It’s amazing to me how bored people are today.
How many T.V. apps are there? How many social media sites are there today?
We have Apple TV (mostly for YouTube and so we can watch re-runs of old T.V. shows on Hulu) and I count no less than 20 apps. There’s probably more but I deleted a bunch of “channels” from the T.V.
It’s like this one time I walked into COSTCO to go shopping and the DirecTV guy stopped me and asked me to sign up for service and I told him I didn’t watch T.V.
His response?
“But there’s 30,000 shows you can watch!”
Who cares?
I don’t want to watch 30,000 shows.
Maybe there’s one or two T.V. shows I enjoy nowadays and that’s about all I can handle… especially with a newborn.
With the fallout from Game of Thrones, which turned out to be one of the most boring endings ever conceived for a television show (sorry/not sorry, it was boring and unimaginative AF, complete with a gazillion plot holes and a maze of contradictions), people don’t know what to do with themselves. People invested almost a decade of their lives into a show and storyline that, ultimately, went nowhere.
So, what do people do? They hop on the Chernobyl bandwagon to do it all over again.
But, this ain’t new. It happened with The Walking Dead — a show I really liked back in season 1 when it was all about surviving a zombie apocalypse and finding humanity in an inhumane world.
But, as the show progressed, it became clear that the showrunners had no idea what they were doing. And, eventually, the choice was clear. I had to stop watching it.
Why do I bring all this up?
Simple. For the last 30 years, Wall Street has benefited from falling interest rates. It’s given people a reason to believe in a constantly rising stock market. A stock market where almost nothing can go wrong. OK, OK, there was a big hiccup back in 2008, and then that dot-com thingie in the early 2000s, but… aside from that, it hasn’t been too bad, right?
Now that interest rates have bottomed out and are starting to reverse course, witness the wave of denial about the future of equities. People have invested nearly their entire life’s savings into tech stocks and it’s really hard to admit now that this is not looking like such a great idea. Even for folks who avoid index funds (and thus the major tilt towards tech companies), it’s difficult to value most of the companies in the marketplace. That which has helped stock markets for the last 30 years is about to cut in the opposite direction and people desperately need to know how to value these companies — a skill they never developed because they never had to. Some people are catching on to what’s about to happen, but most? They’re zombified. They are lurching toward mediocrity and don’t seem to be bothered about it. If this has a lackluster ending, they’ll move on to the next big trend and ride it until that one ends, too. Nothing will ever change for them.
Anyway, for the rest of us? How does one protect one’s self?
I “tell all” in my client case studies. You can also join my email list and let me hold your hand through the process.