The changing season

As I write this, it’s currently 15 degrees Celsius in Shanghai. As recently as a few days ago, I remember discussing why it’s October but still felt like summer with highs of 30 degrees. There was some talk of the impact of global warming.

It certainly doesn’t feel like summer anymore. In the space of a few days, autumn has fully arrived.

I think the human mind has difficulty processing the speed of seismic changes - or anticipating them. Like the seasons, the world can sometimes change overnight in a significant way, and most people wouldn’t see it coming.

COVID-19 was a good example. I remember Wuhan’s lockdown so clearly because there was barely any news of the virus prior to that. Most of my news actually came from my father, who can be somewhat paranoid in many situations (rightly so in this case).

Speaking of my father’s paranoia, he recently messaged me multiple times about the slow-moving train wreck that is Evergrande’s debt default and likely collapse. I read that Evergrande has 1.6 million homes in construction across China, and it's becoming ever more unlikely that they will be completed anytime soon. Meanwhile, few people in China are talking about this, and many in Shanghai are still readily waiting in line to purchase new homes that are still in construction - with estimated completion times in 2023 or even 2024. My wife and I are actually in this group, and it does make me stop and question the current state of the real estate market here.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes about black swans, a metaphor for rare outlier events, and their outsized impact on society. Malcolm Gladwell writes about the tipping point, to describe the threshold when something begins to spread irrevocably like a virus does.

I guess my point is that most people don’t expect very abnormal things to happen, even when history has proven that such events happen again and again with frequency if not regularity. Even something as simple as the changing season, which happens every year without fail, is regarded with surprise when it manifests.

What can we do about this human tendency to overlook the possibility of major change in the world we live in? What follows are some thoughts I have:

Expect it

In my lifetime, I've witnessed the fall of the Berlin wall, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Great Recession of 2008, and the COVID-19 pandemic. There was also the rise of the personal computer, the Internet, and the smartphone. Electric vehicles also entered the mainstream, and civilians have now gone to space. A decentralized cryptocurrency is legitimately being considered as the future of money. It seems that every decade, several major events change the world as we had known it. There's no reason to believe that these events - both positive and negative - will continue to happen.

Pay attention to experts

I remember after COVID-19 became a worldwide thing last year, a TED talk by Bill Gates from 2015 began to spread. Five years before COVID, experts had already identified that collectively, we were not ready for a pandemic. Such prescience, we might say now. But who was listening in 2015?

What are experts saying these days? It seems that the big one is global warming. Another is the rise of artificial intelligence and its implications. A third is the increasing income gap and the instability it will bring.

At least consider the worst case scenario

Since the beginning of recorded history, countries with powerful militaries (and the economy to support it) have been almost constantly engaged in war. The recent decades were peaceful most likely because no country was even remotely close to being on the same level as the United States. With the dominance of the US on the decline, will the prolonged peace persist?

If it doesn't, then I think that's probably the worst case scenario for most citizens in the world. What should a normal citizen do if this scenario becomes reality? People may scoff; I think it's a legitimate question.

By connecting all three of the above points, we can look at experts who expect the worst case scenario and what they do in response.

I can't think of any individuals who are experts in global disasters, so I looked at perhaps the next best category - billionaires who presumably have the resources to research and identify proper responses to some form of apocalypse.

A simple Internet search for "billionaires prepare for apocalypse" reveals a multitude of articles, including a very long one by The Guardian.

Apparently, a lot of them are buying farmland in New Zealand.