Rome, Yet Again – Page 7 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

How Dead Romans Can Help You Be Happy

Jack: (tapping on the walls) Two, three feet thick, I’ll bet. Probably welded shut from the outside and covered with brick by now.
Wang: Don’t give up, Jack.
Jack: Oh, okay, I won’t, Wang. Let’s just chew our way outta here.
-Big Trouble in Little China

I keep turning negatives into positives, which may explain why I can’t jump start a car.

I have, from time to time, been accused of being an optimist. I don’t really think I am. I am certain that I am going to die. I am certain that, of the things in life I have to face, the toughest ones are ahead of me, not behind. Gentle retirement in the world that we’ve made and are preparing to go through now?

Probably not.

I’ll argue that the strange things that we’ve seen so far aren’t even close to the strange things we will see in the days and weeks ahead. And the last six weeks our lives? Who would have expected that the state house in Michigan would be filled with armed protesters? Not me. Although some people have predicted the way that the next financial crisis would happen, I certainly didn’t see it happening because of a Chinese bat.

But what I’m not particularly good at is giving up. The real enemy of life isn’t death – the enemy of life is giving up because life isn’t what was planned. Seneca put it pretty well:

True happiness is to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future, not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears but to rest satisfied with what we have, which is sufficient. For he that is so wants nothing.

I wonder how long he had to sit still for this selfie?

One way to read Seneca’s quote would be to read it as justifying laying around smoking weed and eating PEZ® on the couch until you exhibited a gravitational field that could influence minor planets. I assure you, that’s not what Seneca meant. Seneca and most of the other Stoic philosophers that I’ve read were accomplished people in the real world, not professors at some East Coast liberal arts college. Seneca had worked and made himself one of the wealthiest men in ancient Rome. Marcus Aurelius was a Roman Emperor who daily wrote down notes to himself on humility and virtue and being of service. Marcus himself pours cold water on the idea that inactivity was the point of life:

So you were born to feel “nice”? Instead of doing things and experiencing them? Don’t you see the plants, the birds, the ants and spiders and bees going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order, as best they can? And you’re not willing to do your job as a human being?

So, giving up isn’t the point, and sitting around feeling “nice” isn’t the point, either. Despite all of this, there’s no reason not to stay in bed all day in your footed pajamas with a cup of hot cocoa, right Marcus?

At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: “I have to go to work. I’m a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for, the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?

Nope, I guess that won’t work. I think there’s a chance that Marcus wrote this while out campaigning with his Legions against the Germans. In winter. After millions of Romans died in a plague that’s named after him, the Antonine Plague, his full name being Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. How bad was that particular plague? It’s estimated that one out of nine people in the Roman Empire died. Unless you’re a communist, having your own people die is considered a bad thing.

When the Romans counter-attacked, they always went for the German with the ax, hence the phrase: “We’ve got to get to the chopper.”

I probably would have given a good, long thought about staying in bed, too. But Marcus didn’t give up, he probably worked harder. Part of being a Stoic is to go out and give it your all. That’s what you’re supposed to do.

What you’re not allowed to do is get fixated either on success or failure. Sometimes you win. Sometimes you lose. There’s virtue in neither of these. There is, however, virtue in going out and doing your best, leaving nothing back, fully committing yourself to your cause.

None of us will escape death. All of us will fail. Suffering? Yeah, that’s going to happen, too. To all of that, I have a simple response:

So what?

All of those things will happen to every human that’s ever lived or ever will live. You’re not a special snowflake that the world revolves around. There is no particular way your life “should” turn out. Your life right now is mainly the sum of all of the choices you have made, both good and bad. Was there luck in there, both good and bad? Sure, but not as much as you might think.

You may have been sad, but you’ve never been Ronald McDonald™ in a McDonalds® crying and choking down fries sad.

And if you made bad choices that have led you to a present that you don’t care for? Deal with it. And even today on most days if you look around life might appear to be dark, but this very second you probably aren’t suffering. You have electricity. You have Internet. You probably have some sort of food in the house that you wouldn’t mind eating. And if you’re thinking of making a tuna sandwich, I’ll take one, too. You know, while you’re up.

I don’t imagine PJ Boy does a lot of quoting Seneca. Unless Mommy makes him.

Part of life is getting rid of excuses. Most of the time when we say, “I can’t” we mean “I don’t wanna try (I might fail).”

Others?

I’m too young, or too old, or just too darn pretty. It’s probably the pretty one, right?
I’m too busy. Good news! After the economic Coronacane passes through, we’ll probably all have time on our hands.
I don’t know how to do ______. Unless it’s differential equations. Then just do what the book says. Nobody really understands differential equations.
Skipping today won’t matter/I’ll start tomorrow. These two excuses are the same excuse, and they’re exactly the same one as Marcus Aurelius mentioned when he talked about being warm and toasty in bed instead of doing your job.

It’s today. What can you get done today?

What are you waiting for?

American Caesar: Coming Soon To A Country Near You?

“Because there’s no crying in baseball! No crying!” – A League of Their Own

Wash this.

As we contemplate the wreckage of the economy and the cracks in our culture, I return to that question that many of us have been thinking of:

What happens next?

By next as in next week, well those patterns are short term. Just like the stock market has spent most of the last ten years going up, some weeks were down. The overall aggregate of those weeks was up. Until it wasn’t. The short term direction of the market varied, but like China’s expanding sea claims or my expanding waistline, the long term trend did not.

That’s what I see with the United States as a whole. Over the short term, things go up and down, but the long term stresses in the system keep building up. A brick building having foundation problems will build stress, until the bricks and mortar both snap in a line under tension, just like Joe Biden snaps when people move too quickly around him because of Crimean War flashbacks.

One major tension: people have been concerned about the national debt since before I’ve been alive. Why? The silly idea seems to be that “having an unpayable mountain of debt” might be a bad thing since you have to pay all of that back just to be broke. It’s only money, right? But the Federal debt as a percentage of GDP is now larger than at any time since the end of World War II. At that time the United States had mobilized to spending nearly 90% of Federal dollars on military spending items. That level of debt, 110% of the GDP, existed before COVID-19 gave us a gut shot. What will it be after all of the Chinese Virus spending? 120%? 150%?

At least with World War II we got cool tanks and games like Axis and Allies®. In the last bailout all we got was a bigger penthouse for CEOs like Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan/Chase. You might remember Dimon’s tone-deaf Christmas cards like the one he sent out below in 2013. Sure, people are allowed to send out glaringly condescending tennis-ball filled Christmas cards while they spend enough money to pay off your mortgage on a lunch trip to Switzerland for their dog. But to celebrate their wealth after having been the beneficiary of a $25 billion taxpayer-funded bailout in 2008? That’s just tacky.

I guess Dimon’s Christmas card is nearly as neat as 49,324 Sherman tanks, plus twenty-three aircraft carriers, and a zillion movies, at least some of which had Clint Eastwood. Okay, I’ll take that back. Having Clint Eastwood World War II movies is even more important than the ultimate comfort of a billionaire banker. There. I said it. Go ahead and judge me.

I guess pictures of a pampered CEO are close.

Thankfully Jamie Dimon never had to miss a meal.

At some point, there’s a mathematical limit where debt actually matters. After World War II, the United States dealt with debt through a crazy plan: paying it back, while growing the economy. As we stand right now, with the exception of spending enough on defense to cause the Soviets to collapse, we’ve gotten very little out of that debt. It’s like the nation has since 1990 gone on a spending binge like a six year old with addled on sugar with Mom’s credit card, ending up with a pile of Amazon® packages and next-day Prime® diabetes.

Outside of the economic mess which would have gone off at some point with our without the WuFlu, we’re a nation divided politically. The split has been getting worse and worse through time. People have cut off relations with relatives because of political differences that would have made for amusing table discussions even a decade ago. The creeping socialism that’s been winding its way through society since FDR’s New Deal used the Great Depression to introduce sweeping social changes that wrapped themselves around the national brainstem is now fresh again, back like Nic Cage on a bad sequel.

The idea of infinite benefits from a magical printing press is as old as any fairy tale, and we share it with our children every year – he’s called Santa Claus. But lots of people don’t believe in Santa Claus. Why?

Because Santa’s not real.

Santa can’t exist as he violates a fundamental law of the universe – There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch, or TANSTAAFL, as Pournelle and Niven would have said. Heck, the one thing the Soviets in a gulag and hard-core libertarians agree on is: If you don’t work, you don’t eat. No wonder my kids came back so tough after a week at Ayn Rand Preschool – you had to have the will to take the bottle.

People in socialist countries are the only ones who envy the high tech that the Amish have.

These tensions – the financial system collapse tension plus the political division tension – don’t lead to a good outcome. It’s been noted by commenters here and elsewhere that as long as things are good and bellies are full, people won’t revolt. But if you were saving for a rainy day, look outside: it’s pouring.

As I see it, there are three major ways this situation plays out – and none of them end up with 2030 being “business as usual” anymore.

First alternative: the Left takes over. Just like in Virginia, the Left will spend about 20 minutes before they decide to implement their entire basket of changes. I don’t think that this is likely. The reason is that at this point I don’t think the Right will go gently onto that goodnight. They have realized that gun rights “compromises” include only taking rights away. The Right is not keen to compromise on any rights, which is why the recent push-back came against the Coronavirus-related state shutdowns. If the Left tries this, there will be some level of anarchy. And we all know how many anarchists it takes to change a lightbulb: none. Anarchists have never changed anything.

Second alternative: the states Balkanize. The entire experiment breaks up. The Right isn’t interested, for the most part, in controlling what goes on outside of their state, and would be quite amused to watch New York and Los Angeles figure out that the things that make their lives good, like food and gasoline, all come from places they don’t like made by people who don’t like them. Pretty soon they’d be trading Netflix® subscriptions for potatoes. The reason this is a solution of the Right is because Red State people want their freedoms and to be left alone to grill. This is a difficult outcome – splitting up the states seems to fall along party lines, but lots of Blue states have a Red ring around them, and lots of Red states are covered in Blue dots.

The Third, and in my mind an increasingly likely alternative is an American Caesar.

