Welcome to the inaugural post of The Unabashed Observer! I hope to be your guide and confidante throughout all things in life. This blog/newsletter/whatever will cover any and every topic that can be found within the scope of humanity, with an eye towards getting you, the reader, to think more intentionally about everything.
Let’s kick it off by talking about the concept of virtuous and destructive (aka vicious) cycles, and how they’re found all throughout society. First let’s define what a cycle is. It’s a pattern of actions and behaviors that feed off each other and makes each individual component more likely to happen and more impactful. Think of a snowball rolling down a hill, getting larger and larger until it becomes an unstoppable force.
When that pattern is beneficial to you, you’re in a virtuous cycle. When that pattern is bad for you, you’re in a destructive one. The concept is simple enough. The tricky part is being able to detect whether you’re in one or not. And the truly extraordinary thing is successfully breaking out of a cycle once you realize you’re in a destructive one.
We all find ourselves in various cycles. Some are good. Some are bad. Most of the times, we are not aware of it, at least, not at the level where we can make a conscious decision to break out of the cycle if it’s bad. Many people, through no fault or action of their own, are often placed into destructive cycles and aren’t aware of it.
Not only are these cycles destructive to the people within, they are often self perpetuating and bring more people into them. It’s very hard to break a destructive cycle, which is why there are still too many kids born to poor single parents in destitute communities. The destructive cycle of intergenerational poverty is one that every country and government struggles with. How do we solve it?
The first step to solving any problem is to recognize that there is one to begin with. Like I said earlier in this article, being able to recognize that you’re in a vicious cycle is very valuable. So let’s talk about some other cycles, ones that you might be in right now.
It’s Expensive to be Poor
“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.” - Anatole France
This might be putting too fine a point on things, but it sucks to be poor. Poverty is an easily recognizable destructive cycle because when you’re poor, everything is harder. You have to be more conscious of the exact amount of money in your bank account, because if you overdraw your account, you get hit with an overdraft fee. If you need car insurance, there is oftentimes a significant discount to paying in full instead of by month. Buying in bulk is cheaper than buying individually. All of these things are much harder to do when you have less money.
And of course, it all compounds. You can’t pay for your groceries so you’re hit with an overdraft charge. Now your bank account is in the negative. Once your paycheck finally goes through, you have less money available and can buy less food the next time you’re at the supermarket. You go hungry, and it’s proven that hunger inhibits learning so you can’t build the skills you need to get a better job to get out of poverty.
Now you can’t afford car insurance. You go without it. You get pulled over by a cop who tickets you for speeding and then discovers you don’t have car insurance so he then hits you with another ticket for driving without insurance. You can’t pay the fine from either ticket so now your license is suspended. But you still have to get to work so you take the bus. The bus route is out of the way and erratic and you’re late for work so you get fired. Now you’re out of a job.
That is fucking brutal. And those are all problems that can be solved by having more money. This phenomenon is relatively well known, not just to the people trapped within the destructive cycle, but also to the politicians and policymakers trying to help them out. But while the refrain “it’s expensive to be poor” is quite in vogue, the flip side is not nearly as frequently examined.
It Pays to be Rich
Having money is great, because money gives you options. And most importantly, money gives you the option of making more money. “Let your money work for you!” is the cri de coeur of millions of bankers, financial advisors, accountants, and well meaning relatives.
If you have lots of money, banks and brokerages will give you access to higher yielding money market funds, more exotic investments that can be tailored to your exact level of risk and objective. Financial institutions frequently offer you money to create a checking account with a sufficient deposit (Chase will credit you with a $3,000 signup bonus if you’ve got a cool $500,000 in cash lying around).
The pay-in-full discount that the poor person couldn’t afford? You can afford it. The bulk discounts? Same thing. If you have money, you can afford better investment advice to help make you even more money. All of these things compound in a virtuous cycle of moneymaking. Yes, it’s expensive to be poor. But it pays to be rich. So why can’t everyone be rich? Wouldn’t society in general be better off if everyone was rich?
Have you finished rolling your eyes yet? Okay, bear with me. And let’s go back to the very first example: the kid born to the poor single parent in the inner city. I can list all of the ways that society is stacked against that kid. But that is something that’s already been done to death, by people far more interested in the study of poverty than I. What’s missing is the study of that kid’s counterpart.
If you were to design the perfect environment to raise a kid in, what would that look like? What do his parents look like? Where do they live? Who are their friends? I’ll take a stab at it.
Designer Babies
The kid should be born to upper middle class parents, both college educated professionals making good money in jobs that don’t require working beyond the standard 40 hours per week. Both mom and dad should be very present within his life throughout his childhood. He should be raised in a safe, prosperous community with excellent public schools with other kids who have parents just like his.
That kid is living life on easy mode. He’s been put into a situation that is full of virtuous cycles. From his parents, to his friends, and the community around him, he’s in an environment that is designed for him to thrive. His parents, educated and well-to-do will teach him how to be educated and well to do simply by being around him. His friends and peers, from similar backgrounds, will create opportunities for him to socialize properly. The community around him will provide a safe place for him to grow and explore.
These are the kids who are taught to be diligent about their studies, to wake up and seize the day, to go to college, make a budget, spend responsibly, save and invest responsibly, and do all the other hundreds of virtuous things that create prosperity without even giving it a conscious thought. It’s simply how they were raised.
