Sell Now: Here's Why

Fear moves fast enough to get inside our OODA loop--observe, orient, decide, act--so we decide and act only after the damage has been done.

The dynamics discussed here have nothing to do with the headlines of the past few weeks or months, or with geopolitics or stock market gyrations. These dynamics have been at work for years or decades, and now the banquet of consequences is finally being served, and we each get a seat whether we want one or not.

In Hawaii, calabash uncle (or auntie) describes a friend who is so close to the family that he/she is like a family member. In many cases, the calabash uncle/aunt has spent far more time with the kids than the blood-relations uncles and aunts.

I am a calabash uncle to my old friend's two sons, having spent quality time with them from their infancy to their current age (mid-40s). I've shared vastly more time with them, together and as individuals, than their father's brother.

One of the sons is an entrepreneur who with his wife is busy raising two young daughters and expanding their enterprise. Recently, they bought a parcel of land in the Pacific Northwest near their current home with an old farmhouse that they consider their "dream homestead." They've already planted an impressively diverse "food forest" of trees, and are planning a complete renovation of the old farmhouse, parts of which were built in the 1800s.

All of this activity involves long-term leases of commercial space and home mortgages--major debt and lease commitments that are essentially equivalent to debt, as the lease must be paid regardless of how the business is doing.

The parents are actively engaged with their sons and their families, so my role is peripheral. But I do feel a responsibility to each family member, and I concluded that I would not be serving this son's best interests by remaining silent about what I see coming financially and economically, given the risks that accompany debt.

So I laid out the case to sell now to reduce or eliminate debt / obligations.

My point was the one essential strategy to survive a deep, prolonged recession is to act decisively before it's too late to sell--to get ahead of the crowd before they realize the economy they assumed was stable and risk-on is unraveling faster than they thought possible.

I was careful not to claim predictive powers. I couched it in these terms: "I'm not saying this is going to be right. What I'm saying is: if you see these things start happening, then those are solid reasons to expect a recession that's deeper and longer than most people think possible, and respond accordingly."

In other words: pay close attention to the key signals and don't get distracted by noise.

The key signals include the entire credit system: what's going on with lenders and borrowers, how risk is being distributed or masked, what's going on beneath the surface.

For example: this is not a sign of a healthy economy. Record Numbers of Workers Are Raiding Their 401(k) Savings (wsj.com).

Investment funds cutting off redemptions / return of your capital is not a sign of a healthy financial system.

The noise is all the indicators that are easily gamed or inherently flawed: growth (GDP), inflation, unemployment, the stock market.

What's harder to game are bond yields and interest rates, because the price of these are "discovered" by the risk intrinsic to sinking cash into a risk asset (and every asset is a risk asset) or lending money. Once cash is sunk in an asset, the owner could lose money should the asset's market value drop. Once a loan has been originated, the lender could lose money of the borrower defaults.

I described these dynamics in recent posts: Paging Nostradamus: You Have a Margin Call and This Polycrisis Is Unique:

1. Recessions don't replicate the last recession; they tend to track the recessions before the last recession.

2. A unique confluence of long-term cycles and waves is occurring in 2026-27, which will generate consequences / second-order effects far beyond this two-year time frame.

Since I experienced the market declines / recessions of 1973-5, 1980-83, 1991-92, 2000-03 and 2008-09, and was actively exposed to the downsides as a self-employed / entrepreneur, I wanted to share what happens in a recession that few seem to highlight: the door slams shut faster than anyone thinks possible, due to the recency bias of "good times" and stable markets.

Here is how I described this dynamic:

"People are using debt to maintain their spending, and when they hit the wall, spending drops suddenly.

The same thing happens in real estate: the door suddenly slams shut. Sales plummet, lending tightens--nobody's buying because the economy is making them cautious."

I explained how those trying to sell their house get trapped by recency bias: they fail to lower their price to conditions as they are now (deteriorating fast), and then the door slams shut and they can only sell at fire-sale prices:

"It's human nature to think the highest recent price is 'the real value of my house,' but in a recession coupled with high interest rates, the only sales that close are those where the seller dropped their asking price a lot.