The Roman Republic officially started in 509 B.C., but at the beginning wasn’t much more than a high school audio-visual club with dominion of around six neighborhood blocks until about 282 B.C. It was at that point when the Romans finally took over most of the other tribes in the local area and began to vie for domination of the Mediterranean against Carthage for Blockbuster® franchise rights.

“I hate it when they price just one dollar over. Seems so, disloyal, right Brutus?”

The Roman Republic was fed by expansion. At the time when Caesar became a de facto emperor, Rome controlled not only modern day Italy, but most of Spain, Portugal, Greece, a lot of the northern coast of Africa, France, Belgium, and the Balkan area. Does a republic or a democracy expand? Yes – whoever thought a democracies don’t start wars was as deluded as Joe Biden when he recently denounced President Lincoln for the way he’s handling the polio epidemic.

The Roman Republic lasted until Julius Caesar created and took the throne as dictator after political intrigue. He stepped into a situation where his political enemies were out to get him, and had passed a law to strip him of his troops. Politically and popularly, Caesar was already famous – he had written Commentaries on the Gallic War, which was a bestseller that described his military exploits. It was popular in Rome, and meant at least partially as propaganda to the common people to sidestep the Senate and official media. Sound familiar?

Caesar knew that his political enemies had a trap set for him when he returned – he was certain they’d strip his titles and wealth from him, but, he had an army that was more loyal to him than it was to Rome. When he led Legio XIII (the 13^th Legion) across the Rubicon River, Caesar legendarily said, “The die is cast.” By law, Roman Consuls gave up command at the Rubicon, some 200 miles north of Rome, which was probably about a hard 10-day march over the good roads at Rome. The Senate heard that “Julius is coming,” and got out of there faster than your Leftist friends when it comes time to split the bill for lunch.

Although things were politically precarious at that point, this was the big step. Rome tipped into a civil war. Caesar won, and the people were, generally, pleased, mainly because salads were popular back then. That’s why a few years after Caesar was assassinated, Augustus Caesar was able to take the title – the people were wanting to end the political nonsense, even if it meant a kind of tyranny: this wasn’t the first nor the last time this deal would be made. The people of Rome at that point didn’t want to elect a leader – they wanted an end to the chaos. If the result was an Emperor? So be it.

Spoiler, Caesar died. It would have been much worse if he had continued as a vegetable – let us mourn him.

So far, the leader of the United States has been (more or less) elected through legal means. The Electoral College itself is a great bulwark against fraud – it’s hard to fake enough votes because the dead voting in Chicago alone won’t do it. You’d have to have recounts in cemeteries in dozens of states.

With the jobless increasing 22 million in four weeks, chaos is on the way once people can leave their basements. Unless COVID-19 interrupts, I expect actual riots at the Democratic Convention, especially if they forget the Tupperware® they keep Biden in. Given how much economic activity has already cratered in the United States – total credit card spending is down nearly 30% since last year, but the rent for the store is the same. Businesses won’t be hiring anytime soon, and there’s no way that this will be a sharp recovery.

That economic and political turmoil that we’ll see in the next few years is ripe for a hero, a savior to come forward. Will this new leader look like the old Caesar? No, certainly not. Certainly this savior will be someone that many people know, and look up to.

Tom Hanks?

Maybe President-for-life Tom Hanks? Nah, I hear he eats baby kittens.

The Coming End of The United States

“Hello, I’m Dr. Bean. Apparently. And my job is to sit and look at paintings. So, what have I learned that I can say about this painting? Well, firstly, it’s really quite big, which is excellent, because If it were really small, you know, microscopic, then hardly anyone would be able to see it.” – Bean

If you look closely, you can see itsy-bitsy fur bikini women.

The death of the United States as we know it is near. COVID-19 isn’t the cause of it, despite being in the news nearly as much as a Kardashian. Coronavirus is, rather, a symptom. Like any organism, as soon as a nation is born it begins the process of growth and eventual death. This cycle is a common theme in history, and I’ve visited it before in posts here because I find it more fascinating than, say, beekeeping.

One post I wrote about the how empires have a natural cycle and end date is here (End of Empires, PEZ, and Decadence). That post contains information about Sir John Glubb’s paper called The Fate of Empires. You can also find Glubb’s original paper here (LINK), and you’ll be pleased to find it’s been translated from Glubb’s original fish language.

Which brings us to Thomas Cole. Mr. Cole was an American painter. I say “was” because he’s now dead. This is good, because otherwise he’d have to explain to his wife where the heck he’s been since 1848. Cole did a series of five paintings depicting Glubb’s paper between the years of 1833 and 1836, which was pretty amazing, since Glubb’s paper wasn’t published until 1976. Cole’s five paintings are collectively known as The Course of Empire.

The first of these paintings is called The Savage State. It’s the first picture up above. Cole wasn’t horribly inventive with names, and it’s rumored that he had a dog named “Dog” and a cat named “Cat” and subsisted entirely on a diet of unsalted boiled potatoes. His painting, The Savage State is just that, a savage land dominated by nature, which is also how The Mrs. describes my side of the bedroom. In his painting, you can see that the civilization matched the landscape – rudimentary and rough. It’s chaotic, but that describes a great deal of the prehistory of man. This period of history can last a very, very long time, and would have lasted even longer if humanity would have failed to invent shag carpet.

If you look closely, all these paintings are set in the same place, at different times. Cole even changed the time of day from morning in the first one to night in the final one. I guess this is what you had to settle for as an 1836 version of HD television.

The next painting in the series is The Pastoral State. Each of the paintings presents the same area, just at different stages in the development of the civilization. The land from the original painting has been tamed enough for farming and herding animals. The wild nature of The Savage State has been at least partially replaced by enough control of the land that a greater degree of specialization and start of civilization is possible.

At this stage in the civilizational cycle, there is generally a single dominant culture. If there are two competing cultures, they’ll fight. This explains the Spartans and the Athenians, the North versus the South, or my ex-wife and humans not possessed by Satan. Having a single culture breeds trust, and the uniformity of purpose required for this phase.

The theme of the pastoral state is expansion along the frontier, and is characterized by growth and optimism. It’s how it feels to be on the winning team. Religion is dominant, as are ideals that are higher than self – in Rome, public service was considered honorable. Plutarch wrote about Spartan mothers and their attitudes when their sons went into battle: “Another woman handed her son his shield, and exhorted him: ‘Son, either with this or on this.’”

Legend has it that at one point when Athens was fighting Sparta, that a Spartan, hidden by a hill, taunted the Athenians by yelling, “One Spartan can beat a thousand Athenians!” Enraged, the commander of the Athenians selected his thousand best men and sent them over the hill to kill the insolent Spartan. After fifteen minutes of battle sounds and screaming, a single Athenian, mortally wounded, limped to the top of the hill and yelled down to his general: “Don’t fall for it! It’s a trap! There are actually two of them.”

This state ends when there is no more expansion and frontier. At that point, someone always gets the bright idea that they want to make a buck. The pursuit of profit then replaces the pursuit of honor.

This is the most beautiful and intricate of the paintings. Of course, I had to meme all over it. And looking at the multitudes of people in the painting I had to wonder, “What would a decent three bedroom in the suburbs cost?”

After profits have been pursued for a time, the Empire then reaches the height of power. Cole depicted this phase in his painting The Consummation. Both as a military and economic entity, the Empire will never be better off than at this time, well, at least until it builds that Death Star®. It is here that the greatest works of arts and literature of the society will be created. While the society retains the myth of the expansion, the reality is that is no longer a concern.

Also at this point, intellectuals will start rejecting all of the values that allowed the society to be great, and replacing them with ideals that are often the direct opposite of those that led to success. Virtue is replaced by vanity. Honor and discipline will be mocked as the philosophy of a fool, and be derided as inferior to the values and beliefs of amorality, nihilism, materialism, and collectivism.

Not that I have an opinion, or anything.

Somewhere about this time, with the Empire ceasing to grow, powerful groups figure out that it’s much easier to steal wealth than create it. Politicians devise ways to maximize how much money and power their group can take from the others.

This is the Cole painting, The Destruction of Empire, I see most often out of this set. Perhaps it’s a sign of the time, or perhaps it’s a sign that everyone likes a good Viking raid? Okay. Not everyone. But remember that Roman soldiers are trained, but Vikings are Bjorn.

With the Empire past its peak, the wealth is used to create decadence. Focus is on material goods, and religion declines across the Empire. Since the focus is on wealth, the welfare state forms – Romans had bread and circuses, we have EBT and Netflix®. Historically, foreign peoples from across the Empire stream towards the original culture. Why? Again, the focus is on material goods and not a cohesive society. Why would a Greek want to leave Greece for Rome? I prefer to read books about Rome in Braille – it makes it feel like ancient history.

And as the focus grows on material goods, the originality of the goods disappears. Art becomes a cynical mechanism of control and a means to harvest cash. The remake of the original is remade or rebooted to once again drag the culture for profits. I heard that Hollywood was even going to remake a Muslim version of Footloose, but this time without the Bacon.

An example of that is Spain after the conquest of the New World. Spain found itself with immense wealth in gold. How much wealth? So much that the Spaniards decided that they didn’t want to do the day-to-day things in life, and drew workers in from all across Europe to Do The Jobs Spaniards Wouldn’t Do. So much gold flew into Europe that it changed the exchange rate and wrecked the market for gold. After a century of such luxury, the Spaniards ceased to be the conquistadors that boldly conquered a continent with grit and bravado and became a culture that complained when the Dutch help didn’t peel the grapes correctly.

As an example, in one park I found a cannon seized from a Spanish warship during the Spanish-American War. I looked at the engraving on the cannon – it was beautiful. But this cannon, taken from the Spanish in 1898, was actually forged in 1780 or so. The United States was using cannon that were state of the art and sophisticated, with more than a century of technological advances on the Spanish.

Heck, when a friend got at tattoo in Spain, I was shocked. It was really good. Why was I shocked that it was good? No one expects Spanish ink-precision.

The destruction of Empire can flow not only from battle, but also from a checkbook – a financial collapse can be nearly as devastating as a foreign army, as Spain proves. Regardless, when vigor is gone, pessimism prevails, and sacrifice for the common good to a trustworthy state disappears? Why would you want to be a hero, as all of the national myths and heroes are, one by one, destroyed to make way for the new myths of the intellectual class?

Destruction is just around the corner.

