by
Charles Hugh Smith
My articles My siteAbout meMy booksMy videos
Follow on:Twitter

People caught on that the returns on the frenzied hamster wheel of “normal” have been diminishing for decades, but everyone was too busy to notice.

The superficial “return to normal” narrative focuses solely on first order effects: now that people can dispense with masks and social distancing, they are resuming their pre-pandemic spending orgy with a vengeance, which augurs great profits for Corporate America and higher tax revenues. Yea for “return to normal.

“This superficial narrative ignores second-order effects of the pandemic. Recall that first order effects: every action has a consequence. Second order effects: every consequence has its own consequence. We can also think of these as direct (first order) and indirect (second order) effects.

The pandemic’s first order effect was to shut down the frenzied hamster wheel of American life. The consequence of the pandemic–shutdown–had its own consequence: people had the opportunity to experience life outside the frenzied hamster wheel, and ask themselves why they tolerated the dead-end purposelessness, demeaning rigidity and life-draining stress of the whole spinning contraption.

For a great many people and dynamics, the pandemic was a transformative catalyst, and there is no going back to pre-pandemic “normal.” Many people experienced a liberty and expansiveness they’d either never experienced or forgot that such things even existed. This experience triggered a Metamorphosis, and they’re never going back to pre-pandemic “normal” because “normal” was a nightmarish landscape of exploitation, drudgery, pathology and meaningless servitude.

Consider the re-chaining of the digital workforce to the Cubicle Plantation, where “free” (heh) snacks are supposed to compensate for the dreary Underworld of catatonic-inducing meetings and the rest of the plantation’s soul-crushing routines.

Many wage-slaves feel they have no choice but many others have decided they’re never going back.

A great many of the working poor have also decided they’re never going back, and the time away from their low-paid wage slavery opened up new possibilities, from better-paying jobs to flexible gigs to getting by on informal earnings and part-time work.

Though none of the spending orgy cheerleaders seems to have noticed, global tourism caught a potentially fatal disease in the pandemic’s shutdown, as residents discovered their cities, beaches and neighborhoods were actually beautiful and liveable again once the tourists all went away.

While all the corporations and investor-“hosts” profiteering from overcrowded, ruined cities and islands cheer the return of the millions, the residents are vowing to never go back. In Venice, the residents don’t want the giant cruise ships returning ever again. In Hawaii, only 14% of the residents approve of a return to the pre-pandemic crush that was ruining the state.

Freed of the burdens of tourism, people are now asking cui bono, to whose benefit? The apologists and PR hacks answer is always the $10/hour dead-end jobs, but the residents no longer buy the bogus PR, as they realize all the “benefits” flow to distant investors, not residents.

The overwhelming majority of Hawaii residents want far fewer tourists, and want those tourists to pay a lot more for the privilege of visiting. They also want limits on how many visitors are allowed daily into beach and other parks, and they want the visitors to pay admission and parking fees so locals can go for free. (Hawaii’s annual visitor count topped 1 million in 1969, when I was in high school, and the state was already crowded with tourists. In 2019, the annual visitor count topped 10.4 million.) Residents from Barcelona to Maui want investor-owned BnBs in residential neighborhoods banned, as the global investor class has bought up real estate in “must-see” locales to profiteer off tourism, over-burdening infrastructure, destroying local neighborhoods and pricing locals out of homes.

.

The spending orgy cheerleaders are promoting a fantasy version of a time machine in which we reset the calendar to September 2019 and everything “goes back to normal.” Sorry, cheerleaders: second-order effects can’t be reversed and the cultural revolution is well under way. People caught on that the returns on the frenzied hamster wheel of “normal” have been diminishing for decades, but everyone was too busy to notice. They all attributed their burnout, exhaustion and emptiness to specifics within their own lives, but now they’ve awakened to the reality that burnout, exhaustion and emptiness have always been systemic, i.e. the consequence of the system as the returns for participants diminish with every passing day.

.

You Might Also Like

Weekly SNB Sight Deposits and Speculative Positions: Inflation is there, CHF must Rise

2021-06-07

Update June 04 2021: SNB intervening. Sight Deposits have risen by +0.3 bn CHF, this means that the SNB is intervening and buying Euros and Dollars.

The ‘Take This Job and Shove It’ Recession

2021-05-13

So hey there Corporate America, the Fed and your neofeudal cronies: take this job and shove it. This time it really is different, but not in the way the Wall Street shucksters are claiming.

If You Don’t See Any Risk, Ask Who Will “Buy the Dip” in a Freefall?

2021-04-20

Nobody thinks a euphoric rally could ever go bidless, but as Greenspan belatedly admitted, liquidity is not guaranteed. The current market melt-up is taken as nearly risk-free because the Fed has our back, i.e. the Federal Reserve will intervene long before any market decline does any damage.

The Middle Class Has Finally Been Suckered into the Casino

2021-04-15

The Fed’s casino isn’t just rigged; it’s criminally unstable. The decay of America’s middle class has been well documented and many commentators have explored the causal factors. The bottom line is that this decay isn’t random; the income of the middle class isn’t going to suddenly increase at 15 times the growth rate of the income of the top 0.1%. (see chart below) The income of the top 0.1% grew 15 times faster than the incomes of the bottom 90% because that’s the only possible output of America’s distorted financial system.

What “Normal” Are We Returning To? The Depression Nobody Dares Acknowledge

2021-03-01

Perhaps we need an honest national dialog about declining expectations, rising inequality, social depression and the failure of the status quo. Even as the chirpy happy-talk of a return to normal floods the airwaves, what nobody dares
acknowledge is that "normal" for a rising number of Americans is the social depression of downward mobility and social defeat.

What Poisoned America?

2021-02-20

America’s financial system is nothing more than a toxic waste dump of speculation, fraud, collusion, corruption and rampant profiteering. What Poisoned America?

Silver Swans, Maginot Lines and the Unforeseen Risks of Collapse

2021-02-01

Our Nobility’s assessment of risk and their war-gaming of vulnerabilities are fatally deficient. Many people have heard of Nassim Taleb’s black swan but fewer understand how few events qualify as black swans. Per Wikipedia, a black swan is
an unpredictable or unforeseen event, typically one with extreme consequences, an event that is beyond what is normally expected of a situation and has potentially severe consequences.

2020 Was a Snack, 2021 Is the Main Course

2021-01-04

One of the dishes at the banquet of consequences that will surprise a great many revelers is the systemic failure of the Federal Reserve’s one-size-fits-all "solution" to every spot of bother: print another trillion dollars and give it to rapacious financiers and corporations.