Dealing With Uncertainty
In trading and investing, dealing with uncertainty is a constant. This week, for example, we had uncertainty heading into Wednesday's Fed meeting about whether they were going to cut 25 or 50 basis points. My approach to that was to come up with my best long trade and my best short trade, and place them both the night before, and see which one got filled.
As it happened, it was the long trade, which filled during the Fed-caused volatility late in Wednesday's session. You can read about that here.
In today's guest post though, my friend Kevin Dolan addresses how to deal with larger uncertainties than the Fed's rate cut decisions, uncertainties that can affect every aspect of our lives.
Paralysis Is Rational
As the rhythm of Happenings accelerates, it’s increasingly difficult to resist being paralyzed by the spectacle of the election.
It’s difficult to resist paralysis because paralysis is, at least in an immediate sense, rational.
If you were running a business during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and drawing up your financial forecast for the next five years, and you estimated a 10% chance of global thermonuclear war, then all of your expected returns get discounted 10%.
Building anything big takes a lot of hard work. The payoff is always in doubt, and it’s easy to question whether it’s worth all the effort even in normal times.
If executing your big, complex, exhausting plan suddenly becomes 10% less worthwhile, it’s not irrational to say “let’s wait and see whether the city gets flattened before we make all these outlays”.
The Cuban Missile Crisis was a 13-day episode in a nation on the upswing.
You could have waited it out without missing much — but if you tried to wait out the entire Cold War, you would have missed a world-historical time to build.
America in 2024, on the other hand, is on the “gradually, then suddenly” trajectory.
Things aren’t on the upswing. The election represents a spike in uncertainty, but even if things proceed normally from there, our managerial system is up against fiscal, demographic, and foreign policy problems that it has no capacity to solve — any one of which would catastrophically change our individual lives.
So there’s no relief, no catharsis, after which we can all get back to normal life. All of our expectations for the future have this massive drag coefficient of uncertainty attached.
Living in this climate of sustained dread eventually becomes less like anxiety and more like clinical depression.
Any good or bad decision you might make is discounted by your (rational) calculation
that maybe none of this is going to matter in the long run anyway. When you’re towing this anchor on all your risk/reward calculations, it’s harder to justify any action.
The zoomers grew up that way — which is why you can’t make them care about their jobs. They shouldn’t care about their jobs.
The corporate ladder they’re climbing probably won’t exist in 10 years, and there’s no way promotions or raises are going to keep up with inflation. (And if they belong to the wrong demographics, they may not be eligible for those promotions anyway.)
The effort of going to work in the morning is exactly the same — the extent to which it matters is just continually sliding downward.
(But you still have to eat, so you still have to have some job, somewhere, and you still have to go to work in the morning. For many, this is the yardstick of a true Happening.)
The craving for “a return to normalcy” is actually the same thing as the craving for cleansing, apocalyptic destruction.
The institutionalist Biden voter and the accelerationist Trump voter are pursuing the same objective — they want to eliminate the drag coefficient of political risk by having it out one way or another. The waiting around is intolerable.
Most of our maladaptive online behaviors come from the same place — we doomscroll because there’s an idea that gathering enough data will resolve the tension by reducing questions to actionable certainties.
We argue with strangers (or our parents) because there’s an idea that we might settle something, and thereby resolve the tension.
Both of these behaviors supply a little counterfeit catharsis while actually heightening the fundamental tension, which is why they are so addictive.
So what should we be doing instead?
Own productive assets.
If you have a salary, your income is denominated in whatever a dollar was worth the last time your salary was negotiated. If you own an income-generating asset, your income is denominated in today’s dollars.
(Inflation affects businesses too, of course, it’s not a perfect hedge — but it’s a substantial one.)
Just because dollars and banks and W-2s are going to zero doesn’t mean everything is. In fact, it means that a lot of things are going on sale if you’re trading in any other coin. Every transaction has a seller and a buyer.