So the house was worth $850K in good times, and so the seller lowers their asking price to $825K. The only way to sell it is to get ahead of the trend and drop it to $775K or even $750K. The people who think prices will rebound end up being foreclosed or selling for $550K.

If this seems unreal, I followed markets very closely from 2005 on, and that's why my blog took off: I was being realistic because I'd lived through 1973-75 and 1980-83, and I saw how the door slams shut faster than anyone thinks possible.

Credit dries up, and that reduces spending and makes it very difficult to re-finance anything, no matter how good your credit."

I ended with this simple advice: sell now. Sell whatever it takes to liquidate debt, because it's harder for bad things to happen when you have no debt, and greed is a wonderful motivator but fear works much faster. (Put another way: fear moves fast enough to get inside our OODA loop--observe, orient, decide, act--so we decide and act only after the damage has been done.)

I shared the personal experiences that inform my context / orientation: "I was living on fumes in 1973-74 and only survived 1980-83 because I had no debt and a low-cost of living."

In summary: sell now because:

1. It's harder for bad things to happen when you have no debt.

2. Greed is a wonderful motivator but fear works much faster.

3. Fear moves fast enough to get inside our OODA loop--observe, orient, decide, act--so we decide and act only after the damage has been done.

What happens in a recession / financial crisis is greed is quickly replaced by fear. This is one of our core survival instincts. That transition is the door slamming shut: everything that was possible in the risk-on euphoria of greed becomes impossible in the risk-off wilderness of fear.




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College Graduates Are Losing the Clone War

College grads, it may be time for different approach, not just in getting a job but in life.

If we scrape away the hype and the humbug, this is the corporate economy in a nutshell. Sorry about the bluntness, but alas, there's no way to sugarcoat calling Ultra-Processed Life what it really is.

We're all sheep to be sheared, living commodities. As consumers, the goal is to extract as much of our earnings and capital as possible by any means available, and do so as often as possible. As employees, the goal is to extract as much value as possible from our labor.

Yes, we're each unique. So are sheep. I could tell you about Bootsy the sheep, such a character, for individual sheep are unique, too. But that doesn't mean they're not commodities whose value and purpose in life is to be sheared to profit those doing the commodifying. We're all commodities, just like sheep.

Corporations have vast expertise in the psychological tricks of making it appear that the corporation really, really cares about you: yes, you, the consumer of their products and services (you're special!) and you, the employee / 1099-contract worker / gig worker--you're special!

Actually, we're not special. We're just commodities being processed to extract as much money / value as possible from each transaction or hour of labor, and an integral component in that extraction process is to mask the heartbreaking truth behind warm and fuzzy stories, signals and images--we really, really care about you, you're important. Yes, we are important, in the same way sheep are important because they're the source of profits.

The cold-steel truth is we're interchangeable. Ideally, we sign up for a high-interest credit card and charge our way into a high balance we can never pay off, but if we pass up that offer or default, we're replaced by another sheep in line to be sheared.

The individual who replaces us at work may not be as good as we were, but we remain replaceable. If the value of our work can be commoditized, that makes us more easily replaceable. And if the commoditized work can be automated, that's a slum dunk for the corporation, because the commodity AI agent / software process doesn't require stupidly expensive healthcare insurance, doesn't need training and won't sue us.

The work that can't be commoditized / automated requires experience, and if we don't have the necessary mix of experience to create value on Day One, we're a commodity of no interest.

Which brings us to college graduates sending out 90 resumes and being ghosted or rejected by the cloned HR (Human Resources) bots deployed by all 90 corporate employers to weed out everyone but those few with the requisite experience. Which in the case of recent collage graduates, is near-zero because they've been university students with minimal opportunities to gain high-value / intensive work experience.

Here's a real-world example of high-value / intensive work experience: I was speaking with a frontline healthcare tech and her first job was working alone on the night shift: no supervisor, no co-worker, just her and the patients. In these situations you learn fast or quit fast.

There are innumerable accounts online of the commoditization of applying for a job and the commoditization of rejecting applicants. 'I feel helpless': college graduates can't find entry-level roles in shrinking market amid rise of AI.

