Should You Move While You Can, Or When You Must? by Charles Hugh Smith for Of Two Minds
This gives an extreme advantage to those few who move first, long before they must. The financial advantage for first movers is equally extreme.
Moving is a difficult decision, so we hesitate. But when the window to do so closes, it’s too late. We always think we have all the time in the world to ponder, calculate and explore, and then things change and the options we once had are gone for good.
Moving to a new locale is difficult for those of us who are well-established in the place we call home. Add in a house we love, jobs/work, kids in school, a parent living with us and all the emotional attachments to friends, extended family, colleagues and favorite haunts, and for many (and likely most) people, moving is out of the question.
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Many of us have fond memories of moving when we were in our late teens or early 20s–everything we owned fit in the backseat and trunk of a beaten up old car, and off we went.
Once you put down roots in a home, work/enterprise, schools, neighborhood and networks, it’s a herculean task to move. Moving to another state or province isn’t just a matter of the physical movement of possessions and buying / renting a new dwelling, itself an arduous process; the transfer of medical and auto insurance, finding new dentists and doctors, opening local bank/credit union accounts, obtaining local business licenses and a staggering list of institutions and enterprises that require an address change is complicated and time-consuming.
Knowing this, I don’t ask this question lightly: Should You Move While You Can, Or When You Must? The question is consequential because the window in which we still have options can slam shut with little warning.
The origin of the question will be visible to those who have read my blog posts in 2021 on systemic fragility, our dependence on long, brittle supply chains, the vulnerabilities created by these dependencies and my polite (I hope) suggestions to fashion not just a Plan B for temporary disruptions but a Plan C for permanent disruptions.
My new book Global Crisis, National Renewal: A (Revolutionary) Grand Strategy for the United States is a result of realities few are willing to face: the extreme inequality we now have in the U.S. leads to social collapse. That’s the lesson of history. So to believe as if collapse is impossible is to ignore the evidence that social collapse is inevitable when inequality reaches extremes. Human and nature dynamics (HANDY): Modeling inequality and use of resources in the collapse or sustainability of societies.
Social collapse has consequences, and so we have to ask: where do we want to be in the vast human herd when social order unravels?
My new book also addresses the transition that’s obvious but easily denied: we’ve transitioned from an era of abundance to an era of scarcity. There are many historical examples of what happens as scarcity diminishes living standards and puts increasing stress on individuals, families, communities and nations.
There are ways to adapt to scarcity (that’s the point of my book) but nation-states and the elites who run them are optimized for abundance, not scarcity, so they lack the means to adapt to scarcity. Their default setting to is keep pursuing a return to higher consumption (“growth”) by increasingly extreme means–for example, printing trillions of dollars and giving it to wealthy elites and corporations, and printing additional trillions to give away as bread and circuses (stimulus) to the masses.