Ideally, own productive assets that are either highly mobile, or in friendly jurisdictions. Being able to make money from your laptop reduces a hostile jurisdiction’s leverage on you considerably. Many farmers stayed longer than they should have in Rhodesia and South Africa, because their families wealth was bound up in an asset that couldn’t leave with them.
Make contingency plans.
If your picture of the future is just nameless calamity, it’s very difficult to metabolize anything you learn into useful action — but if you have branching contingency plans with specific if/then heuristics for action, you can keep an eye on world events in a purposeful, limited way.
Instead of worrying about whether Trump or Kamala is going to win, decide what you’ll do in either circumstance and be ready to execute either plan. This leads inevitably to preparedness strategies that make you better off in either situation.
It also reduces the psychological drag of uncertainty, because you are no longer building in ways that will suffer catastrophic loss if things don’t go your way.
Ordinary people in Florida don’t agonize about hurricanes, because their lives are built to accommodate hurricanes. They watch hurricane news in a fairly practical, businesslike way, because they know their triggers for action, and what to do when they come.
Hurricanes are still big, dangerous, uncontrollable phenomena, but contingency plans place them under psychological control.
Be in friendly jurisdictions.
As the political and economic situation deteriorates, legal regimes will become much more variable, as they already have in major cities around the country.
District attorneys refusing to prosecute squatters and shoplifters have accomplished a de facto abolition of private property in many jurisdictions. Simultaneously, frivolous lawsuits, criminal proceedings, and manipulation of contract law can be used to target political dissidents. A child in a blue public school district is a potential hostage, if a teacher or administrator encourages them to denounce your sexual politics.
Plant your family, your assets, and your professional network in friendly jurisdictions.
If you can’t pull up stakes right away, build strong connections outside your jurisdiction. If you were a Ukrainian kulak in the 1920s, a German Jew in the 1930s, or a Rhodesian in the 1970s, the most valuable asset you could have was a cousin in America and a train ticket.
Make smart friends.
Fur is adaptive to the cold, fins are adaptive to the water, but intelligence and social organization are meta-adaptive — they make humans more survivable in every circumstance.
The people who did best in the civil wars in Yugoslavia or the Russian collapse in the 1990s were the people who had lots of friends and knew where to find things that everybody needed, like food, diapers, antibiotics, ammunition, heating fuel, etc.
It was people who could solve problems like treating wounds, fixing broken equipment, or getting a friend through a military checkpoint. One person can’t learn everything — but you can make friends who know pretty much everything.
And remember that everyone is discounting.
Everyone is facing the same headwinds of demoralization. Almost everyone you meet is far more inert and more passive than they ought to be. Every homeschool mom thinks she’s doing a terrible job until she meets the public school kids. There are opportunities to build (and people to build with) that are wildly underpriced.
We run twelve weekly accountability calls — covering entrepreneurship, tech, fitness, content creation, investing, etc. — to get people networking and building their EXIT plan together.
Listen to some of our private Q&As to get a sense of who we are and what we’re interested in.
Check our member map to see who’s in your area, and visit a cocktail hour to start getting to know the guys. When you’re ready to get started, apply for membership at exitgroup.us.
EXIT News:
On last week’s full group call (9/10), we had a catch-up call on our leadership meeting, what we learned in Ecuador, our new meetup format, etc.
On this week’s group call (9/17), we will hear from Mike Shelby from Gray Zone Intel on his book, The Area Study Handbook, as well as his work with Forward Observer and his experiences in intelligence.
This weekend we will be presenting at Network State Conference in Singapore. Watch the livestream here.
Wednesday (9/18) we will launch our business incubator boot camp, taking our guys from a concept to a viable pitch that will be presented to investor judges.
Cocktail hour invites for Washington, DC (10/11), and San Francisco (11/8) meetups available below the paywall. EXIT cocktail hours are a great opportunity to meet your local guys, and see if the full group is right for you.
If you'd like to stay in touch
You can follow Kevin Dolan on X here, read his Substack here, and check out his EXIT group here.
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