About the Changeiverse

Over the past several years, I’ve been increasingly convinced that we are on the cusp of a long process of discontinuous and potentially very painful changes in our economy, our society, and our personal lives. While this coming wholesale change is largely being driven by an end of relatively cheap energy, factors such as the climate change, water shortages, increasing frequency and intensity of natural disasters, post-cold war power realignment, the increasingly dysfunctional political process in the U.S., the aging U.S. population, the declining dollar, and generational perspective shifts are all contributing as well. By my admittedly amateur analysis, we are upon a wave of change unlike anything this country has seen since it went from the America of 1938 to the America of 1945–from an isolationist, still largely urban/rural society to an increasingly suburban superpower, economically and militarily supreme.

I’ve decided to coin the term changeiverse to capture my sentiment that these changes are so pervasive and global as to really constitute their own universe; that the change we are about to experience will be unlike anything experienced in over five decades–and potentially unlike anything in the history of our nation. These changes won’t be isolated culturally, as were the civil rights and peace movements of the 50’s and 60’s, nor economically and politically (think the economic dominance of the US from 1945 through the early 1970s, followed by the 1973 oil embargo and the subsequent decline in U.S. manufacturing and the outsourcing of industry that followed). They are not purely technological, as were the changes driven by the development and personalization of the computer from the end of WWII to today.

I am not a historian or a sociologist, and I have no intention of looking or sounding like one. I’m just a private citizen who is convinced that times are going to get very tough for most–while presenting very attractive opportunities to those with the smarts and luck enough to seize upon them.

I’ve taken it on as a personal discipline that I will do my best to be a student of this change such that I can both insulate my family from its shaking effects and position myself to benefit from its dislocations. When things change, somebody always benefits. It may be a net loss to society, as occurs during recessions and depressions, but even in recessions and depressions there are people who prosper.

This blog is intended to be a point of focus in that discipline, and is thus a purely personal exercise. But I do hope that just as I learn and grow from the exposure to and challenge from others’ perspectives, that I can give likewise.