The seven beautiful kine, and the seven full ears, are seven years of plenty: and both contain the same meaning of the dream. And the seven lean and thin kine that came up after them, and the seven thin ears that were blasted with the burning wind, are seven years of famine to come: Which shall be fulfilled in this order: Behold, there shall come seven years of great plenty in the whole land of Egypt: After which shall follow other seven years of so great scarcity, that all the abundance before shall be forgotten: for the famine shall consume all the land,
GENESIS 41:26-30 DOUAY-RHEIMS
My thoughts have turned once again to things of an economic nature. My wife and I have read and watched various bits of content of people complaining about the affordability crisis, the respective fortunes of the various generations, and examples of people doing incredibly stupid things with their money. My perspective on these things comes from my evolution in my thinking about thrive and survive mode. I will now try to capture these thoughts and collect them into something coherent.
Thrive/Survive Mode
I have written about thrive mode and survive mode before. I no longer believe in thrive mode. Thrive mode is a fantasy and a fiction. Thrive mode is believing that the seven fat years will continue indefinitely into the future, and the lean years will never come. Yet, those who know the lean years are coming prepare for that inevitability by storing up from the fat years of plenty. That preparation is survive mode.
The smart strategy is to always live in survive mode. You should never be a grasshopper and always be an ant. You can't go wrong with this strategy. The people who claim otherwise will discuss opportunity costs. By being frugal, you might miss out on winning the lottery of life. To make it sting worse is that there are people who win the lottery of life. Their example represents the cheese in the mousetrap luring in the suckers who follow the example but end up with the mistake. The Roaring Twenties is a prime example of this folly as suckers piled in until the Crash of 1929. This yielded the Great Depression when the whole country found itself in survive mode. The smart ones never left survive mode.
Boomers
Survive mode ended with the Baby Boom generation. Post-World War II America was a time of prosperity and plenty when the generation forgot survival. The 1960s were a boom time which gave us the 1970s which were a bust time. We can point to Nixon taking us off the gold standard and the Vietnam War as catalysts for the hard times of the 1970s. Those ended with the Reagan/Volcker era of the 1980s. That was when the Boomers killed it financially. It was a good time to be alive, buy a house, and start a family. Because of those good times that ended sometime during the term of George W. Bush, subsequent generations have envy and spite for those prosperous Boomers. Today, many wealthy Boomers are enjoying lavish end of life vacations in Florida on pensions, retirement, and stock market returns goosed along with a fresh round of debt on new homes that they will never pay off in what is left of their lifetimes.
I don't share this resentment of these Boomers because I know that much of your good fortune depends on circumstances beyond your control. They were lucky and got to live in thrive mode for most of their lives. This is how you get the phenomenon of rich people who are stupid. I used to hear people say, "If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?" Today, I turn that around and ask the obvious question. If you're so rich, why aren't you smart?
The fastest route to poverty today is to take the advice of out of touch Boomers. They believe the fantasy that they made their prosperous lives by some act of will or genius on their part. The reality is they were lucky fools in the right place at the right time. Their run of luck is unrepeatable. This is why you should not listen to these people.
Gen X
Gen Xers like myself know the truth about Boomer prosperity. Ours was the first generation to know they were not going to be better off than their parents. I don't know of any Gen Xers that whine about this fact of life. My generation just accepted that life was going to be a bit tougher and grittier than our parents had it. This was also goosed along by the utter neglect of our parents who let their kids free range their way through life beginning in elementary school. I will say that I thought those years of neglect and freedom were awesome. People don't realize the blessings that come from having free range parents.
When life is tough, you learn to survive. I didn't have it as bad as my Great Depression surviving grandparents, but I am grateful to have lived in the time that I did which was a sort of halfway house between prosperity and adversity.
Millennials
The Millennials were the first generation to audibly begin whining. This whining resulted in "economic outpatient assistance" from their Boomer parents. Where Gen X suffered neglect, Millennials suffered from too much help. I call them "Generation Whine."
It feels weird to be sandwiched between Boomers and Millennials. As a Gen Xer, I don't lay the guilt trip on the Boomers. I just don't take their "wisdom" and advice. At the end of the day, those who aren't lucky have to be smart. That is Generation X.
Gen Z
Generation Z are the children of the Xers. All I can say is that Generation X has utterly failed at parenting. Where Boomers left their X children to roam the streets until the streetlights came on, Xers left their Z children to the world of tech and social media with the disastrous results you see today. The next time you see a gender confused Zillennial with a nose ring at the grocery store, know that X and Millennials had a hand in birthing that madness.
Gen Z is the first generation to be utterly detached from reality. They aspire to become "influencers" on social media and to be paid wages and salaries that are insane. They are a damned and doomed generation. If you doubt this, just look up from your smartphone and witness the other idiots glued to their smartphones. Generation Z lives entirely online and has done so for their entire lives. They see thrive mode as their birthright and cannot comprehend why no one wants to pay them big money.
The Thing That Cuts Across All The Generations
What all the generations after the Great Depression have in common is an over reliance on credit. The Depressioners learned that credit and debt was what got them into trouble in the first place. Consequently, they eschewed accumulating debt and learned to live within their means. They were fortunate in this regard while their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren were unfortunate. But within these foolish generations are those who did get a clue and imitate those folks who survived the Great Depression. These are the ants.
My old man was the first one to clue me in on the grasshoppers and ants as he derided his peers for buying new cars and trucks on credit while he drove used vehicles he paid for in cash. That was in the 1980s. Fast forward to the 2000s, and I found myself deriding my peers for the same foolishness. I have always been mocked for driving the oldest and rattiest vehicle in the company parking lot, but that ride was never in danger of repossession.
The Great Depression survivors were smart. The Baby Boomers were lucky. Generations X-Z are neither smart nor lucky. The result is three generations without prosperity and saddled with debts. Yet, this is a fate that was and remains entirely avoidable with some common sense. This common sense means eschewing consumerism.
Credit means never having to say no to your desires. It means living in a perpetual state of thrive mode. This thrive mode has been the state of things since the 1950s. We have had recessions, but those downturns were papered over with more credit. When a bubble popped, the Fed printed up another bubble. The government spends with no end in sight as we now have a $39T national debt being paid for with more debt. It is insanity.
People can decry the insanity except they participate in the madness by their own individual choices as borrowers and consumers. It is the rare person who is debt free today. The ones with debt and toys mock the ones without debt and toys. For the thrive mode people, survive mode is a needless and avoidable hardship.
When does the bill come due for this economic madness? I don't know. The sky never falls. Despite inflation not seen since the 1970s, people are still living their best lives. They are going on cruises and vacations to Disney World. They still eat out and get their meals delivered to them as they mindlessly scroll on their devices. The one thing I don't do is worry or concern myself with what is going to happen to these people. Whatever happens to them will be deserved when it comes.