There's a Catch-22 here that everyone sees: you need a university degree, and so you have little high-value work experience, but we only hire people with a university diploma and 3 to 5 years of the exact type of experience we need so the employee starts generating value on Day One.

(The Catch-22 in the novel of the same name is the military service member who requests to be relieved of hazardous duty due to insanity is obviously sane, so their application is rejected.)

No corporation wants to waste the money and time to train a green employee with a university diploma of uncertain but likely low value. They want to poach a highly experienced employee from some other company that invested scarce resources in training the employee.

The analogy here is a Clone War: the recent grad incorrectly assumes getting a job offer is a numbers game, where volume / quantity will eventually generate "bingo"--a job offer in the grad's field of interest.

But HR has a digital army of clones programmed to find a reason to reject our application / resume, because that's the commoditized job of HR: process applications and resumes as quickly and cheaply as possible, which boils down to commoditizing the rejection process.

In the current zeitgeist of Ultra-Processed Life, the recent grad's response is to commoditize counter-strategies by using AI agents to tweak the resume so it gets through the clone army by guessing what triggers rejection and inserting some signal that evades the work experience requirement.

Battling commoditized clones with commoditized clones is a dead end. Fabricating work experience may be tempting but that will be revealed in the first interview, or the first week on the job.

College graduates, it may be time for a completely different approach: don't fight in the clone war, realize you need experience and the way to get it is by de-commoditizing yourself and your job search by pursuing a path of what I describe in my book Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy as accrediting yourself by doing real work and documenting it in ways that verify its value and your ownership of that value.

I wrote the book 12 years ago, but since I've been a student of AI since the mid-1980s, I anticipated what's happening today in the workplace and economy, and laid out a way out of the clone war's commoditization.



The way to avoid being ghosted by the clone war's commoditization is to forget about applying to corporations with HR clones and start looking for small to medium-sized businesses that don't have HR departments or AI clones--they have what Peter Drucker observed every enterprise has: expenses.

In many cases, they're not even aware they could use some help because they assume another employee is an expense they can't afford. These businesses are not in the business of commoditizing the extraction of money / value via transactions; their business includes transactions but their core value proposition is relationships, not faceless digital transactions.

It takes shoe-leather research to find businesses you might want to work for not necessarily because they're doing whatever your field of interest might be, but because of the integrity of the enterprise and the people working there.

Corporations have budgets for consultants and tech, but smaller enterprises are often struggling with legacy systems that they don't have the time or ability to replace or upgrade. They're often so overworked just keeping everything glued together they don't see ways that they could streamline processes or add value to existing sources of revenues without spending a fortune.

This is where, you, recent college grad, come in. The foundation of accredit yourself is to start thinking and acting like a self-employed entrepreneur. It's you against the world, and so you need to acquire the essential skills every self-employed person / entrepreneur needs to know via experience, not case studies.

Where you get those experiential skills matters less than acquiring them, for the point of these eight essential skills is they can be applied to every enterprise regardless of scale or sector or locale.

Learning how to think and act like a self-employed person must be learned by experience. While others can mentor you, no one can teach you how to do this, you must train yourself via focus, effort, willingness to experiment and fail, willingness to learn what you thought you knew but didn't really know, and desire for mastery.

The core trait of the self-employed person is figuring out what the customer is willing to spend money on and responding to that in a way that benefits the customer more than the other alternatives. In some cases, it's lower price; in others, it's providing a better product; in others, it's real customer service, not commoditized service being passed off as authentic customer service--in other words, a relationship not a transaction.

My own experience is the value lies not in fighting the commoditization war but in bypassing it completely, in effect obsoleting the entire corporate-HR commoditization. Find small businesses, try to meet the boss / owner, find out what they do, and if it's of interest, write them a letter or call them.

Don't say, "I want a job." Say "I'm interested in your business and work, I want to learn more, can I come by?" The self-employed entrepreneur you're nurturing within you will observe, ask questions, and if there is some small opportunity to help, offer to help without compensation, just because you find it interesting.

