Understanding Economic Depression

Depression will be impossible to define in economic terms if games are still played with respect to the definition of recession. If the definition of a word changes, the use of that word may change. But it does not change the underlying conditions that word was being used to describe. In other words, if a depression is defined by a recession that lasts 2 years, you can change the definition of depression to require 3 years. But if you are in a 2 year long recession, you still have to deal with those conditions. In one sense the words and their definitions are not paramount. They become important when people behave as if achieving arbitrarily defined milestones is required to justify changing off a bad course. Irrationality is a factor you can’t always calculate. 

Emotional depression and economic depression can be closely linked. If you lose your job for example, it can cause depression. However, there is also a very real sense of danger when a person loses income. That too often is confused with depression. If a person has no savings, no job prospects, and no ability to gain new skills, they may panic or become erratic. That doesn’t mean they have any imbalance or emotional problem. They are suffering from a lack of solutions to real problems. The depression diagnoses implies a person is not calibrated to their surroundings in a healthy way.

Economic depression can be thought of as the market being improperly calibrated to its surroundings for an extended period of time such that it creates an anxiety that is disconnected from reality. When the market is attempting to correct itself, the worst thing that could be done is to pass vindictive judgement on the bears who are responsible for making things right. It’s like demonizing an addict in therapy.

Sociopathic Markets & The Analysts That Fuel Them

Our markets have become sociopathic, in that they are detached from reality. This happened slowly, or at lightning speed, depending on your vantage point. The companies that were once valued at over $1,000,000,000,000 were founded in 1975 (Microsoft), 1976 (Apple), 1994 (Amazon), 1998 (Google) 2003 (Tesla), and 2004 (Facebook). As of the date of this writing, Amazon, Tesla, and Facebook have all fallen out of the “Big T” club. All of these companies sold the market on promises. They promised to be the most innovative, important companies in human existence. In the halls of Yale or Harvard, that’s an okay pitch. But if you sell that to the tune of trillions of dollars to the public, you have to actually do it. None of these companies delivered.

Apple Is Rotten To Its Core

How long would you “be depressed” if Apple were to go bankrupt and evaporated out of existence tomorrow? If the brand disappeared, and you had to get a new phone, would you commit suicide? I think from the consumer’s perspective, everybody would move on. That is, if consumers are only consumers of Apple’s products, and not their stock.

But with over 50% of Americans (as last reported before 2020) are invested in the stock market, 1/2 of Apple’s American customers are also vested in the company. Whether it’s fractional shares on their Robinhood account, or their entire retirement, the number of people who believe they would economically die without Apple is exceedingly high. That has become a depressing problem we must escape.

So people end up lying to themselves, and other people, in order to perpetuate the idea that Apple is an essential business. They convince themselves that consumers need Apple products, and the brand to exist. In reality, nobody needs any of the trillion dollar companies mentioned here. All the debates on whether “cloud computing” or “virtual reality” are going to be the “computing platform of the future” are moot. These conversations are about as interesting as Philosophy 101 students arguing about proving existence. It’s fun your first time on acid, but after that, it’s meaningless.

Why Jim Cramer Needed A Hug From Dave Faber

The news anchors on CNBC, Bloomberg, and the other major outlets are a shining example of how insidious the sociopathy becomes. These people all make hundreds of thousands of dollars per year or even in some cases millions of dollars per year. They work for publicly traded companies which are much more essential than any individual technology product manufacturer. Their jobs are relatively secure because of how much investment there is in their identity being associated with the broadcaster too. So when they talk about upcoming joblessness, they know it won’t affect them. If there is rising inflation, it isn’t really a factor for their daily lives. Or their long-term stability. Maybe that’s a good thing. I don’t really know if we’d be better off with financially insecure news anchors. It’s possible that would just generate constant panic in the markets or dissuade investment because of all the pessimism. Maybe that’d actually be normal.

As if news anchors aren’t consumers themselves. They all use the social media platforms personally and professionally. They use the software and hardware from these companies, as provided by their own major conglomerates. This further entrenches them in the culture of those companies, and the survival of those companies becomes part of the news anchors’ culture too. They protect each other generally speaking, because they are all in the same industry. Without that support, they might actually have to compete. Competition in the news business might create a more fair market, because the scrutiny would be genuine. Unfortunately, that is not our world.