If you look closely at this picture, there are no people, only birds, which must mean that Cole felt that the birds would take over the Earth. This is my favorite, because it makes me feel better about how my yard looks.

Cole’s final painting in the series was the Desolation of Empire. The Empire is over. The drama is over. What remains are a scattered people and the ruins of a great civilization. It sounds bleak, but it doesn’t need to be.

The desolation of Empire isn’t the ending for every person in it, it’s just the ending of the golden age of the way things were. Imagine someone near the end of the Roman Empire, worried about what they saw going on around it. Would the Roman Empire collapse? Certainly. Would all of the people die as a part of this collapse? No. But the globalism of the day did.

And the Roman Empire, in its death, set the stage for a new series of cultures all around Europe – from the reuse of Caesar as “Czar” in Moscow to the United States, which consciously adopted many of the symbols of ancient Rome. What was the first name of the United States Army? Under its first commander, Major General “Mad” Anthony Wayne, it was known as Legion of the United States from 1792-1796.

This isn’t the end of the world, it’s just the end of what we have now, and the end of the United States as we knew her. It’s the beginning of something new as the old structures cease to serve us. There’s a common phrase that I can’t find the source of but that describes the cycle simply and well: “Hard times breed strong men. Strong men breed good times. Good times breed soft men. Soft men? They bring hard times.”

We are in for hard times. But don’t fear. This will make strong men, and, if they are strong enough, a new United States that deserves those strong men.

Eight Phases of Crisis: COVID-19 Edition

â€œYou had aÂ dishwasher box to sleep in?Â I didn’t even know sleep. Â It was pretty much twenty-four seven ball gags, brownie mix and clown porn.â€ â€“ Deadpool

One girl I dated in High School asked if she used too much makeup.Â I replied, â€œDunno, depends on if you are trying to kill BatmanÂ®â€

â€œGreat, now itâ€™s the end of the world and we canâ€™t get a new dishwasher,â€ The Mrs. actually said, after I finally relented that it would probably cost more to fix the dodgy old dishwasher than a new one would cost.Â Plus, the old dishwasher is stainless steel, so if it were a hundred yards away, it would make quite a nice practice target.Â I call that a win-win.Â Besides, AmazonÂ® actually has them in stock, so I could theoretically have one by next week.

See?Â You can get quality appliances during the end of the world.

I started working from home yesterday, which was nice.Â When it was lunchtime, I wasnâ€™t hungry, but I was nice and warm so I took a nap right in my home office which is also known as the couch.Â Good times.Â I do have a concern â€“ The Mrs. slapped my heinie as I walked by and said, â€œnice buttâ€ so Iâ€™m thinking of bringing this up with HR.Â I want to be treated as more than a sexual object.Â I mean, not much more, but more.

As much as you might be interested in my derriÃ¨re, I really do want to talk about COVID-19 and get to the bottom of how the issue will progress in the coming months.Â While each crisis is different, they are all sort-of-predictable because in the end, people donâ€™t change all that much, even though circumstances do.Â Certainly we want to get this all behind us, in the rear view, so to speak.

Okay, Iâ€™ll stop.Â Seven synonyms for the posterior in two paragraphs are quite enough.Â I donâ€™t want you to think Iâ€™m a bum.

But what is this pattern I mentioned?Â Here are, as near as I can determine, Eight Stages of a Crisisâ„¢, a level at which each crisis can be evaluated compared to the other â€“ this is my modification of work originally done by Zunin and Myers.Â This is like the KÃ¼bler-Ross five stages of grief, but with the apocalypse in mind.Â Why settle for one death, when you can have millions or billions on your mind?Â Itâ€™s so nice and cheery.Â The nice part of using this model is that you can gauge where we are in the current COVID-19 mess.

Who would he assassinate for a KlondikeÂ® bar?Â Apparently Archduke Franz Ferdinand.Â

The Warning

This is the opening stage of a crisis.Â It may be short, as in 9/11, or it may be a slow-motion collapse like the gradually increasing troop buildups and mobilizations that led to World War I.Â Everyone wanted to stop it, but no one was sane enough to say â€œno.â€Â The Warning before the first Civil War was literally decades in length.

In the current COVID crisis, The Warning came during and just after the December impeachment.Â With the focus of the country elsewhere, who cared about the flu?Â We donâ€™t trust the media very much.Â Why?Â They donâ€™t seem trustworthy.Â Example: Â when Trump shuts down air transport to China, CNNÂ® says itâ€™s racist.Â When China shuts down air transport from the United States, CNNâ„¢ says itâ€™s a wise and prudent move by Chinaâ€™s benevolent leadership.

In a world where CNNâ„¢ and the Chinese government have similar levels of credibility we tend to forget the ending to the story of the boy who cried wolf:Â in the end, wolves really attacked.

How did they not see this coming?

The Event

The Event is generally not long, but it can be.Â Itâ€™s the Shot Heard Round the World at Lexington and Concord in the Revolutionary War.Â The Event is when the rules change forever, and nothing can ever make the world go back to the way it was.Â Itâ€™s the spark that lights the fire.Â When people look back, everyone can see The Event.

Nothing is ever the same afterwards â€“ The Event changes everyone that it touches, and often ends up changing systems permanently.Â It is disruptive.Â It may not be the reason that everything fails, it might just be a small event toppling an already unstable system.Â In a crisis like 9/11, the event is obvious and instant.Â COVID-19 has led to a slow-rolling avalanche across the economy.Â Was it poised for a fall anyway?Â Possibly.

As a longer cascade, what will be The Event that history will use to remember COVID-19?

In one of my more frightening thoughts:Â what if we havenâ€™t seen The Event yet?

Iâ€™m not sure heâ€™s koalafied to make that decision.

Disbelief

When things have changed, and changed drastically, people refuse to believe it.Â When the power is out because a tree fell on the power lines, I will walk into a room an automatically flip the light switch.Â Why?Â Habit, partially.Â But thereâ€™s a part of my mind that is existing in Disbelief, perhaps, that doesnâ€™t believe that the power could ever be gone.

Disbelief isnâ€™t a coping strategy, and itâ€™s not an attempt of the mind to protect itself, at least in a healthy person.Â Itâ€™s more inertia.Â Youâ€™re used to the world being a certain way, and when it isnâ€™t, part of your mind isnâ€™t quite ready to process it.

This might be an overreaction â€“ COVID-19 might be no worse than the flu.Â But that isnâ€™t explained by the reactions weâ€™ve seen so far from places that got it earlier than the United States.Â Italy is locked down.Â In two weeks, we will know more.Â In a month, I think, we will have certainty.

In order to calm panicked customers, Wal-Mart opened up a second register.

Panic

At some point, the mind is confronted with the new reality and forced to accept it.Â But the rules are new, and unknown.Â What to do?Â One could take a deep breath, and review the situation and think logically or?Â One could Panic.Â Panic is easier, and doesnâ€™t require a lot of thought.

Panic is the natural reaction when your brain realizes that it has done zero to prepare for the new reality.Â So, what to do? Buy staples as required to build up the stockpile youâ€™ve accumulated over time?Â Or buy 550 cans of Diet Mountain DewÂ®?Â Or just buy toilet paper, because everyone else is and you donâ€™t know what to do or have any independent thought?Â Â Toilet paper purchasing is Panic.

Not all heroes are able to walk.Â I mean, some gained 400 lbs on the couch.

Heroism

While the Panic is ongoing, the first glimmer of Heroism starts to show.Â Brave men and women working in the medical field are the first signs of Heroism.Â Donald Trump talking with Al Sharpton to address the problems he sees is Heroism â€“ realizing that there is a greater good, and that sacrifice is required.Â Heroism is embodied throughout the response to the crises where a few have an opportunity to save many, and where enemies put aside squabbles for a time because itâ€™s the right thing to do.

There was a family story â€“ Grandma Wilder went during World War II to weld Liberty ships at the Alameda Ship Yard.Â She would regularly get things sent to her from her mother who lived in the country in the middle of Flyover.Â Needles were rationed in San Francisco, but not in Flyover.Â Sugar was rationed in San Francisco, but not in Flyover.Â Why ration needles and sugar?Â To build common purpose, so even people not piloting P-51s or jumping out of landing craft at Iwo Jima could feel like they were doing their part.Â To be fair, rationing was necessary in wide segments of the economy, it wasnâ€™t a fake, but it did help bring everyone together.

Right now Heroism is going on, and we arenâ€™t even asked to do anything more than to sit down and watch NetflixÂ® unless weâ€™re keeping vital industries going.Â Hereâ€™s a link to Aesopâ€™s place that shows the quiet heroism going on out there (LINK).Â Read it all.

I read the other day that coyotes are about 10 miles an hour faster than road runners.Â My entire childhood was a lie.

The Cliff

Keeping order requires energy.Â Some part of the energy of the system is put into keeping order.Â In a time of significant social cohesion, like World War II, the United States didnâ€™t face The Cliff, even though virtually every other developed nation did.Â Instead, the energy that the crisis took was replaced by people working together.

Most of the time in a real crisis, however, thereâ€™s The Cliff.Â I wrote about it here: Senecaâ€™s Cliff and You.

We have not fallen off The Cliff.Â Is it certain that there is one?Â No.Â But every single leader, elected or appointed, is acting like itâ€™s there.Â I believe we will see it.Â The new normal will be grow from events moving quickly.Â Already at Wilder Redoubt, weâ€™ve had nothing but home cooked meals for the last week, with a couple of store-bought sandwiches being the exception.

Will home cooked food, family dinners, and homeschooling be the legacy of COVID-19?

I expect that weâ€™ll see The Cliff soon enough.Â How deep will it go?Â As Iâ€™ve mentioned before, no one knows.Â The worst case is that the economy crashes through levels to Great Depression era lockup in two weeks or so.Â Only 40% of Americans are able to absorb an unexpected $1,000 expense.Â 80% are living paycheck to paycheck, and those paychecks just stopped.

Dead.

Going first will be car payments.Â The average monthly car payment is $800.Â Me?Â Iâ€™d sell you my daily driver for just two months of that, so expect car finance companies to seize up like an ungreased stripper pole.Â But the businesses that employ those people arenâ€™t much better off.Â The best restaurant in Modern Mayberry came pretty close to closing down shop six years ago, but pulled through.Â The second best restaurant didnâ€™t survive.Â There will be cascading failures as the debts owed from one business to the next go unpaid, and this wonâ€™t just be for small businesses.Â I feel confident saying that several businesses with 10,000 or more employees will go bankrupt.Â Overall loss to the economy?Â 40% of the GDP this year?