In many cases, the owner is overworked and has people demanding things, not offering to help. They may be reluctant to accept help, and if so, try to find some tiny task you can do for them that they'll accept. Then go to work on the real task, which is figuring out ways they could reduce expenses or increases revenues in ways that don't require a big budget or major effort.

In every case, you understand it's experimentation. Maybe ten owners blow you off. It's discouraging, but you anticipate this. Somebody will accept your authentic interest and sincere offer to help, just for the experience. Your value isn't necessarily a skill at this point, it's the willingness to help, to learn, to establish a sincere, authentic relationship with customers / clients.

Nobody will tell you this, so I'm telling you: those are all priceless and cannot be commoditized or automated. Every attempt to automate these is fake, nothing more than a synthetic, superficial simulation, just another debilitating, lifeless iteration of Ultra-Processed Life.

The value of your commoditized diploma is not what will get you hired. Learning how to create value with experiential skills and authentic relationships is what will get you a job offer. I get emails from people discouraged by the commoditization, the lifelessness of their current job, the many obstacles to changing careers. All these are real, and I've lived all the obstacles, not just more than once, but as a continuous process of adaptation and learning.

Although I titled my book Get a Job, it's not about getting something, it's about acquiring experiential skills and a mindset, an approach, an enthusiasm for learning by doing even when there is no money in it at first--or ever. Authentic skills, mastery via continual learning--these are what's scarce and valuable.

I don't want to veer too close to sappy homilies, but in my experience Emerson was right: Do the thing and you shall have the power. Rumi was right, too: when it comes to mastery gained from experience, What you seek is seeking you. We all seek to become good at something, to establish authentic relationships, to become valuable to others. Our job is to find ways to do so that are authentic. No one can map the path for us, we must do it for ourselves.

Success has also been commoditized, so de-commoditize it. Must get rich, must check these boxes, blah blah blah. Guess what: nobody cares, because everything's that's commoditized is interchangeable.

What's worked for me through decades of failure is Churchill's dictum: Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm. Spot-on, Winny.

MacArthur got it right: There is no security on this earth; there is only opportunity.

So did Aristotle: We are what we repeatedly do.

Painful but true, as John Paul Jones knew from experience: He who will not risk cannot win.

College grads, it may be time for different approach, not just in getting a job but in life.


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I'll Turn Bullish When This Happens

I will enthusiastically join the Bulls when we replace a guaranteed-to-bankrupt-us Sickcare system and we rebalance the extreme asymmetries of Capital and Labor.

Being permanently bullish is profitable because "markets go up." This is more than enough reason to be permanently bullish, of course, but being persnickety, I prefer there actually being some economic basis for being bullish other than memes (markets go up, the Fed has our back, AI, super-abundance is all around us, etc.).

Some things I consider super-bullish are impossible. Two come to mind:

1. We collectively conclude Waste isn't "Growth" and start rewarding durability and repairability rather than planned obsolescence and the Everything is Disposable Landfill Economy.

2. Creating more "money" out of thin air isn't actually a "solution" to every problem.

But since these two delusions are the foundation of the status quo economy / financial realm, replacing the Waste is Growth landfill Economy and we print our way to prosperity with a non-delusional alternative isn't going to happen.

So let's turn to what's a longshot but maybe, just maybe, possible if a revolution of clear-eyed sanity sweeps the land and rationality replaces fantasy... OK, these are impossible, too.

1. Sickcare is replaced by a sustainable, affordable system of healthcare that rewards health rather than profiting from illness, disease, needless procedures, outright fraud, legalized fraud, denials of claims, paper-shuffling, etc. As I've noted for two decades, "healthcare" will bankrupt the nation all by itself.

Bankruptcy U.S.A.: Medicare, Greed and Collapse (July 5, 2006)

A Partial Answer to National Health Care (November 11, 2006)

Sickcare Will Bankrupt the Nation--And Soon (March 21, 2011)

There are solutions, but they're "impossible" because they would take away the bottomless federal feeding trough.

