Life Cycles: Why We Can’t Learn Everything Ourselves

The world woke up this past Monday morning to a clear and dramatic market downturn that is marking a clear bear market and potentially the start of an even more dramatic and prolonged recession. 

While there is much more complexity to an economy than what can be described in a few hundred words, one this is clear:

Life moves in cycles. 

Surely, these cycles ought not be construed as full blown determinism. However, there’s much to glean from history. The fall of empires and their economies almost always is preceded by a devaluation of currency not unlike the wanton spending and printing of money that we’ve seen through the pandemic. 

However, if most everyone alive has never lived through a devaluation of currency, it’s misguided to only use our own intuition to make decisions on the matter. In fact, many of today’s troubles are battles that have been fought by past generations and we need their wisdom. Failing to do so is specifically what makes “history repeat itself”. 

I’m clearly not smart enough to say that we should or shouldn’t have printed the money in response to the deadly COVID-19 outbreak. But, I’m generally connected to cycles enough to know that printing money and denying the obvious consequences of doing so is problematic. 

This isn’t an article about politics or even economics. It’s an article about an inconvenient truth:

Generally, our lives aren’t long enough to understand the cycles beyond our time. 

This means, whether we like it or not, we need to make inquiry with the people that have “been there before”. This means looking to history to inform us of the lessons that we couldn’t possibly learn in our short lifetime. If we don’t we’ll be surprised by outcomes that have happened over and over and over again.