Is there a better case?Â Sure.Â We contain COVID-19 in a month or so, and then call it good.Â We only lose 10% to 20% of our GDP this year, and government pumps five or six trillion dollars into the economy to juice it back up.Â Thatâ€™s the best case.Â And thatâ€™s just in the United States.

Iâ€™m not kidding, thatâ€™s how deep The Cliff is.Â If weâ€™re lucky.

Something, something, Dark SideÂ®.

Disillusionment

After the fall, things suck.Â We had heroes, but the time for Heroism is over.Â Disillusionment sets in when things donâ€™t snap back to normal.Â Things will seem rosy, only for failure to crush hope.Â The more government â€œhelpsâ€ during this phase, the worse recovery will be.Â Roosevelt â€œhelpedâ€ so much during the Great Depression that he extended it for years.

But politicians will take drastic steps, because they canâ€™t help themselves.Â The length of time Disillusionment lasts?Â Months to years.

Some re-assembly required.

Rebuilding

This is the other side of The Cliff.Â Whereas, as Seneca said you go down a cliff pretty quickly, you only build up slowly.Â Rebuilding the economy will take years.Â If we do it right, weâ€™ll build a stronger economy, less dependent upon foreign supply lines, that guarantees freedom while preserving the traditional values that built the wealth in the first place.

If done poorly?Â The system is controlled, oppressive, and coercive.Â Leaders matter, but the quality of the citizenry to fight back against the system is even more important.Â Rebuilding takes years, and by my best case scenario, four to eight years.

So, I guess Iâ€™ll get a jump start on rebuilding.Â Dishwashers on the Internet.Â Amazing.Â My only problem is that thereâ€™s this lady at work who keeps making suggestive comments and touching me all the time.Â Just a few minutes ago, she told me that she expects me to share a bed with her!Â They always told me not to get my honey where I got my money, but what happens when you work at home?

Complacency, An English King, Elon Musk, and Bikinis

“Well, perhaps what we most needed was a kick in our complacency to prepare us for what lies ahead.” – Star Trek, TNG

Q: Why can’t dinosaurs clap? A: They’re all dead.

Once upon a time The Mrs. and I bought a piece of bare land to build a house on, and not a Lego® one like they make in California. The land was in a county that had (eye roll) rules about that sort of thing. In order to get a permit to build the house, we had to have our land approved as a subdivision. We did it the old fashioned way – we did it ourselves. We prepared the relevant paperwork, hired the surveyor, and worked with the county zoning staff to present it to the Zoning Commission. After discussing it at the meeting, and observing the property, the chairman of the commission stated:

“Mr. Wilder, the commission would like to reserve a 40’ foot strip of land along the north boundary to put in a road at some future point. In your zoning packet, we’re going to add that you will deed us this land at no cost if we ever decide to build said road.”

That was over an acre.

The Commission Chairman must have seen the expression on my face. I’ll admit it, I wasn’t pleased. I felt, based on my law degree of “reading the Constitution” that this was a clear violation. It was, I felt, a “taking” of my land with no compensation. Even though I didn’t say a word, and wasn’t wearing a Gadsden Flag t-shirt, I think he knew right where my head was.

Snek no lyke step.

“Now, Mr. Wilder, you understand that we as a Commission have a duty, a duty not only to those living here for today, but for those not living yet. Why, this subdivision will be recorded and be in force for the next thousand years.” I don’t recall the next sentence, because I really couldn’t believe what I had just heard.

The next thousand years? Was he taking the same kind of drugs that Bernie does?

The Mrs. and I finished our turn at the podium for the meeting. We left and went outside. The Mrs. beat me to the punch.

“The next thousand years? Was he serious??? What an idiot.” We actually still joke about it to this day. You would have been proud of her scoff when I read it to her tonight. It was perfect.

We had both focused on the same sentence. It was pompous. It was self-important. It was delusional. It was . . . complacent.

The idea that the governance, the structure, or even a culture that respected property rights would follow a continuous path for a thousand years was deluded. 1,000 years ago, the Danes ruled Norway and England as well as Denmark under King Cnut (yes, that’s spelled right) the Great. Ever hear of him? Well let me tell you if you misspell his name just one time in an e-mail to Karen, you’ll have to spend an hour explaining old English history to HR so you can prove you really meant that Karen was displaying the wisdom that old King Cnut was cnown for.

Yeah, just like Karen, the Commission Chairman was a Cnut.

That more or less proves my point. I doubt that the records of that subdivision named the “Free Autonomous Reserve Tract” will even exist in a thousand years. It could be that whatever emerges from the nearly certain Musk Cat Girls on Mars© Uprising of 2257 or the Amazon™ slave rebellion of 2856 against Bezosclone4651 don’t destroy the records, but don’t bet on it.

Elon apparently has a different version of Cat Scratch Fever.

Expecting a county commission’s decisions to be relevant 1,000 years into the future was an outrageous example, but it proves the point I’m trying to make. Often, we get so complacent in our day-to-day lives that we’re willing to believe incredible things that we normally would scoff at, like, oh, Joe Biden doesn’t have dementia. I mean, it’s normal to answer the question, “What is your vision for health care?” with “I remember when it was polite for a man to call a woman a ham-handed yellow-teethed hammer soaker before you made sweet love to them in the back of your tree fort, I mean if you had a dozen or more. Pinecones, right? Those were the days when you could rub my legs and watch the hair spring back up and the wood elves would play music for hours on their nose harp. Ever have a nose harp? We did, but you could call women broads then, because they liked to get you coffee, what with the skirts and pantyhose and all. Canada. And if you don’t like it, you can damn well vote for that Reagan fellow.”

One way I choose topics to write about is I want to look at a subject I know something about, and then dig deeper. My idea is that often one of the biggest dangers was well defined by Mark Twain: “What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.”

It’s a shame Twain never learned to write properly and not use “ain’t” – maybe if he had his career would have gone somewhere like mine has. Anyway, when I find a disconnect like Twain described, or new information that’s something that I like to write about.

But when I can find that same situation and tie it directly to a problem or situation in society today?

That’s perfect.

Okay, nearly perfect. It has to be interesting, too. The relative changes in the combustibility of dryer lint throughout the twentieth century might be not what you expected, but it’s probably not particularly interesting, unless you like to burn dryer lint as a hobby, which I hear is what Jeb Bush is into now, at least when it’s group craft time.

Okay, that’s actually “lightning and lightning bug.”

I really like learning new things, and I learned something new today: One thing I like writing about, and keep returning to as a nearly constant theme here is: complacency. It’s evident when I write about the economic system (Rome, Britain, and Money: Why You Can’t Find Fine China after the Apocalypse), or prepping (Be Prep-ared) or really nearly any topic I write about. And I try to live by my advice.

In my life, I try not to be complacent about:

Relationships: Love is a voluntary choice. Being complacent about those around you is a good way to lose a relationship, and that can be expensive. But, for certain people, it’s worth it. (That’s an ex-wife joke.)
Jobs: Jobs come and go, even within companies. I have seen entire departments disappear as technology made people irrelevant. Always be learning new skills, or at least be learning more about the “niece” of your boss.
Value of Money: When I was a boy, Bernie Sanders would shine a shinbone for a nickel. Now? I think he wants to expand Medicare to do that.
Economic Future: The stock market will always go up, right? Well, no. Sometimes
Limits of Human Knowledge: Much of what is science is a fad, to be replaced by new science in a few years. Not so much with math. Mostly not with physics. Medicine? 75% of it is washing your hands and eating right. 20% is antibiotics. 5% is not step on snek. And Aesop will change all of these percentages if he gets this far.

Wilder, Wealthy and Wise is absolutely against complacency. I don’t like complacency. I like finding places where it has snuck into my life or I see it sneaking into the lives of others. I especially like sharing things that help people see complacency in their own lives, because then I don’t have to change anything about me.

That moment when I’ve written something, and I imagine that someone’s entire world view changed?

That moment is why I write, though some of you might say that for a writer, I’m a fairly competent typist. Regardless, that’s the enjoyment I get from this, besides the jokes and the bikinis. I want to create discomfort in me. And in you. And also be able to explain to The Mrs. why I spend so much time looking at bikini pictures.

“Research, dear. It’s for my readers.” Oh, the things I put myself through for you.

At least it’s not another Kardashian. But I think the dog has less hair.

Back to complacency. When it comes to life and health, how often do you step back and question your basic, underlying assumptions? If never, you should. How often are they wrong? If never, then you’re not testing them hard enough.

Assumptions change because circumstances change. A forty year old metabolism isn’t the same as a twenty year old metabolism. If you eat like you’re twenty when you’re forty and fifty, you’ll end up weighing 657 pounds and being buried in a piano box. I guess the good part about that is “all the Oreos®,” and being able to dress convincingly as Jabba the Hut® at Halloween, but the downside is attractive slave girls cost more than you think.

Assumptions change because knowledge changes – we were wrong. All of us. Sugar used to be great for you, it was a carbohydrate, and those were good. But fat? Fat was bad, as bad as John Travolta acting in a movie that requires his character to be able to use words of more than one syllable bad. Everyone knew that, and they were right. But only about Travolta. Companies even made fat-free cookies in special green packages so you could know that you were safe eating them. But in 2020, we know that’s insanity.

But I hear Darth Braider did her hair.

What circumstances have changed in your life that you need to account for? What will be changing?

As for knowledge, what does “everyone know” that’s wrong today? That’s tougher. I think that the news about sugar (for instance) started to show up in more than “fad” levels about the year 2000, a good 20 years after the war on fat in food began. Pay attention. And if something seems too good to be true, it probably isn’t.

Complacency. Heck, I’ve made mistakes.

Probably enough for 1,000 years. Just ask Karen. She’s quite a Cnut.

Dangit. It’s HR again. FCUK©.

(FCUK™, of course is the British clothing brand “French Connection, UK®.”)

Silly.

Corona Virus, with a Slice of Recession?