The "Impossible" Healthcare Solution: Go Back to Cash (July 29, 2009)

While we as a nation can sleepwalk into Sickcare-induced bankruptcy, private enterprises cannot go quietly off the fiscal cliff without some attempt at self-preservation. Looking at $30,000 a year in healthcare insurance costs for family coverage of every full-time employee--costs that just keeping soaring higher--employers are quite rationally salivating at the prospect of slashing headcount with AI agents, gig workers with zero benefits / health coverage using AI agents, low-cost offshore workers using AI agents, etc.

The entire Sickcare system has to be tossed in the dustbin of history so we can start over from scratch. "Reforms" are just cover stories for adding more cash to the federal feeding trough for those managing the "reforms" through the auction of political favors of Congress.

Fee for service worked when it was the customer paying and employers paid insurance policies for low-cost hospital care at local community-owned hospitals, but that model was junked as absurdly unprofitable and replaced by Corporate America's federally funded profit-harvester which chews through everything to maximize profits by any means available.

Why Healthcare Is in a Death Spiral: Follow the Money (December 1, 2025)

It's not that complicated, folks: either replace the current "healthcare" system or bankrupt the nation--and all the employers who don't replace employees with no-healthcare-insurance AI agents. It really boils down to a simple choice: is "healthcare" just another profit-maximizing "opportunity" that's maximized by buying political influence, corrupting "scientific research" and creating cartels so there is no competition left, or should healthcare be about fostering a healthy way of living at the lowest possible expense via common-sense incentives for healthcare institutions, caregivers, employers, patients and our economy and culture to do whatever can be done at low cost to foster health by avoiding preventable / lifestyle illnesses and diseases, starting by recognizing the adverse health consequences of designed-to-be-addictive ultra-processed foods, social media, AI and smartphones?

A modest profit and higher compensation to reward improved productivity / results are common-sense incentives. But what we have today is a system that incentivizes maximizing profits by any means available, regardless of consequences. That is not a healthy incentive system, that is pathological psychosis masquerading as a healthy incentive system. If we can no longer tell the difference between the two, we're doomed to reap the consequences.

Or shall we be "bullish" on the profitability of Sickcare because the federal feeding trough is unlimited? That seems to be the consensus choice at the moment. That this is delusional is not a problem, because we print our way to prosperity. Uh, yeah, sure. And if that should fail--perish the thought--we can always borrow trillions of quatloos from the Central Bank of Mars.



The second more-or-less impossible change that would make me bullish is rebalancing the extreme asymmetry of Capital and Labor that favors Capital over Labor. Capital is taxed at low rates, labor is taxed at high rates--and that's just the start of the asymmetries favoring Capital over Labor.

AI is shorthand for Capital. So invest capital in AI, get rid of costly (taxpaying) employees, profits soar and the asymmetrical inequalities of wealth and power will skyrocket to new extremes.

Never mind robots aren't consumers; because we print our way to prosperity, we'll just print up a couple trillion dollars every few months to fund Universal Basic Income (UBI), so the millions of laid-off workers can stare at screens all day or write bad poetry and still buy, buy, buy to their heart's content, generating Corporate profits that only go up, and a stock market that only goes up.

Welcome to FantasyLand!



I will enthusiastically join the Bulls when we replace a guaranteed-to-bankrupt-us Sickcare system and we rebalance the extreme asymmetries of Capital and Labor. If we have no incentive to do so because markets go up and we print our way to prosperity, then we're inviting a reversal to extremes at the other end of the spectrum, where markets stop going up, Capital changes places with Labor and printing delivers ruin rather than prosperity.


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Welcome to the Theater of the Absurd

The real world no longer matters, what matters is the performance on stage. Welcome to the Theater of the Absurd.

In the present era, all the world is a stage and everything is a performance on that stage: welcome to the Theater of the Absurd, a Hollywood set fabricated of cardboard and plaster made to look like gold leaf and marble columns, where the contraptions and ropes that do the magic are hidden behind purple velvet drapery.

Every detail has been designed to create the illusion of permanence and power to rivet our attention and distract us from noticing that behind this faux fabrication, the world is on fire.