The present world we live in, is there are news anchors espousing ultimately sociopathic belief systems that harm the public. This in turn creates a counter-productive consensus among those in power and the people who elect them (or hire them) that what they are doing is working. So long as anybody that disagrees gets excommunicated, the con continues and nobody has to admit defeat. It is a great set up for…sociopaths. Or people that are under the control of sociopaths. The further devoid of connection the market is, the easier it is for reporters to live in their own isolated bubble. At the end of it the market needs correcting, but most of the people who need to correct it are too dumb or proud to. Depression is here, and hauntingly still.

Facef**k Yourself, Mark

It may…depress people to realize what they have to do. Facebook is a primary example.

The company, always chasing valuation, raising more money claiming they would be bigger and bigger. But then they got to the point where it was hard to imagine them getting any bigger without admitting they were not as big as they had been pretending they were. The thesis that Facebook was an honest company (or that Mark Zuckerberg is honest) and that they were making mistakes, could not longer hold up. The thesis that Zuckerberg will “figure it out” is also failing. So either they peaked, or they lied.

Or both. Because Zuckerberg is a sociopath. It is not a clinical diagnoses when I say that. This is an etymological point. The word “socio” means of, or relating to society and “pathy” means a disorder of the body or mind. Literally the word means that society makes a person sick. Therefore sociopaths will find various ways to isolate themselves from society. The more intelligent ones literally construct worlds where they are solely distinct from society. Separated physically, emotionally, and mentally.

Zuckerberg is putting every dollar on the line to rebuild the world in a computer. But anybody who has spent too much time in it reports the same thing: it’s depressing beyond belief. It is also clear that if children can be easily preyed upon on Facebook, it will be infinitely worse in the metaverse. Zuckerberg was probably banking on that but even in that disgusting underworld, child predators apparently prefer real thing(s).

Therefore, anybody still invested in META, either intentionally, or because their money manager refuses to let them out of it, is becoming depressed. They are becoming more sociopathic, because they have to delude themselves into thinking something is real, that isn’t. There is not a market for people who ever want to disconnect from reality to the extent that Mark Zuckerberg does. If he wants to build his own virtual reality fantasy to live in, he should cash out of his shares and go do that all by himself.

Depression Doesn’t Have To Be Complicated

When you look at the emotional/psychological depression, it is worse than ever before in recorded human history. The rate of teen suicide, and self-harm, is so heartbreaking. That statistic alone should cause every parent in America to look themselves in the mirror and ask, “What can I do to make sure that my kid and their friends are safe?” But most of those parents hold META stock. So they won’t ask that question very long, and they won’t look very hard. A lot of those teenagers end up holding stocks too, now. So they don’t even fight it for very long. But it continues.

It is a sociopathic nightmare – society reality now, so the sociopathy is understandable.

Routinely people joke about how this is “not a fundamentals market.” Right, because it’s a depressed market. Companies that have actual value are undervalued, and companies full of nothing are worth trillions of dollars. That is all backwards. We have collectively given too much benefit on top of way too much doubt to continue trusting people like Elon Musk to be the herald of our future. 

We Deserve Better From Our Business Leaders

In the film Back To The Future II, the future is portrayed as the year 2015. There are flying cars. Clothing has self-drying modes on it. Nike made boots one-size-fits-all with automated straps. Advertisements were made out of animated holograms. An entire pizza could be re-hydrated into a family-size serving. The television has several picture in picture screens easily added by voice command. Yes, they still used fax machines, but hey, nobody gets everything right. They even had a version of mobile telephones. This future depicted a VR headset being used, but our modern crop of inventors didn’t attempt to upgrade any other part of our real, physical world. They resent reality.

Elon Musk claims to be trying to get to Mars. The market responds by investing a lot of money. Who says it would be valuable for society to go there in the first place? That kind of premise has just become universally accepted. Or if we take the case that it has some importance, is it a trillion dollars’ worth? Is it something that even deserves monthly mentions in the press? Not to mention the fact that he just downgraded himself by entering the social media market by overpaying at the end of the trend.

Your Stock Broker Doesn’t Love You

Consider that you have an abusive relationship with a sociopathic market and that is causing part of your depression. Maybe some of those prescription pills you take to calm yourself down are helping to dull the nerves you’d need to see. Those pills which are made by publicly traded companies that you heard advertised to you on a publicly traded broadband company. The only way out is to demand recompense from the companies that have hurt you. They will refuse at first. Then they will call you crazy…LOL you know that old chestnut. But seriously, if you don’t fight back against these sociopaths they will just drag you down into their sad little legless worlds. So rise up, pull out of their stock, delete the apps, stop talking about these people like they matter, and go do something important with your life. Whatever the hell that is.