â€œGlobal? Oh, great. I’ve doomed humanity.â€ â€“ Ash Versus Evil Dead

I hear it can only be caught from crowds.Â Introverts everywhere smiled as they stared at your shoes.

The other day I was emailing back and forth with James M. Dakin, proprietor of the Bison Prepper (LINK).Â I mentioned that Iâ€™d bring up an old essay weâ€™d both read back when Jim and I went to different high schools together. Â That essay was I, Pencil.

I, Pencil was written by Leonard Read and published in 1958.Â The essay is available here (LINK).Â I, Pencil is a fairly short essay with a fairly long introduction.Â Spoiler alert:Â Leonard felt that no single person on planet Earth can make something as simple as a boring old yellow No. 2 pencil.Â And, heâ€™s right.Â A pencil, even a 1958 version, uses components that are sourced all over the globe.Â Mr. Read makes a great point â€“ the free market takes components from all around the world to make even the simplest and most mundane object.

I cut myself with a pencil â€“ I drew blood.

Likewise, the knowledge required to make that pencil is distributed across the globe.Â No single person can make the pigments for the paint by milking the Tanganyikan paint turtles, and pick the aluminum from the Australian aluminum trees to make ferrule that holds the eraser on.Â And that eraser?Â Itâ€™s made of rubber from the Congo.Â Iâ€™d make fun of the Congo, but, really.Â Itâ€™s the Congo and they have enough problems (LINK to a really fascinating story of crossing the Congo).Â Plus the wood is made from sustainably farmed free-range vegan trees in California.Â Donâ€™t forget the graphite â€“ itâ€™s from the Sri Lankan graphite glaciers.

The humble pencil is a creature of Globalization.

How much Globalization?Â Sadly, it looks like Dixon Ticonderoga used to make most of its pencils in the United States, but now apparently makes only enough pencils here to claim that it actually makes pencils in the United States (LINK).Â There were a few pencil jokes I was going to make here, but theyâ€™re pointless.

While we talk about globalization as being a new phenomenon, Globalization has been a thing since the days of the American Revolution â€“ the tea that Sam Adams threw in the harbor during the Boston Tea Party came from halfway across the planet.Â Even back to the days of Rome, there is evidence of far flung trade â€“ shipwrecks found in the Mediterranean are often found filled with wine or olive oil being shipped across the Empire.Â Sadly, the Romans abandoned those cargos after they broke the V second rule of being on the bottom of the ocean.Â Â

X/X

Globalization provides a huge advantage.Â Some things arenâ€™t available around the world â€“ resources come from other places for a reason â€“ corn is imported to the South Pole because corn grows rather poorly in ice.Â Shockingly, wood comes from places with trees, and having Saudi Arabia export timber is probably not a great business strategy.Â But having Saudi Arabia export oil is.Â And having the United States export food also makes sense â€“ we grow more than we can eat.

When done right, Globalization provides the benefits of bringing together resources and knowledge from far-flung corners of the world to meet the needs of people that most of them will never meet.Â But Globalization doesnâ€™t consist only of benefits.Â With Globalization, TiconderogaÂ® can decide to make pencils in China.Â Hundreds of jobs are then lost in the United States.Â A typical journalist would indicate that the people who lost pencil-making jobs should, â€œlearn to code.â€ Â When those same journalists lost their jobs due to Globalization, they cried on TwitterÂ® when told that perhaps it was their turn to #learntocode.Â The journalists even got people banned for suggesting they take their own advice (LINK).Â Still missing:Â journalists who became coders.Â Also missing:Â journalists with a sense of humor and irony.

Although the United States spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year on yellow No. 2 pencils made in China, should pencils stop showing up from China, there wonâ€™t be chaos and anarchy in the streets except around SATÂ® test taking time.Â I mean, we all remember the No. 2 pencil riots of 1989, right?

But that is just a humble pencil.Â What other things are imported from China (LINK â€“ warning â€“ quite an addictive set of graphs)?

You can tell that toothpaste was invented in New York City.Â Otherwise they would have called it teethpaste.

A lot of the things the United States imports from China are trivial, or convenience items that we could live without:

Lots of toys are manufactured in China, including trikes and video game consoles, virtually all Christmas decorations, and (the census has a category for this) practical jokes. Yes, the Corona Virus could directly cause a shortage of fake dog poo.
Strollers and toasters are almost all made in China. Why did I combine these items?Â No reason.Â None at all.
Millions of wet heads could result.
Artificial flowers. Now here the Chinese are particularly cunning â€“ theyâ€™ve cornered the production of not only plastic artificial flowers, but also artificial flowers not made from plastic.Â This is a true strategic threat.
Nearly every thermos. The United States could bankrupt itself in additional ice costs.Â Also, cold soup?
100% of lawn edgers are made in China. 100% of my lawn edger hasnâ€™t left the garage in five years.

Okay.Â There is a lot of stuff that comes from China we live without.Â Unless you work at Wal-MartÂ®.Â Without those imports to be sold, the impact should be minimal.Â Very few people have ever had a life or death situation that could be solved by fake dog poo.Â Iâ€™m pretty sure this is the first time that last sentence was ever written in the English language.

Had much super fun time inserting receptacle into hand.

But . . .

Nearly every â€œportable digital automatic data processing machine not weighing more than 10 kilogramsâ€ comes from China â€“ all $37 billion worth.
65% of cell phones – $72 billion.
80% of â€œother radio telephonesâ€ $44 billion.
And, oops, it seems that 80% of pharmaceuticals and 97% of antibiotics in the United States are imported from China ().

Amazingly, everything that China exports to the United States only amounts to (about) 3% or of the United States economy.Â Stopping Chinese imports to the United States would have an immediate impact because of lowered sales regardless of what we import.Â But as the bullet points above show, slowdown of imports from China could also have an immediate effect because of what we import.

The third impact would come from what we make out of the things that China sends us.Â Things like . . . cars and pickups.Â Where does the housing for the alternator in the FordÂ® pickup come from?Â Touch screens?Â How many are made in China?Â How many days until Chevyâ„¢ canâ€™t build a car because itâ€™s missing a switch that runs an air conditioner?Â Last time I checked, most cars need nearly 100% of the parts to be called a car.Â At least until I work on the engine â€“ then I always seem to have a few bolts left over.

Not one of my repairs.Â But I have used zip ties as a structural material.

The third impact of reducing manufacturing in the United States would be large. Â I donâ€™t have precise figures but I can guess â€“ it might be as much as a 10% drop in the economy in the year it happened.Â For reference, the Great Recession of 2008 had a 4% drop in economic activity.

Iâ€™m probably not the guy to talk about how the Wuhan Flu is going to spread.Â Iâ€™m certainly not the guy to tell you how to treat it if you get it.Â But I do know that something like the shutting down of factories in China can spill over to the United States and cause recessions or worse, even if the Corona virus never became an epidemic here.

Stock up on pencils while you can . . . .

The Lighter Side of the Apocalypse

â€œIt’s theÂ ApocalypseÂ all right. Â I always thought I’d have a hand in it.â€ – Futurama

I make apocalypse jokes like thereâ€™s no tomorrow.

Wednesdayâ€™s are normally a day to talk about wealth, and when youâ€™re prepping, what is wealth?Â Is it gold coins?Â Is it ammunition?Â Is it beer?Â Is it a paid off house?Â Is it a decadeâ€™s worth of PEZÂ®?

In many cases when I go to other websites that discuss either economic or social dislocation I see people arguing in the comments section about the way to prepare.Â In some cases, these arguments have even occurred here at this humble bastion of Internet civility and decorum.Â All of the people arguing are right.

No, that doesnâ€™t mean that John Wilder is out there awarding participation trophies for comments, far from it.Â The problem is one of definition.Â As Tolstoy said in Anna Kareninananana, â€œAll happyÂ familiesÂ are alike; eachÂ unhappy familyÂ isÂ unhappyÂ in its own way.â€Â Each of the stunningly attractive and freshly washed (and waxed!) geniuses that comments here has an IQ that would put Joe Biden to shame.Â Yet they disagree because theyâ€™re talking about different things â€“ each apocalypse is unique in its own way.

Protip:Â if youâ€™re a mortician, tie all of the corpses shoes together â€“ that way if we do have a zombie apocalypse, itâ€™ll be funny.

Therefore, Iâ€™ve decided itâ€™s important to talk about the W.I.L.D.E.R. Scale.Â Itâ€™s like the Richter Scale for earthquakes or the Fujita Scale for tornados or the Joe Biden Scale for Lying Dog Faced Pony Soldiers.Â But this one is better, because I came up with it.

Most importantly, what does W.I.L.D.E.R. stand for?Â Itâ€™s the:

Wilder Index of Life Disruption and Economic Ruination.

See?Â W.I.L.D.E.R.Â No, wait . . . W.I.L.D.E.R.â„¢Â There.Â That looks better.

The scale is broken up into a ten point scale, as described below.Â Why ten?Â Besides being my mental age, it also describes the number of fingers that I had before using a table saw.Â Itâ€™s also metric.Â So, all of you people who live in countries that havenâ€™t nuked Japan (excluding the Japanese) can have this one in metric.Â But you have to keep the soccer.

NOTE:Â This is not a comprehensive financial guide or preparedness guide.Â Depending on the W.I.L.D.E.R.â„¢Â level youâ€™re preparing for, this is only the barest bones of a start.Â

W.I.L.D.E.R.â„¢ Level 0:Â All Quiet

Everythingâ€™s fine.Â Life is good.Â Life is projected to be good â€“ you have a job, itâ€™s fairly secure and has good benefits and it pays the bills, mostly.Â Save money in your 401k, grill some burgers and watch the game.Â Go back to sleep.

W.I.L.D.E.R.â„¢ Level 1:Â Local Slowdown

What is it?

A W.I.L.D.E.R.â„¢ Level 1 is the lowest level of economic disruption â€“ local job loss, minor and non-chronic civil .Â Itâ€™s not great if youâ€™re caught up in it, but itâ€™s pretty mild.Â There may be widespread local job loss â€“ a factory was closed.Â Itâ€™s not pleasant for those caught up in it, but the underlying economy outside of that local area is sound â€“ you may have a longer commute, but you can get a job.

What to do?

