It Was the Best of Times, It Was the Worst of Times

It was business and life as usual; some people were on the upswing, while others were in a tailspin -- and that’s always been the case, and always will be. These developments are all the whole of life -- and not just a part of it. A few people actually thrive, when the fortunes widely reported as catastrophic for many, and particularly all reporting that “news,” seem hopeless. But for whatever conditions, a few have prepared themselves for those conditions -- so that when they play out, there are no surprises for those prepared for those eventualities and realities.

Presently, those who thought that the whole purpose and meaning of life was to consume as many resources as possible, are finding that it is their ruin and not sustainable for much longer -- as prices for that unlimited consumption, become prohibitive. Concurrently, those who foresaw the need for frugality, prudence and a minimalist lifestyle, seem like the geniuses of these times -- and are the solution, when everybody else can only see problems for as far as the eye can see and calculate.

That obviously portends that change is imminent, urgent, and already underway -- and no longer merely an option for the intelligent who have voluntarily chosen their better fate. Of course, their warnings and advice to others fell on deaf ears until denial was no longer possible. Still, many insisted, they could believe anything they wanted to -- and that’s what made it so. They were “taught,” that if they merely believed what everybody else wanted them to believe, that was enough to transmute reality into anything they wanted it to be.

That’s not a new idea; that’s what primitive people have thought all throughout civilization, while a few more conscious of what was really going on, were actually making things happen -- including observing and thinking rightly. It’s really not about choice -- but having the proper understanding leading to the inevitable and logical responses. In contemporary society, we call that valid and verifiable information -- from merely what some people would like us to believe.

In a previous time, it was thought that any information could be equally valid -- if one was persuasive enough, and could get everybody else to go along. But that was before there was real-time knowledge and information, and so the best that was known was of the past that might already not be true -- but that would take years, if not lifetimes to know -- and so the promises of the future became very important and even preferable to the real and verifiable present. Whole classes of experts could thrive in that world in which reality never could catch up to their knowledge and certainty of the future. If the results of the present course of actions were poor and unsatisfactory, that simply meant, in their world, that it augured for an even more wonderful, miraculous outcome in a more distant future -- and not that the best indicator of future performance is actual present results.

The best of financial advisors were known to say, one should put even more money in losing investments, and if they continued to do that unfailingly, when they retired, there would be untold and undreamt of wealth waiting in a pot of gold, if one could merely locate those individuals who had long since vanished from this earth.