Since the entire point of the theatrics is to cloak the decay of the status quo from serving shared interests to a craven scramble of self-enrichment, no expense is spared in the theatrics, for as the gulf between the reality of who's getting richer and who's losing ground and what the performers claim--this is the best of all possible worlds because of technology and Progress--widens, it becomes necessary to pour more resources into the performances, lest the losers catch on that the performance is the con that keeps the self-serving status quo from being revealed as an extractive, exploitive arrangement favoring the few.

As the audience is no longer entranced by mere performance, the theatrics must be ramped up to absurd heights. Leaders shout continually through the megaphone of social media, every pronouncement is exaggerated to self-parody, jokers prance around as Wall Street jugglers perform tricks, and faux trials run continuously in the background, exiling star performers as part of the enthralling theatrics.

The audience soon habituates to the exaggerations, and so the absurdity is notched higher. Every outrage is played out on stage, and soon the audience is no longer outraged by anything, for every aspect of the performance is now accepted as "normal." In this jaded state, the audience becomes restive and starts booing the performers.

The Theater of the Absurd resorts to throwing money into the audience, creating frenzies as all those losing ground stampede to collect the coins as their last best change of getting rich enough to avoid the fires burning behind the stage.

While the money is being thrown into the increasingly agitated mob, audience members are invited onto the stage to perform their own theatrics. This taste of fame is electrifying, and soon the stage is a seething mass of onlookers seeking their moment in the spotlight, leaders claiming divine inspiration, and a crush of jugglers, clowns, and jokers pressing forward and being pushed off stage in the melee.



Since the performance is now the key to the survival of the status quo arrangement, nobody's paying attention to the fires burning behind the stage set. The real world no longer matters, what matters is the performance on stage. Welcome to the Theater of the Absurd, where the performance is more real than the world burning behind the flimsy simulations and facsimiles of permanence and power.


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Automating Our Dependence Will Cripple Us

The rush to monetize automation / AI is self-liquidating.

Dependence is easy but crippling. When we're children or advanced in age, we're dependent on adults for our care. This is the normal flow of human life. But when we're dependent as adults, it cripples us, for it removes the pressure to acquire problem-solving skills that strengthen our facility with both processes and results.

In my post on The Inevitability of the AI Depression, I noted the distinction between process-based work and results-based work, as standardized processes are easily automated, while generating results that can be tested / verified is much more difficult, as a standardized process might not suffice.

Problem-solving demands integrating both process and results, as being able to repeat the desired results requires assembling a process which is organized enough to generate the desired results but flexible enough to deal with novel problems.

This is the shadowy realm of experiential knowledge, the intuitive tacit knowledge that can only be gained by experience. We can attempt to distill this knowledge down to rules of thumb, i.e. heuristics, but when we turn these heuristics into algorithms, we're converting right-hemisphere integrative thinking into formal rational processes--left-hemisphere thinking. This conversion loses the essential nature of tacit / intuitive problem-solving.

When the State or parents protect adults from the pressure of problem-solve and the consequences of failure, this protection has a price: the adult has no opportunity or pressure to develop the self-confidence that can only be gained by enduring--and learning from--failure, and the uneven, no-guarantees process of experimentation and effort of problem-solving.

The adult learns not how to be independent; they learn to fail so demonstrably that they will be rescued once again.

Failure is stressful--in today's terminology, traumatic. But failure is the source of pressure to problem-solve. If some entity solves all our problems, in effect automating processes so we don't have to learn them and delivering results that we didn't have to figure out how to generate, then we learn nothing that contributes to our experiential knowledge, self-reliance or self-confidence.

Having processes and results automated cripples us: we know virtually nothing because we were never forced by problems / failure to develop the self-discipline, ruggedness, self-awareness and hard thinking demanded to endure failure and keep trying new approaches until we solve the problem at hand.

The harder the problem, the harder the process of solving it, the more we struggle and endure, the more we learn. Failure, doubt, anxiety and suffering are the crucible in which we gain experiential problem-solving skills which bolster our self-confidence and generate skills that can be applied to future problems.

The key to problem-solving is not just learning from the experience of failure, but the experience of joy from finding a solution and the rarely described joys of developing flexible skills and processes--the key word here being flexible.