Have savings.Â Have minimal debt.Â In many cases, youâ€™ll be able to keep doing what youâ€™ve been doing, but you might have a farther commute or reduced wages.Â The nice thing about a Level 1 is that if youâ€™re willing to move to a new city, chances are youâ€™ll find something.

W.I.L.D.E.R.â„¢ Level 2: Â Regional Slowdown

What is it?

One thing that was more common in the past in the United States was a regional level of economic slowdown.Â Entire areas would remain stagnant for periods at a time, sometimes years.Â In the case of New Mexico, no one really knew it was a state anyway, so weâ€™re not even sure if New Mexico has an economy.Â As we have been in the â€œBoom Everywhere, All the Timeâ€ mode for the last 20 years (with the exception of that pesky Great Recession), the economy of the United States seems to be far less regional, but more centered in larger cities.

But regional economic slowdowns do occur â€“ an example would be in the Oil Patch when the price of oil first goes up, and then collapses like my resistance to a steak on Friday night.Â The good news is that when the oil price collapses, you can buy a small child in Oklahoma for the price of a cheeseburger.Â Not a plain cheeseburger, but the fancy one with lettuce and tomato and onion.Â Oklahomans have standards.

What to do?

Have savings.Â Have minimal debt.Â Have a realistic budget and know the difference between whatâ€™s really required and whatâ€™s nice-to-have.Â Have a house that you can either sell or walk away from.Â Be prepared to change careers â€“ have an additional skill that people will pay you for if you have to change careers.Â Be prepared to sell a kidney â€“ grow an extra one or two if you can for a rainy day.

Philosoraptor.

W.I.L.D.E.R.â„¢ Level 3:Â National Recession

What is it?

Since World War II, most recessions have lasted, on average, a little less than a year.Â Recessions mean that, broadly, the economy is shrinking.Â Since the entire economic (and banking) system is based on continued expansion and growth, a recession typically kicks people out of work.Â During a national recession itâ€™s easier to drive drunk and text Shakespeare from memory while smoking weed than to get a raise.

Even though the economy â€œrecoversâ€ after a year or so, the failures and economic transitions that come from the recession linger in many lives for up to a decade â€“ careers at failed businesses may not be viable anywhere.Â If the entire factory is shipped to China, chances are slim that the Chinese will want to import people â€“ itâ€™s not like there are enough bats for everyone.

What to do?

If you are graduating from college, think twice.Â People who graduate during a recession and take a job during the recession typically earn less for their entire careers.Â Several of my friends went to graduate school instead of into the job market during a recession.Â It worked out well for one guy â€“ he became a dictator of a country in the Middle East.Â Heâ€™s generous, too.Â I heard that he last week at the bar he ordered shots for lots of his friends.

If you have a job â€“ do what you can to keep it.Â Pay down remaining debt, but understand what bankruptcy might mean if you donâ€™t have six months (or more) of cash to cover expenses.Â Stock weeks of spare food, if you can.Â If you canâ€™t, start making friends with neighborhood cats.

W.I.L.D.E.R.â„¢ Level 4:Â The Great Depression

What is it?

The Great Depression, and, to a lesser extent, the Great Recession of 2008-2009 and the Stagflation of the 1970â€™s fit here.Â These are much greater economic hits than a recession.Â They are nationwide, and may threaten the economic collapse.Â Expect extreme measures to get the economy working again, many of which will actually be counterproductive, but itâ€™s government, so you expect that.Â Banks will fail.Â Weird things will happen to the money supply.

What to do?

If you have spare cash, this is the time to pick up great bargains.Â As the Great Recession hit, the price of gold dropped significantly.Â People who had debt but too many toys had to sell them â€“ it was a great time to buy boats and cars and motorcycles and mistresses and admission for your kid at HarvardÂ®.Â Several stocks were selling at ridiculously low prices.

Why was this?Â Money had dried up, so there were bargains everywhere.Â Of course, I didnâ€™t have enough money then to buy anything.Â Except a house.Â Before the prices collapsed.Â (Spoiler â€“ I got out of that house okay.)

Again, having no debt and cash to cover expenses is key.Â Having a spouse who doesnâ€™t work (but could) is also key â€“ in a pinch, they can work, too, or you can sell their kidneys for buckets of wheat.

Diversify your banks.Â Diversify how you keep your money â€“ is one currency enough?Â Desperate people will be desperate.Â Be able to protect yourself and your family.

Hey, donâ€™t laugh â€“ I can almost buy two packs of gum in 2024 with the money in that picture.

W.I.L.D.E.R.â„¢ Level 5:Â National Collapse

What is it?

Governing structures cease to function in a meaningful way.Â This is also known as â€œTuesdayâ€ in most African nations.Â Weimar Germany, and the late Soviet Union are examples.Â They didnâ€™t collapse in the same way â€“ Weimar Germany collapsed in an explosion of hyperinflation.Â The Soviet Union collapse was the collapse of an entire economic system, and now nobody knew who got to take the cow to the dance on Saturday.

What to do?

When nations collapse, their currency collapses.Â This always happens.Â In surviving any of those collapses, a pocketful of gold was more helpful than a pocketful of paper.Â If the nation collapses, it can be difficult to predict the system that will replace it, but they generally are totalitarian strongmen who take over in the chaos after collapse.Â The Soviet Union was a happy departure â€“ as rough as it was on the former Soviet citizens, it could have been far worse.Â Chef Boyardee was originally chosen as Gorbachevâ€™s replacement, but they didnâ€™t like that he called his secret police the Gazpacho.

Six months of food isnâ€™t extravagant in a situation like this.Â Some means of protection are mandatory.Â Realize that changes could happen in a second, so plan.Â Have friends.

W.I.L.D.E.R.â„¢ Level 6:Â Civil War

What is it?

The American Civil War, the French Revolution, and the Balkans War are examples of civil wars.Â Civil wars are probably more vicious than any other type of conflict.Â When the Germans started fighting the French and English in World War I, they werenâ€™t really into it â€“ they even stopped the war for Christmas in 1914.Â But when the French finally snapped before the French Revolution?Â They were ready to throw down like a rabid epileptic cat in a strobe light store.

What to do?

Moveable assets like gold or foreign bank accounts, a second passport, and lots of lead are preferred.Â Be in a place (if you can) surrounded by like-minded people.Â It helps if youâ€™ve been there for years before trouble breaks out â€“ being an outsider during a civil war isnâ€™t preferred.Â Have food â€“ a year?Â Have weapons.Â Have a supply of necessary pharmaceuticals if you can.Â Be aware that your side might lose the war.Â What would that mean?Â Oh, and donâ€™t forget to floss.

W.I.L.D.E.R.â„¢ Level 7:Â International Collapse

What is it?

World War I and World War II are modern examples of this, but earlier examples include the fall of the Roman Empire and the late Bronze Age Collapse (~1200 B.C.) (LINK).Â These are collapses that take down multiple nations and re-write borders and history.Â They are cataclysmic, and are often followed by the mass movements of people, either as invading conquerors, or fleeing refugees, or in the 2010â€™s, fleeing conquerors and invading refugees.

Some things never change.Â Image:Â Lommes [CC BY-SA 4.0)]

What to do?

Be away from where the war is happening.Â That may be more difficult than it says on the label.Â All of the suggestions for Level 6 responses still fit, especially flossing, but finding a place not torn by conflict is exceedingly difficult.Â Events have the ability to move very, very, fast.Â If youâ€™re in continental Europe, learning German is probably a good idea.Â A year of food will likely not be enough.Â Lead is recommended.Â Gold may or may not help at all.Â If you think it wonâ€™t, Iâ€™ll watch it for you.

W.I.L.D.E.R.â„¢ Level 8:Â Regional Extinction

What is it?

Regional extinction last occurred when the population collapsed after the Europeans brought disease to the New World.Â Smallpox, measles, and high cholesterol (eventually) killed an estimated 90% of the pre-Columbus population through either disease or carryover effects.Â That amounted to, perhaps, 10% of the world population at the time.

What to do?

Donâ€™t eat bats.Â Donâ€™t welcome Spaniards.

I fell in love with a calendar.Â Together we had a lot of dates.

W.I.L.D.E.R.â„¢ Level 9:Â Continental or Multi-Continental Extinction

What is it?

This hasnâ€™t happened in recorded history.Â There are some scientists that theorize that the supervolcano Tomba that erupted 75,000 years ago nearly eliminated humanity.Â How close?Â Genetic evidence indicates that it might have been as low as 1,000 breeding pairs of humans.Â However, some people think those scientists are bunch of cotton headed ninny mugginses, and say that people were just fine â€“ the restriction in genetic variation shows up because some people were MUCH better at propagating their genes, if you know what I mean.Â Also?Â Asteroids arenâ€™t your friend.

What to do?Â

Be lucky.Â Wear clean underwear.Â You cannot save enough food for this contingency â€“ it may last years and the task will be nothing less than rebuilding civilization.Â Read Luciferâ€™s Hammer for a lighthearted look at life after a Level 9.

W.I.L.D.E.R.â„¢ Level 10:Â Planetary Extinction

What is it?

Game over, man.

What to do?

Save money in your 401k, grill some burgers and watch the game.Â Go back to sleep.

And thereâ€™s the W.I.L.D.E.R.â„¢ scale.Â Drop me an email or leave a comment if I missed something.

Hans Gruber, a Hooters Waitress, Patton, and Health

“And when Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer. Benefits of a classical education.” – Hans Gruber in Die Hard

Alexander the Great loved chewing bubblegum and conquering Persians. And he’s all out of Persians. And bubblegum wasn’t invented until 2,251 years after he died. Poor Alexander.

One thing that I think holds people back isn’t that they plan, it’s that they don’t plan big enough. I’ve been fortunate enough in my life that I’ve made most of my goals come true. That may sound like a good thing, but is it?

Of course it is. It’s really cool to be able to be successful at achieving your goals, because losing sucks, and if you have great goals you end up with Cash and Prizes®.

But what would happen one day if I looked around and said . . . “I’ve done it. I’ve accomplished everything I’ve set out to do.” What purpose is left to drive me? And if I did reach all of my dreams, what’s left to work for?

