The Natural Consequences of Everything

I still find myself getting irritated with people. For a lot of different things. Mostly their excesses and their tendency to overcompensate. To be too fearful, too greedy, too political, too whatever.

It’s not nearly as bad as it used to be, but it still happens.

The main reason it’s not so bad is because I’ve learned how to just focus on me. If I get the things in front of me right, it doesn’t much matter what anyone else is doing. The things that are in front of me require plenty of my time and attention — I shouldn’t waste it being angry about what other people are doing.

But there’s another reason, which has been making itself more and more apparent to me. And that is, people are doing what is natural for them to do given the circumstances.

I have learned to understand the world in a fundamental way which I didn’t before. The world of the present is an accurate representation of human nature, iterated over time. Where we are is the precise result of where human nature would lead us — it’s precisely where human nature has led us. How could it be any other way?

I recently read Ray Dalio’s Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail. The book was a fairly low-resolution (but extremely useful) overview of the patterns that tend to repeat throughout history. Throughout economies and empires and societies. This book highlights the patterns of strength, optimism, necessity, complacency, and failure that build and subsequently plague empires. The processes that create strong empires lead directly to the processes that cause their downfall.

If you’ve ever seen this image, you know what I’m describing:

Now this image might seem juvenile, naïve, or oversimplified. But that does not make it untrue. There is more truth in this image than in anything you’ll read on Instagram today.

The seeds of complacency are sown by success. The seeds for hubris are planted by victory. And the seeds of success are again planted when that complacency and hubris inevitably lead to failure. Human beings have an endless capacity to be ingenious when necessity and poverty demand it of them. And human beings also have an endless capacity to rest on our laurels when we think we’ve won. That will never stop, because it’s human nature.

Dalio highlights how the Dutch empire fell because it over-financialized everything, overused debt as if it grew in the trees, and expanded its empire so aggressively that there came a point when it was economically (and militarily) impossible to maintain. He also highlights how the British empire did… well, exactly the same thing. And both fell because their success led them to do too much of everything.

Each of them thought they had won the game of nations and would forever be the strongest and greatest civilization that ever grew on this planet. Sound familiar?

It’s more than a meme

This cycle idea applies to everything in life. Or just about everything. Almost everything moves in cycles, and everything has a natural consequence.

For example, our parents told us to go to college. So we did.

Our parents’ parents might have been the first generation to have reasonable access to higher education. Until then, it was mostly a luxury for the privileged or the ambitious. So our parents ran with that and made it mainstream. They went to college because, for the first time ever, it was economically and physically accessible for most people. And they got good jobs, and bought homes, and received a decent return on their investment.

And then they told us to go to college — because why would they not? All they knew was that it had served them well and kept them competitive in the workforce. All they knew was that if you didn’t get a degree, you’d be left behind.

Well, we all got a degree. And we all got left behind anyway.

What our parents didn’t realize was that once college became a standard part of American life, it got watered down (not just in distinction but also in quality) and lost nearly all of its value.

It’s not their fault — they didn’t see it coming. The pendulum swung too far in the direction of the university. Another thing nobody predicted was that this overcompensation left us without enough people in the trades. We were all so focused on becoming white collar that we forgot how well it can pay to be blue collar. I know welders and landscapers, skilled manual laborers, who made six figures by the time they were 25. I don’t know any white collar grads who made six figures by 25. For most of us, six figures is a pipe dream. But it happened, because we went too far with the college thing. We made blue collar scarce and white collar ubiquitous. We made college default and saddled ourselves with debt we can’t pay for.

And now we’re putting so many students into computer science and coding that pretty soon we’ll have 80 million coders and not enough things to code. And then they will be unemployed and underpaid.

Revelio Labs, borrowed from a delightful post from Packy McCormick

According to the chart above, we’re also putting tragically low amounts of effort and study into the humanities and education. Part of the reason for that is that we overextended ourselves into the humanities in the beginning of this century — but notice how we didn’t just simmer it down a bit. We overcompensated again. Because we always do. Because that’s human nature. Especially at the herd level — the society level.

And I have a feeling that people my age will teach our kids that college is not everything. (Not least because the integrity and value proposition of the American university is at all-time lows, but that’s not the point.) Because where college saved our parents, it burned us. I have a feeling we’ll help our kids overcorrect for our mistake — and the pendulum will swing too far back the other way.

And that chart also brings us back to Dalio. One of the telltale signs (if not the telltale sign) of a declining empire is the decline of education. We all already know that we all already know that teachers are criminally underpaid. That’s been true as long as I’ve been breathing. And if we invest even less into producing high-quality instructors and instruction, I fear we will become completely incapable of educating our offspring. That means bye-bye American Exceptionalism, bye-bye advantage, and maybe even hello World War III that unseats us as the leader of the free world.