This brings us to the automation of processes and results via artificial intelligence (AI). The basic idea here is we no longer have to learn the tediously acquired deep-knowledge of how things work, as AI does all this for us.

And we no longer have to learn to triage tasks--eliminate make-work / BS work / low-productivity processes, we simply assign our AI agents to perform all that low-value work and pat ourselves on the back for "optimizing workflows."

As for getting results, we simply prompt AI agents to generate the desired output. And since we don't actually know how to generate these results ourselves, we have to trust that the AI agent is 1) telling the truth, which is itself a problem we cannot solve, and 2) that the result isn't a hallucination or falsity generated by the homogenization of the AI's knowledge base and programming.

There is no pressure now to tediously acquire deep knowledge such as learning a foreign language or learning how to play a musical instrument proficiently, as AI translates everything and can compose music (and everything else) via prompts. There's no longer any need to learn how to write well, as AI does this for us.

All these automated processes and results are homogenized, as AI eliminates the rough edges of variability as reducing the probabilities of a result that passes the tests of accuracy.

This is why studies have found that human users of AI have homogenized thought processes even after they stop using AI.

What's lost in automating processes and results is far more profound than the mainstream can grasp. We lose the ability to think deeply, and this cripples our capacity to develop real problem-solving skills. And since it removes the pressure of having to learn difficult skills and the pressures generated by failure, we no longer have any incentive / selective pressure to learn experiential, tacit knowledge.

Writing isn't just stringing together words in a format that passes auto-correct spelling and grammar rules. Writing is the process of deep thinking.

Learning a foreign language isn't just something that facilitates being a tourist. It's a process of learning new ways of contextualizing and organizing the world, and this too is a process of deep thinking.

Here is an example of what I'm describing. This is Fragment 54 from the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus. Notice the range of translations into English.

"Latent structure is master of obvious structure." (quoted by Philip K. Dick)

"The unseen design of things is more harmonious than the seen." Guy Davenport

"The hidden attunement is better than the obvious one." Charles H. Kahn

"Harmony which does not appear clearly is superior to that which is clear and apparent."

"Apparent, hidden. more powerful, more desirable."

"Hidden structure is more powerful than visible structure."

I do not know the Greek language but I studied a text that placed the original Greek side-by-side with the English translation and exegesis, so I could discern the sources of the many translations.

I've found the same is true of the many translations of the Tao Te Ching. I do not know Chinese, but I am familiar with the construction and ambiguities of key ideograms. I've read many translations but prefer that of my professor, Chang Chung-yuan: Tao: A New Way of Thinking.

Here is an excerpt from Chapter 41:
Understand Tao as if you did not understand it.
Enter into Tao as if you were leaving it.

I've formally studied French and Japanese, and am not fluent in either, but I learned enough to grasp how social structures are reflected in the language itself.

None of this is visible in an AI translation. It's too easy and so we become dependent not just for the translation but in the loss of the ability to understand more than the superficial conversion.

In music, composing is now easy: just prompt AI. But in becoming dependent on AI we can never experience the frustrations of trying different chord progressions and working out a new melody, or experience the physical sonic joy of strumming the "magic E chord" (7th fret on the guitar).

I spent hours working out a double-lead for guitar that lasts all of nine seconds on the recording. The process was painstaking but fun, in the way that only painstaking experimentation can be fun. You learn by stretching yourself, not by repeating what you already know or having AI do it for you.

I only have my own life experiences as examples, and so these may not be great examples but they're all I can vouch for because I lived them.

Just the other day I was working on an old structure constructed of steel pipes. One of the joints was rusted and needed to be strengthened. The conventional approach would be to replace the whole thing, at significant expense, or replace (at great expense of labor) the rusting lengths and connectors. Neither was worth the time or money in this situation, so I rummaged through the workshop and found a steel plate that's used to cover copper piping running inside stud walls so drywall nails or screws don't puncture the water lines.

I bent the plate into a curve using a few tricks and drilled holes through the steel pipe and connected the plate with through-bolts left over from another project. Is it a thing of beauty? Not by a long shot. Does it do the job at zero cost and a few minutes of my time? Absolutely. Did it solve the problem with minimal investment? Yes.



