The Recession We Need Is Coming
And it will likely change your life for the better.
Did you feel that? The swift shift of everything?
As I wake up this morning I have only two thoughts rolling around in my head:
- I need coffee
- What the hell am I going to do if a recession hits
And I don’t know. I think most people don’t know what they’ll do.
I know we need it. We need a recession.
Everything is crawling with the stink of excess. We have more content creators than manufacturers. We have more content created than our eyes could ever digest.
Inflation is at an all-time high. Gas is expensive. No one can afford to buy a house to live in.
Everyone has the same “tips and tricks to help you make money online!”
“4 things I do every month to make $10,000 on autopilot!”
Everyone is talking like the road we’ve been on is the one we’re still on.
But we’re not. We’ve turned a corner. Layoffs are coming.
The stock market is buckling under its own weight like a 600-pound man with arthritic knees.
I know we need it.
We had a very good run. We accomplished so much since the 2008 housing crisis. I mean, seriously, we did some truly incredible things in the last 14 years.
Now we have come to a place where we have too much. We are getting lazy. Forgetting how to put in a hard day's work. How to pull back. Starve a little. Sit in discomfort.
Recessions can be a wonderful thing.
They drive big change. They cut the excess out. Any company or entity that doesn’t make the cut simply isn’t needed by the market. It sounds harsh, but that’s the reality of a recession. It forces everything and everyone to cut back to just the necessities.
It’s actually incredibly good for us.
Does that make it any easier? No. But it’s not supposed to be easy.
We’ve had it easy.
You might look at the pandemic and say “Um, no, we have not had it easy!”
It’s true. It’s not always been a walk in the park, but I’m not talking about the last 2 years, I’m talking about the last 12 years.
The 12 straight years where any college kid with an app or idea was commonly given millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capitalist funding to go “explore that idea”.
Or how about the years leading up to the pandemic from 2009 to 2016 when the housing market was so cheap you could buy bundles of properties in Detroit for less than $1k…. on eBay.
What about from 2015 to 2020, a five-year stretch when the average price of gas in the U.S. was cheaper than a gallon of milk.
In the last decade, we have invented, improved, produced, and flourished in so many industries it will make your head spin. We live in a completely different environment than we did 12 years ago and we have done so much in that time.
I know we need it.
It’s time to take a step back. Look at our achievements. Appreciate what we’ve done. And then trim the fat.
It’s time to get back to our roots; to the basics of life. Remember what’s really important.
We need to be uncomfortable for a while.
We need to be spread a little too thin. Because honestly, the only way to appreciate the good times is to know what hard times feel like. Embrace the change. Embrace the struggle.
Understand that discomfort will not kill you. You will make it out to the other side and be better for it.
Recessions give clarity.
When we are at the bottom of everything looking up, we can see the whole universe before us. Untethered by the daily grind of progress on top of progress. Forced to see what we’re truly made of. We are brimming with potential.
What the hell am I going to do if a recession hits?
I don’t know yet, but I know we need it.
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