An example of exactly this happening is Buzz Aldrin. At the age of 39, Buzz walked on the Moon. The frikking Moon. It’s so difficult and expensive to do, we can’t do it today. Yet Buzz was the second guy to walk on the Moon. As a goal it’s awesome. But like the miniature schnauzer that catches a Humvee®, what do you do once you’ve won? Buzz didn’t have a clue, but he didn’t have a problem asking Jack Daniels™ for assistance.

Another example is General George S. Patton. Patton had been a highly competent general in World War II – daring, audacious, and cromulent. Yet, he found himself in a position where the war that he knew how to fight was gone – it was over. In his diary he wrote: “Yet another war has come to an end, and with it my usefulness to the world.”

Little known fact: French tanks in World War II had rear view mirrors. Those were so they could observe the front line.

But Patton and Aldrin aren’t alone with this conundrum of having their success be the source of their discontent – you see this behavior again and again. It’s a common story in Hollywood: nobody to somebody to discovered cocaine to dead. Or, if the actor has a heart made of titanium, they become beloved actor Robert Downey, Jr. The most interesting part of that is the cocaine, especially to Robert Downey, Jr. Although you might think cocaine comes from Colombia, it really comes from the boredom of having everything you want.

It’s curious that one of the things that keeps us healthy and not developing a liver the size of Johnny Depp is the struggle to achieve a goal. In the absence of meaningful goals, bad things happen to people. They drink too much. They vote for the Left. They get depressed – why get out of bed when there’s nothing to work for?

Goals are important – and there are two ways that you can lose them:

Believe that they are impossible and give up, or
Achieve them all and run out of goals.

Essentially these are the opposite problems – one is believing you’ve got to play a football game against the 1985 Chicago Bears® using 11 toddlers. The other is being on the 1985 Chicago Bears© and playing 11 toddlers.

I know it’s a soccer ball in the trophy. It’s not like the Cowboys® would recognize a real football.

Both are no-win outcomes. Toddlers cannot run a receiving pattern at all. And they cannot hold a block long enough for their toddler-quarterback to get a decent pass off. And if you’re the 1985 Chicago Bears™, what’s the best thing that could happen? You beat a bunch of toddlers. I mean, it’s fun and all, but it’s hardly a greater achievement than defeating the Dallas Cowboys© or a school for ten-year-old girls that lisp.

A goal is required for good mental health. The very best goals require that you work at your limits, pushing yourself to become better. They’re goals that you believe you can achieve. And they’re goals where you can see a path to make them become real. And the best part of the goal is at the end, after you’ve achieved it, if you plan ahead you’ve got another goal waiting.

One of the waitresses at Hooters® lost a leg in a car accident last week. She now has a job at IHOP™.

As I mentioned in Wednesday’s post (Playing The Game, And Goals For Life) I had goals, just not work-related goals. I’ve been working to create some, and I’m not there yet. That’s okay. The goals have to be meaningful. And I’m not working without a net – I have sufficient goals out in front of me that even if I couldn’t work out a work goal, I have plenty of others. Is having a cup of fresh, hot coffee a good goal? Dangit. Back to the drawing board.

So, what about these great men who had everything when they accomplished the goals of a lifetime?

Patton’s uncharacteristic self-pity in the quote from his diary was the result of his achievement – the war was won, and he contributed to the Allied victory on the Western Front. He had fame. Only 11 men had ever had a higher rank in the military. From what I read about Patton, I’m willing to bet that he would have been able to channel himself into a post-war United States without too much difficulty.

Would he have been a politician? Hard to say. It’s unlikely that he would have the desire to speak pretty little lies just to get elected. But you can bet one thing – if he hadn’t died, Patton would have done his level best to shake up the United States. I wouldn’t bet against him.

And what about Buzz Aldrin? Buzz crawled into a bottle and managed to skip most of the 1970’s. Admittedly, that wasn’t a bad decade to skip since not having a memory of the Bee Gees® is something some people would pay for. At some point I believe that he managed to come to a truce with the Moon. He decided to instead focus on making money for himself and to be a spokesman for his cause: “Get your ass to Mars®.” Is being a celebrity spokesmodel as exciting as going to the frikking Moon? Certainly not. But you might as well be comfortable if you flew to the frikking Moon.

Buzz Aldrin sadly got divorced in the 1970’s. Apparently his wife needed space, too.

But Hans Gruber got it wrong. Plutarch actually wrote:

Alexander wept when he heard from Anaxarchus that there was an infinite number of worlds; and his friends asking him if any accident had befallen him, he returns this answer: “Do you not think it a matter worthy of lamentation that when there is such a vast multitude of them, we have not yet conquered one?”

In this case, Alexander is saying the exact opposite of the Hans Gruber quote – that he had a goal to conquer an entire world, but wept because his dream wasn’t yet complete. The moral of the story?

Maybe if Hans knew his Plutarch better he might have not fallen off the Nakatomi Plaza Tower.

Health Goals, Girls in Togas (and a Bikini)

â€œTrying is the first step toward failure.â€ â€“ The Simpsons

I want to get my face on a coin â€“ that way I achieve my goal to help make change in the world.

One thing that Iâ€™ve decided to focus on even more in 2020 is my health.Â Even if I followed all of Dr. Sinclairâ€™s advice (Living Forever, The Uncomfortable Way), Iâ€™m still getting older although my immortality is working out so far.Â In some respects I think that we might be in for some very interesting times in the next few years, so being in better shape than I am now would probably be a good idea.Â Besides, as Pugsley gets older, taller, and stronger if I donâ€™t do something heâ€™ll wake up one morning and say, â€œIâ€™m going to break you, little man.â€

One way to do that is to keep my life under constant review.Â This isnâ€™t new, at all.Â The Romans may be dead, but I contend that Roman philosophy dating from the first century A.D. is valid today.Â Heck, current American civilization looks a lot like Roman life around that time.Â In reading Senecaâ€™s Letters, I saw a conversation where he described checking into a hotel, looking down from the room at the fitness gym next door.Â A little later he described that the Romans had regulations on boat speeds in particular areas.Â It was like California, but only 30% of the population in Rome were slaves.

Romans on diets were happy when their togas went from L to XL.Â

In particular, one of my favorite philosophers of the first century was Seneca.Â Seneca was a stoic, but had managed to make a considerable fortune open a chain of all-night toga laundromats.Â It was there that the togas were washed with water from the sea tides.Â Occasionally, a batch of this water would get too stiff from the added starch used to flatten the togas so they werenâ€™t wrinkled.Â Thatâ€™s where the Roman expression, â€œbeware the tides of starchâ€ comes from.

Okay, but what Seneca really said was:

â€œI will keep constant watch over myself and will put each day up for review.Â For this is what makes us evil, that none of us looks back upon our own lives.Â We reflect only upon what we are about to do.Â Yet, our plans for the future descend from the past.â€

â€“ Seneca

Before I read that particular passage, I had bought a little MoleskineÂ® notebook for just that purpose.Â When I said, little, I mean it.Â Itâ€™s really small â€“ just a little larger than a 3×5 notecard.Â Itâ€™s small enough I can fit it in my wallet.Â I bought it for a very specific purpose:Â to reflect on progress towards my goals, specifically my health related goals for 2020.

Her parents even named her Annette.

Each day I write down several things:Â how much and what I ate â€“ if I ate anything (The Last Weight Loss Advice Youâ€™ll Ever Need, Plus a Girl in a Bikini Drinking Water), how much I exercised, what weights I lifted and how many repetitions, my morning and evening weight, and whether or not I felt that aliens had put pods near my house that would turn into an exact duplicate of me if I dared fall asleep.Â Those are a few of the things that go into the book, though not all of the things I put down.Â It doesnâ€™t take particularly long to write it down â€“ just two or three minutes.

I find, for me, the process of writing this data down makes it more real somehow.Â And it makes me jump on the scale on days Iâ€™d rather not (like after Thanksgiving) so I can get the data.Â And collecting that data and writing it down is important.Â It makes me face the cold, hard objective truth and holds me accountable in an equally objective manner.

So, I record what Iâ€™ve done, and how Iâ€™ve lived as it relates to my goals.Â When Iâ€™m fasting, I write about that progress.Â I also record how much Iâ€™ve slept, because even though I know that sleep is no substitute for caffeine, I also know that Iâ€™m probably not sleeping enough â€“ though I would say that the passengers in my car seem to get unreasonably angry when I try to take a short nap.Â â€œAre you trying to kill us?â€ they ask.

Worrywarts.Â The road is practically straight.

Sometimes I wake up grumpy â€“ other mornings I let her sleep in.

Writing those experiences and activities down also help me celebrate victories â€“ and holds me accountable for lapses.Â It also sets up a feedback loop.Â Nothing makes the next lunchtime session on the treadmill more focused than seeing that I gained weight the last week.Â But present me certainly doesnâ€™t want to make life worse for future me by setting future me up for a failure.Â Writing things down changes outcomes. Â I certainly donâ€™t want to write down failures.Â I mean, one time someone told me I tended to blame others for my failures.Â He was right.Â I guess I get that from my mother.

But in reviewing the past, and in reviewing my failures, I donâ€™t, and wonâ€™t use past failures as a club.Â I donâ€™t allow them to poison my future.Â Instead, I use failure as a lever.Â Since I caused the failure in the first place, more than likely I can solve it.Â Unless it involves communism.Â Then youâ€™re on your own â€“ you should have seen the red flags.

Iâ€™m hoping Kim declares war on his real enemy:Â TwinkiesÂ®.

I also use this time to reflect on the things I did to take me towards my goals, and the things I did that take me away from them.Â It sounds overly simplistic, but most people would be far healthier if they just made several small changes each day about what they eat, how much they work out, how much sleep they get, and what is the appropriate amount to pay for a hooker in Tijuana*.Â $3.50 is probably a little low.

Weakness is powerful, so having to write down every time I make an error is one way make me more powerful.Â It also strengthens the cause and effect relationship between my action and the outcome.Â This further makes me accountable.Â Dangit.

In a sense, this is (sort of) a sequel or companion piece to Wednesday (Focus is a Key to Life and Look a Squirrel!), and ties to focus.Â You can have a plan, but if you donâ€™t collect data and donâ€™t analyze it regularly, youâ€™ll never focus on it â€“ itâ€™ll be like an objective your boss gives you and then never mentions again â€“ it simply will never get done.