I know that sounds like a silly exaggeration, but I mean that with every fiber of my being. America might well be on its way out, at some point during my lifetime. Because we have so decisively controlled the world for so long. As you’ll notice from the annals of history, that never lasts forever. It always comes to an end. Because it must. Because human nature demands that we become fat and lazy and sloppy after we’ve won, and make people hate us. Which we did, and we have, and they do.

Now please don’t misunderstand. I’m not rooting against America. But I most certainly am rooting against the form in which it currently exists. Because it’s an awful form.

Human nature is what our world is made of

We know that hard work and creativity are the natural result of desperation. And we know that success is typically the result of repeated hard work and creativity. And we know that complacency is typically the result of success. And we know that complacency leads to getting your ass kicked and becoming desperate again.

But we can also see these same types of cycles, natural consequences, patterns, and overcompensations in other aspects of human behavior. And as ridiculous as it might seem, and as frustrating as it might be to witness, people’s excesses often make a lot of sense.

Most human behavior, with just a little bit of study, is actually quite reasonable. Of course by reasonable I do not mean “defend this in front of a jury and get acquitted”… what I mean is, if you understand the context and the emotions and the conflicts at play, it actually becomes quite obvious why the outcome happened. Because there were reasons for it to happen. “Reasonable.”

For instance. People (mostly me) make fun of people who call themselves “dog moms.” Or “cat dads.” Or anything that equates owning an animal with being a parent. Because it’s an utterly ridiculous comparison to make — those two kinds of love are nowhere near the same. And also because it feels nakedly self-important.

The question, of course, is “why do you deserve that title which you so clearly have not earned? You are not a parent.”

But, since I have a blog about being a better person, maybe I should stop and think about that. Maybe I actually have that question backwards.

What are a lot of people my age missing? Meaningful relationships, loving marriages, and kids.

And that’s for a lot of reasons — and probably deserves its own blog post.

One reason is that American dating and sex are the worst they’ve ever been.

Another is because, if you ask 100 millennials why they don’t have kids, I’ll bet you 30 of them will look you dead in the eyes and say “I can’t afford to have kids.” What an unbelievable, despicable tragedy. In the richest country in the world.

But then what’s the natural consequence of this state of affairs? We’re overcompensating by taking on pets as surrogate children. And treating them like children, and spoiling them like children, and being accountable to their needs as if they were our children. Because we are desperate for that kind of love in our lives. We’re desperate for our own loving, healthy home. And we cannot find it.

So… “dog moms.” Obnoxious? Yes. Definitely. But reasonable? Actually, it just might be. Because maybe now I understand why — it’s a natural consequence of where and how things are.

You can see it everywhere. Your ex-girlfriend was always suspicious of you? Well, it’s because she had three ex-boyfriends who were dishonest with her and that made her distrustful of men. Does it suck to deal with? Yes. But is it the natural consequence of her past? Also yes.

People are politically-charged and extreme. Is that obnoxious? Yes. Unproductive? Extremely. But is it the natural product of a system that fails to address most people’s needs and concerns properly? It sure is. Are political gaps a direct result of growing wealth and values gaps? They sure are.

Is cryptocurrency an overzealous attempt to remake the entire world society using computers? Yes. But is it the direct result of a financial system that hasn’t worked since 1971? Yes. Yes it is. Are people going too far thinking that crypto and decentralization are going to fix everything? Yes. Does decentralization usually lead directly back to centralization? (Again, probably worth another blog post.) Yes it does. But people are going to try it. Because what else would they possibly do? It’s the next step in the cycle. It’s the natural consequence of exactly where we are.

The examples are everywhere.

I’ve found it’s better to approach the world and its people with curiosity, rather than judgment. To have questions about intentions, rather than judgments about intentions. Not only does it make me less irritable, which makes my life better, and helps me to learn… it allows me to see into why people are doing the things they’re doing and communicate with them about it. The assumption that I try to always keep in mind is “there’s a reason for this.” It might be excessive and overcompensated, but that does not make it indefensible.

Whatever it is — people’s mental states, group behavior, community politics, disagreements, the social tendencies of a child… there’s a reason for this. And the only way I can be an effective communicator, friend, community member, or leader, is to try to understand those things. And to give all due respect to whatever causes came before.

Now this does not give anybody a free pass. There is no free pass. People are responsible for their own behavior. Because if that wasn’t the case, then the entire world would be responsible for the behavior of every individual, and that’s an unusable suggestion. Taking responsibility is the fundamental challenge and virtue of life. So that’s the way out. That’s the way to interrupt, end, or change these cycles.

The point is to deploy forgiveness and understanding wherever possible. The point is to lift people up instead of assuming the worst and putting them down.

Drink some water and then spit it on the floor because we’re rich,

JDR

“A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.” - Dwight D. Eisenhower