The key to living life well is to be in as many virtuous cycles as possible and to be in the least amount of destructive cycles. Because the thing about being in a cycle is that it happens without thought or design. It simply is the default state of being. You want to be in a state where the default is wins begetting wins instead of losses compounding on losses.
Forces Beyond Our Control
If you contrast our designer baby with the type of environment that the inner city kid grows up in, it becomes extremely easy to see why each kid (generally speaking, of course there are always exceptions) turns out so differently.
But what should be illuminating is that each kid, through no action or decision of their own, grows up and is constantly living and experiencing a bunch of behavioral and social cycles. For the kid in the upper middle class suburb, the vast majority of those cycles are virtuous. For the kid in the inner city, the vast majority are destructive.
Food stamps will feed a family, but they won’t get them out of a failing school system. Free/subsidized medical assistance can have them visit a doctor, but it won’t give them the habits needed to create a healthy lifestyle. The healthy lifestyle may not even be achievable if they don’t have a car and live in a food desert. Housing vouchers can give the family a place to live, even in a good school system and a safe community, but it won’t give them the study habits necessary to take advantage of the opportunity.
This is why intergenerational poverty is such an intractable problem. Government programs are not designed to remove people from the myriad of destructive cycles that they find themselves in. What’s even more disheartening is that it’s not even clear that the government can create programs that do this, at least not without vastly increased powers and resources well beyond the public’s willingness to give (look at the public response to Federal busing in the 70s and 80s).
That leaves us with measures largely designed at alleviating the immediate effects of poverty. Because to truly break out of a destructive cycle is to do one of the hardest things a person can do: overcome personal and societal inertia.
Inertia Is a Property of Matter
The example of the two kids is fundamentally about inertia. It is very hard to change the trajectory that either kid is on, because there are so many forces acting around them to derail any attempt to change. It’s just that one kid is on a glide path to success while the other is marching towards to failure.
This resistance to change is found in every person and every society. Our Constitution has inertia baked into it by design, which is why the modern day Congress hardly ever passes any new laws of consequence. In order for a person to change, they have to overcome personal inertia, the inertia found within their family and friends and community, and then society at large. Every step of the way, there will be something fighting against change, because humans are extremely conservative by nature. We want the predictable, the routine, the unchanging, whatever is easiest.
And thus even recognizing that we’re in a destructive cycle (which is also an admission of being in a bad place) is an extremely hard task for most people to do, because recognizing that there is a problem naturally begs the question: what do we do about it? It’s far easier to stay in a mostly tolerable situation than to look for something better, because we fear that changing could lead to something worse than what we’ve currently got.
In order to truly change, there must be a countervailing force strong enough to break a person out of their current cycle. For drug addiction (an extremely common destructive cycle), the common refrain is that an addict must hit absolute rock bottom before they really try to kick their habit. In other words, the destructive cycle has to be close to or at its logical conclusion before the person realizes they have to get out of that cycle.
That rock bottom point is different for many people. For some it could be an intervention of their loved ones. For others, it could be when they find themselves on the street with nowhere to go. Some people may never get to that point. But it’s generally a mix of internal and external factors that ultimately leads to an individual to conclude that what they’re currently doing is unambiguously bad for them, and that they need to do something differently in order to mitigate the effects or even reverse course and do something good for themselves.
Knowing is Half the Battle
We’re two thousand words in, and we haven’t even gotten to the part on identifying the cycles that we’re in. So how do we do it?
I was reading a discussion thread on Reddit one day and I came across an incredibly profound thought. It was something to the effect of “a stranger could have one conversation with you and immediately know something about you that will take you years to understand about yourself”.
Chances are if I asked you to think of a destructive cycle that one of your friends or family members are in, you could come up with an answer very quickly. But if you were to think of a destructive cycle that you are in, it would take a lot longer before you could come up with something.
Self evaluation is incredibly hard, and we all have blind spots that are obvious to others. One of the best ways to know more about yourself is to tell your assumptions about yourself to those close to you and to ask them if they think those assumptions are correct.
Of course that can be an incredibly awkward conversation to have. Remember, change is hard and even recognizing the problem is hard. But there are ways to make it less awkward. You can make a game out of it, such as framing it as a table topics conversation. You can simply just be honest and have a direct conversation and ask for them to humor you.
Recognizing any potential problem about yourself involves vulnerability. Whether you’re being vulnerable to others or to yourself, it is a necessary precondition of self knowledge, because we are not perfect beings, and we all have flaws. Taking the time to know our strengths and weaknesses, having the most accurate picture of who we are, is the best way of finding out all the cycles that we’re in.
As For the Other Half…
I wish I could end this article by tell you how to break out of the destructive cycle you’re in, but it’s hard enough to give decent generalized advice on how to recognize a problem. Actually solving the problem is much, much harder. And what works for one person might not work for someone else.
When I was talking about drug addicts hitting rock bottom, I listed a few instances that could be any one person’s rock bottom. But each person’s rock bottom (or tipping point for change) is unique to that individual. And the ways in which people pull themselves out of destructive cycles are similarly unique. For one person, it could take something as simple as reading this article to spark a desire for change. For another, it might take a grueling series of steps involving self discovery and a herculean effort involving those closest to them in order to break out.
But regardless of what it takes to substantively and decisively change, there is one thing I am certain of: it requires a greater understanding of oneself. That is what I hope to provide with this Substack, and that is what I hope that you, the reader, get out of it.