compounding gains has also become the only strategy to stay afloat.
Look at the performance of broad index funds since 2008. You either dumped everything you had in the market over the last 15 years or literally lost out on 4Xing your money.
That kind of dynamic is pretty shitty for risk, why would I sink my money into any kind of risky venture when the market keeps spitting out 15% a year returns on safe investments.
All expenditures also get warped by this, move across the country? Buy a new car/house? Better to play it safe and keep the wheels spinning and watch the numbers go up and to the right.
That’s a good point too. You increasingly need to participate in the system or you get left behind and can’t afford the things you could 5-6 years prior. So doing something crazy like wandering the country in your car or working at a cafe to fund your artist lifestyle is a constant ticking clock.
Also you could wander much more easily in the past. These days digital surveillance has creeped in everywhere. Stay in one place over a day and you'll get a ticket. Pay is better monitored so you cant easily do under the table work. Your customers probably use cards so your transactions are monitored and will be taxed. It's a different world from what us older people grew up in.
Yeah; I was reading Kerouac recently and just thought to myself, this kind of wandering free existence just isn’t even possible anymore. Everything is mapped and reviewed, so you’d need to deliberately be counter-cultural and turn off your phone.
Not had a smartphone in 5 years, and would never go back. I get lost sometimes and explore new areas, I enjoy concerts with my own eyes, I can wait to deal with work when I am back home and enjoy dinner with my family, and I am always present in whatever I am doing not allowing the internet to ever tear me away.
It has changed a lot about my life, and I am so much happier. And have so much more privacy, given I also only use cash in public. I am mostly invisible when away from home, digitally.
Turning off your phone just the easiest way to track you. With more AI based facial recognition cameras and data sharing between corporations you're still being tracked in public. The digital world has shrunk the analog world to a very small place.
Not that I'm pro being tracked or anything, but what difference does that make to your general existence and daily adventure if there is some sort of behind the scenes tracking going on. Why would that prevent you from wandering?
Tracking is a necessary precursor to being able to hassle wanderers.
Absent mass automated surveillance, the state's ability to do so at scale was limited.
Once implemented (and processed and stored), norms on use erode over time... and then anyone anomalous is being auto background-checked when showing up in a new area.
Or do we think someone won't find a use for all the dark datacenter GPU power after AI pops?
Even the most closed societies (say, East Germany, the USSR, and the DPRK) only accomplished a fraction of what's now technically possible, and that historical analogue through a massive human labor force.
It's been the historical norm for all of time, except the extremely recent past.
The norm is that you're born somewhere and you stay there forever. Everyone there knows you and they've known you since you, or they, were born. If a traveler happens to show up, everyone can recognize immediately, by looking at their face, that they're from somewhere else. Strangers get low levels of trust.
In Australia, it feels to me like "participate in the system" is owning property. And unless you have a shrewd alternative path, you want to be in that game because the growth in value is aggressive (~ doubles in value every 10 years; enough that every month you wait puts you behind).
That said, while wandering off jobless is a ticking clock, it is easier than ever to work remotely while wandering. And if you have property rented while you're away, you can get some of the deviance without digging too much of a hole for yourself.
It is definitely easier to work remotely, and I have taken advantage of that to travel, but realistically most remote jobs are for people that are already in demand economically. There isn’t really a remote equivalent to the cafe job for the average non-finance, non-technical person.
That used to be support, graphic design, and writing, but all are being offshored or replaced by AI. Marketing more broadly probably is one of the few career paths I can think of that is still viable remotely, excluding the groups I mentioned before.
> why would I sink my money into any kind of risky venture when the market keeps spitting out 15% a year returns on safe investments
If it returns 15% it isn't a safe investment. The rate of return for a safe investment is in the 1-3% real range. Someone is offering you 15% real that implies they think it is a risky enterprise to sign on with. 15% nominal isn't so hard to find (gold yields at 10% nominal - but that isn't actually coming out ahead as much as treading water). It isn't a very impressive nominal rate of return in that sense but it is still not all that safe.
Look at the performance of broad index funds since 2008. You either dumped everything you had in the market over the last 15 years or literally lost out on 4Xing your money.
That kind of dynamic is pretty shitty for risk, why would I sink my money into any kind of risky venture when the market keeps spitting out 15% a year returns on safe investments.
All expenditures also get warped by this, move across the country? Buy a new car/house? Better to play it safe and keep the wheels spinning and watch the numbers go up and to the right.