If you write about it, you will focus on it.
If you measure it, you will manage it.
If your ego is against it, youâ€™ll never measure it.

â€œIâ€™m a failure â€“ I canâ€™t even fake the death of a stripper.â€Â

I heard an interview with Penn Gillette, the Penn part of the illusionist duo Penn and Teller.Â He was talking about his recent weight loss.Â He mentioned what he thought his starting weight was, but then added, â€œI really donâ€™t know how much I weighed at my heaviest, no one does.â€Â What he was stating is that his ego wouldnâ€™t let him step on the scale at that higher weight â€“ he simply didnâ€™t want to know that answer.Â It wasnâ€™t until heâ€™d started losing weight that his ego allowed him to start measuring.

And start managing.Â And start tracking.

And start winning.

*I have never been to Tijuana, but I saw a Cheech and Chong movie once where the plot involved them making a van out of marijuana in Tijuana, so I feel I have some expertise.

Success, Fight Club, Strippers and Socialists

“We have just lost cabin pressure.” – Fight Club

The second rule of Wilder Club is if this is your first visit, you have to comment.

I had a conversation with a friend today. Oh, sure, I hear you say, what would an iconoclastic iron-jawed individualist with a body odor redolent of medium rare ribeye (with just a hint of pepper) like John Wilder need with a friend? I guess we all have our little weaknesses. And dogs follow me. Because I smell like steak.

In this particular case as with most of my friends, I’ve known this friend for years. I’ve known most of my close friends longer than The Boy has been alive, and he’s in college now. It’s nice. If a day, a week, a month or a year goes by, so what? We can still restart the conversation where we left off. It’s as comfortable as watching a movie you’ve seen a dozen times.

I’ll make the observation that the only place where the character of people change is in a movie – almost all of my close friends have the same sense of humor and the same sense of values that they had when our friendships were forming. Absent a significant emotional event, people are a constant.

And I like that.

There is a corresponding trust that comes with being a close friend – honesty. That’s why when talking with my friend, I really enjoyed the chance to be honest. Honesty is difficult because it requires that trust, because really honest criticism is hard to take, even when it comes from a friend. Or a co-worker. Or a relative. Or someone you just met. Or your UPS® delivery guy. Oh, wait. Most people don’t like honest. But my friends do.

This particular friend is really in a good position in life, which seems to be a common pattern with my friends. He has a spouse that makes more money than he does, and, in general, the household probably brings in enough cash each month so that Nigerian princes send emails to them asking for money. They’re wealthy enough that they donate to the homeless. This appears to be a more socially acceptable donation strategy than my “donation to the topless,” scheme.

Yes, this is the only joke that I’ve ever seen that involves both the Greco-Roman philosophy of stoicism and stripping. I’m sure that Seneca would be proud.

But lest ye want to class my friend as the evil, selfish, wealthy type, he’s not. The family has a huge number of kids, and it’s a close family. My friend is constantly taking time off to go to athletic events, and when we catch up, I can sense that the relationship he has with his kids isn’t a surface relationship – it’s genuine and deep. I can tell, because I know people who understand genuine relationships, who listen to both sides of a family argument – my neighbors.

And yet . . . despite the wealth, despite the great family, my friend feels that there’s something missing. He is as high as he wants to go in the company he works at – any higher and the travel demands would pull him away from family. He’s long since mastered his job – there is little that can be thrown at him that he hasn’t seen in the last fifteen or so years. So, his condition is one of high pay, mastery of work, and, improbably, discontent.

John Wilder: “You realize you have an advantage that 99% of people would die for. You’re financially secure. You can quit your job anytime. Literally, you could walk in to your boss this afternoon and quit. Your lifestyle wouldn’t change a bit.”

Not Elon Musk: “Yes.”

Unlikely Voice of Wisdom John Wilder: “So, what is it you want to do?”

Really, I Promise It Isn’t Elon Musk: “I need to think about it.”

Channeling Tyler Durden From Fight Club® John Wilder: “No. If you think about it, you’ll end up doing nothing but thinking about it. You have to do something. Physically start it. This weekend. I’ll check back on Monday to see how you did.”

There is a scene in the movie Fight Club™ where Tyler Durden holds a gun to the head of a liquor store clerk. If you haven’t seen the movie, I strongly suggest it. I probably watch it once a month while I write – I think there are few movies that communicate the human condition in modern life so well.

Pugsley doesn’t miss many school days.

JACK, in voiceover: On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.

CLERK: Please… don’t…

TYLER DURDEN: Give me your wallet.

Tyler pulls out the driver’s license.

TYLER: Raymond K. Hessel. 1320 SE Benning, apartment A. A small, cramped basement apartment.

RAYMOND: How’d you know?

TYLER: They give basement apartments letters instead of numbers. Raymond, you’re going to die. Is this a picture of Mom and Dad?

RAYMOND: Yes.

TYLER: Your mom and dad will have to call kindly doctor so-and-so to dig up your dental records, because there won’t be much left of your face.

RAYMOND: Please, God, no!

JACK: Tyler…

TYLER: An expired community college student ID card. What did you used to study, Raymond K. Hessel?

RAYMOND: S-S-Stuff.

TYLER: “Stuff.” Were the mid-terms hard? I asked you what you studied.

JACK: Tell him!

RAYMOND: Biology, mostly.

TYLER: Why?

RAYMOND: I… I don’t know…

TYLER: What did you want to be, Raymond K. Hessel?

TYLER: The question, Raymond, was “what did you want to be?”

JACK: Answer him!

RAYMOND: A veterinarian!

TYLER: Animals.

RAYMOND: Yeah … animals and s-s-s —

TYLER: Stuff. That means you have to get more schooling.

RAYMOND: Too much school.

TYLER: Would you rather be dead?

RAYMOND: No, please, no, God, no!

Tyler uncocks the gun, lowers it.

TYLER: I’m keeping your license. I know where you live. I’m going to check on you. If you aren’t back in school and on your way to being a veterinarian in six weeks, you will be dead. Get the hell out of here.

JACK: I feel sick.

TYLER: Imagine how he feels.

Tyler brings the gun to his own head, pulls the trigger — click. It’s empty.

JACK: I don’t care, that was horrible.

TYLER: Tomorrow will be the most beautiful day of Raymond K. Hessell’s life. His breakfast will taste better than any meal he has ever eaten.

How dare you . . . make Greta uncomfortable.

And it’s true. I tend to think that everyone’s life would be a little better if they had Tyler Durden to be a life coach, to ever so gently coax them to be the best they can be while holding a .357 magnum Colt® Python™ to their head. That seems to be a bit frowned upon, so that leaves my friends with me. See how lucky you are?

In my role as Dr. Durden, I’ve noticed that there’s a problem some people have. It’s being too clever. It’s thinking. How do I know? It’s my problem that I try to compensate for by writing and doing. If I think about doing something, it will never get done. I keep thinking about fixing the bannister that broke when we moved in to the house a decade ago. It’s never been high on my list, since people falling down stairs is funny, with extra points if they are really old. But thinking about doing something never accomplishes anything.

If I plan to do it, it will get done. Half of my time driving to and from work on a day I’m going to write a post, I’m writing it in my head, selecting jokes, thinking of themes. It’s also spent thinking of how I’m going to connect the idea I want to share with students who might be forced to read this post when Mrs. Grundy tells them to compare and contrast my work with that poseur, Mark Twain, in high school in the year 2248 (that’s when Kirk will be a sophomore).

Okay, generally on my drive to work I have about five or ten minutes between cars, so it would take several hours to get a group of cars behind me like that. But a man has to have goals!

It may look like I’m driving to work, but I’m really plotting out what I’m going to write about. To be honest, it sometimes takes both lanes to do that. I wish the State Patrol® would be a little more understanding to artists like me.

Thankfully, The Mrs. is.

The Mrs. and I had a conversation the other night. It may or may not have involved wine – I’m not telling unless I’ve been subpoenaed and am under oath to a House subcommittee. Actually, it wasn’t so much a conversation as The Mrs. describing to me how she felt about this little project I publish three times a week.

I don’t make any money on this blog, though I’ve made clear since day one that can change at any time. I have plans for several (eventual) ways to do that including adding subliminal messages causing you to want to pay for my health insurance. It looks like it’s already worked for Bernie Sanders.

In a socialist paradise all bloggers make $450,000 a year, right? But I worry that for this Christmas we won’t have an Elf on a Shelf, we’ll have a Bernie on a Gurney.

No, at this point, writing is a hobby. But it’s a hobby that takes over 20 hours a week, sometimes closer to 30 hours. I still have a job, and I won’t stop interacting my family, so most nights I won’t even start writing before 9pm. A lot of that time comes from time I’d normally be selfishly engaged in what you mortals call “sleep”, but a chunk of that time comes directly from time I’d be spending with The Mrs.

When I’m writing, I’m simply not available. I’m writing.

The Mrs.: “You know, I would certainly have an issue with the time that you spend writing, if it weren’t important.” There was more to this, where she detailed the number of hours I spend. But I keyed in on the word “Important.”

I was a little surprised by that. “Important?”

The Mrs.: “Yes. I can see that what you’re writing about is important. People need to hear it. So keep doing it.”

Okay, that proves she never reads this stuff.

But as I talked more with my friend, the concept of “meaning” came up.

My Friend Who is Really Most Certainly Not Elon Musk: “So, it’s about meaning?”

Suddenly as Wise as the Roman Philosopher Seneca John Wilder: “That’s silly. You don’t go off chasing ‘meaning’ in your life. Pick out something you like to do, and do it. But figure out how to make it important to other people. You like to woodwork, right? You say you never have time to do it. Do it this weekend. Film it. Put it up on YouTube®. I’ll be checking up with you on Monday.”

I asked myself, why is my friend working at all? I think because he feels he’s supposed to work. That having a job is a rule, it’s what he’s always done. The problem that many of us have is that we tend to create rules where there aren’t any rules. I’m not sure why. Perhaps we need to justify what we do. Perhaps it’s like my two important rules for life:

Don’t tell everything you know.

Success? My friend is already successful in most ways a person can be successful. Their life is really good. I told them, directly, “You’ve been given so many gifts. If you don’t make something special of your life, you’re wasting it.”

Interestingly, this applies to you, too.

And me.

How will your breakfast taste tomorrow?