The problem wasn't a deficiency of beauty. The problem was strengthening a weak connection and time pressure (daylight ending). Quick-and-dirty was the optimal solution.

I doubt a robot could have replaced my processes. They're too extemporaneous, too contingent, too unpredictable (using what's laying around, etc.) and require multiple tactile skills of applying just the right amount of force, but not too much. They're based on 53 years of experience with tools, metal, connectors, and the physical knowingness that can only be gained from long, wide-ranging experience. Everyone with similar experience knows what I mean.

Growing food isn't easy. We look at mechanized equipment guided by AI and we think it's easy, but it is intrinsically difficult due to Nature's variability. Learning how to grow food takes a high tolerance for failure and experimentation, careful observation and the discipline to record what was tried and how it fared. I use six kinds of fertilizer, in various combinations depending on the tree / plant. Others have developed their own mixes and stratagems depending on their terroir and experiences.

Once again, there is no algorithmic shortcut. The only process that yields problem-solving on the fly is experiential.

People occasionally suggest I "monetize" our produce, selling it at a farmer's market, etc. This misses the point via a fatally flawed reduction of everything to money. The point is self-reliance, the acquisition of priceless skills and experience, and the sharing of our produce with others to strengthen a social network. Selling our produce would be a catastrophic waste of a precious resource. Not everything of value can be priced in money.

When we were building our house in our 20s, with no loan and minimal savings / income, we moved into the shell with Visqueen (sheet plastic) over the window openings as soon as we had a working tub and toilet. A two-burner camp stove was the kitchen. We did the dishes in the tub. Under pressure, you improvise. It wasn't that hard; we were sheltered from the weather and had everything we needed.

Many people misunderstand athletics. They think it's about talent or winning. It's actually about training, not to hit some metric (weight lifted, miles run, etc.) but integrated physicality: agility, strength, speed, endurance and the capacity to endure while avoiding needless injury brought on by prideful excess.

Despite a complete lack of talent, I played team basketball for five years and one season of football. I learned about training, self-discipline, unit cohesion and much more. Training is tedious and maintaining agility, strength, speed, endurance and the capacity to endure is demanding. But once again, there is no substitute for experience.

(If you want a metric, choose one that reflects overall health: the triglycerides-HDL cholesterol ratio: triglycerides divided by HDL. Under 2 is good; even lower is better. Mine is 74/61 probably because I work stupidly hard physically instead of buying a robot.)

When everything is given to you or done for you, you learn nothing, have nothing to be proud of and no experience of the joys of hardship met and sacrifices made that paid off. And if they didn't pay off, you learned something valuable that could be usefully applied later.

What looks easy when watching a cooking video is tricky in real life. Consider a basic skill like making a roux--cooking flour in butter. It's easy to undercook it or burn it. You really only learn by making both mistakes.

So buy food out and learn nothing or learn to cook the hard way, which is the only way.

This is the fatal consequence of becoming dependent on automation / AI to "optimize everything." We're actually optimizing failure.

The fatal consequences are scale-invariant. New research suggests the vast, immensely successful Khmer civilization in southeast Asia succumbed not just to environmental changes (drought) but to the decay / loss of the social / institutional know-how needed to maintain the complex system of waterways and irrigation that enabled food production at scale.

No human remains were found in the abandoned cities. There were no mass die-offs; the residents just left. Since they retained the basic skills needed to make a living off the land, life went on.

As our horrendously complex systems become dependent on automation / AI, without being aware of it we're generating dependencies that carry grave risks: once the number of humans who truly understand how to build systems from scratch or reconfigure them on the fly dwindle, when novel conditions cause the automated systems to fail, recovery will be out of reach.

Right now, this sounds farfetched because there are still enough people around who have deep experiential knowledge and tacit problem-solving skills. But since these skills cannot truly be taught, they must be learned the hard way, by tedious experience of failure and experimentation, then once those people retire, the entire civilization is vulnerable to cascading failure.

This is why I say that the rush to monetize automation / AI is self-liquidating: in optimizing both low-value workflows and essential systems, we're becoming fatally dependent on systems we no longer have the experience to fix on our own.

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