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Is it time to tie yourself to the mast?
In Odyssey
Book XII Circe
warns Odysseus about the dangers he will face at sea. One of
these is the Sirens. In the adventure of the Argonauts, Jason
and his men faced the danger of the Sirens with the help of
the singing of Orpheus. Odysseus has no Orpheus to drown out
the lovely voices, so he orders his men to stuff their ears
with wax and tie him to a mast so he can't escape, but can
still hear them singing. This painting shows the sirens as
beautiful women-birds who fly to their prey instead of luring
them from afar.
Something dawned on me just now...and I want to write about
it, as well as it's emergent affect.
I'm going to write about several streams and the stream of
these streams in a multiverse, as I watch my own thinking
about what stirred me to reveal my own model of affect, and
effect, and what you should give serious thought to how you
look at the next 1/2 decade.
I'm continually trying to take a perspective on why I am
thinking the way I am thinking and what causes me to make
sense the way I do, often looking into my own (lack of)
self-knowledge to see how my inborn dispensation affects how I
filter data, etc.
I was walking through some thoughts, as my own personal
situation has changed dramatically over the past couple of
years, and in looking how I'm approaching that, I'm trying to
look into as many datapoints as I can to remain informed
because of the facts surrounding leveraging and compounding
@F-L-O-W.
In the multiverse we are in, one can't run a single line of
thinking very long without hitting pretty serious barriers,
cul de sacs, or even flat-out dead-ends.
We all live in this multiverse, whether we know it our not.
Kegan and Lahey called it "competiting commitments" in their
book: How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work: Seven
Languages for Transformation.
I'm not so much interested in a transformation, as I am in
cataloguing how my sense-making emerges.
For example:
I was thinking about why I am sticking hard to the idea that
are underlying dynamics are in fact pessimistic, and still
remaining optimistic in my processes, which means I know, but
I don't do as much as I know, which of course is responsible
for my present circumstances in part of my multiverse of
behaviors and motivations.
Exactly, I was thinking about what I should forecast for 2014
and beyond, as 2013 is pretty much in the hopper, even with
what most believe is an unexpected crash, it's still pretty
much going to take a particular train of action, as there are
still many psychological and system barriers that will buffer
any broad action and people in general can't and don't think
long-term.
The question for me is what lies in 2014, by then the election
affect will be gone, we will have a mid-term election moving,
and the heat will be on the economy.
All the while, we have several very important streams
runnning, such as global energy, money and credit, and
psychology, the most important driver, as what people believe
is more important than what is happening. Few discuss this,
and I will remember to bring this back later, because this is
the root driver of all POS (paradigmatic operating sytsems) of
which @BS, and @F-L-O-W are members of....
Now, circling back on "what dawned on me" as to why
I wanted
to think down this path is both an attempt to be generative in
my own framing of the world--what I think will happen and how
do I guide my elephant--and what will scaffold people who are
interested in being generative as well, which is at the root,
generative for me--so part of this is self-hugging for sure.
My thoughts ran to investment and people who don't have enough
money to invest, as that is one of the ways to get ahead, or
out of the cycle of your current situation.
If people don't have money in excess of their needs, for
whatever reason (focus on wants, note enough income, money and
credit issues)...they don't have to worry about a crash in the
way that people have to worry about if they are saving money
and investing it for retirement. [I apolgize for how long it
took me to get here, but i figured that exposing my thought
process might be helpful, if for nothing else than my own
study, or perhaps a model of how to think in several streams
at once.]
The problem as I see it, aside from the normal job losses
during a downturn, or crash, is that people who have saved and
invested will lose their future.
Because if you were like me, you tried to put some money into
a go to hell account (if you are not, then you are not funding
@F-L-O-W in wellth, fyi)...and you had money wrapped up into a
future, and something happens to change that, then you have to
rethink your approach to life based on alternate assumptions.
So, we are back to the stream of what creates leverage and
compounding, but...one point that dawned on me.
If you are a person who has money invested and you are
counting on that money for the future, you would be wise
(IMHO) to remove it from whatever investment vehicle you have
and park that somewhere for the next 5 years, in a
federally-insured account, where you will be sure to protect
those seed funds from the dangers that are on the horizon.
EXAMPLE: NO ONE can predict what is going to happen. EVERYONE
is guessing based on a multiverse of behavior and models. SOME
of the underlying fundamentals are NOT conducive to investment
now, which means that while in 5 years, at let's say 3% return
(use rule of 72s to identify that 72/3 = 24 years to double
your principle at 3% return) and 5 years, let's use 4 to make
it easy to calculate, is a loss of about 1/6 of your
principle, it's a llittle more because of compounding but
let's keep it simple. So, if you had 100k, by putting your
money on the sidelines at 0% return (t-bills) for 4 years, you
would lose some 15k of potential future gain, someone of you
math whizzes can calulate this more precisely, but I'm just
making an example, and 15k is probably very much on the high
side of the actual loss, but for the sake of quick example,
look at your tradeoff. If we crash, you lose 2/3rds of your
100k, or 67k.
Now, how long would it take to earn that back, the 15k or the
67k?
Let's say you are earning 7.2%, which is probably at the
highest range of risk/benefit right now, without taking
speculative risk, and that it takes 10 years for your
principle to double, and you don't want to pull that money
offline for 5 years, which will really cut into your principle
amount of 100k, so you give up 50k in FUTURE income, but you
preserve the principle, or you risk it, we crash and your
principle is 33k...
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