels. But courage is also needed, and demonstrated, by action sports athletes, activists, artists of all kinds, pioneers of all kinds, and entrepreneurs.
The Warrior Mentality is becoming the dominant mentality, and the wishy washy fence sitters are getting the boot. This is why nearly all of us hate most of our old school politicians these days, no matter what political party you belong to. Our long term politicians are schemers who will flip at the drop of a hat, they are not leaders. As all of this chaos happens, the average people are looking for courageous leaders, or (as we've unfortunately learned the hard way in the last couple of years), people that pretend to be courageous leaders, and can con a large part of society into following them. But those types show their true colors soon enough, and most people see through them before too long. Ultimately, the truly courageous, they will become our new leaders, in business, in political circles, and in other organizations.
So, in my geeky, big picture view, all of these forces and changes are coming together to make this next recession a time of incredible change. And incredibly scary. That's where the courage part comes in. I think this next economic downturn, which will be severe, as the major shakeout of our lifetime. A lot of major change will happen in a short amount of time.
Like the phoenix, one thing after another that we know well, will burst into flames and die off. That will be catastrophic on many levels, and painful for many people. But this is all to make way for new things that are, and will continue to be, born.
Welcome everyone, to The Phoenix Recession.
I have a new blog called Adaptive Reuse SoCal, about finding new uses for old, abandoned, and unused buildings, as well as the economy, and commercial real estate in general. Check it out!
