A perfect storm

I try to avoid doomsday thinking. I mean just look at all the dire predictions from every crackpot since well, ever. They're wrong 99.9% of the time. 

But then you see dark clouds on the horizon. You think, well, probably just another little storm and we'll be back to sunny skies tomorrow. 

But then your neighbors start falling ill. Just a bug going around, we'll be fine in a week or two. 

Then your company announces a round or two of lay-offs. I'll just work extra hard and become irreplaceable. If not, there's always funemployment.

Then your washer and dryer decide to break, and it will cost an arm and a leg to fix, or an arm and a leg plus a disturbing but tempting amount to replace them. I can afford this minor emergency as a one off. We'll be frugal for a while, no biggie.

And then everything you're being frugal with, becomes more and more expensive. I'll just stop buying beef, and buy chicken or pork. Actually, I'll just buy chicken and only for special occasions. 

And then you have another emergency. The stress from all of the above likely contributed to it, and now you have a lot more stress. By the way, we're going to war with Russia, a bunch of small kids were shot and killed in a Texas school, your investments are plummeting, your savings are dried up, and if you are still employed, you freaking hate every minute of it. Plus your family is starting to blame you for being so bad at providing for them, at least that's how you feel. Nobody's happy. You and your family's outlook is... uncertain. 

Oh and by the way, that storm will be here any minute.

I'm tired, I'm scared, I'm stressed and I don't know how much longer I can keep this up. 

Miscellaneous updates

I will no longer refer to partisans and activists of the left in North America as liberals (I stopped using that ill-fitting label years ago) and progressives ("progress" lol). They are neither. They are more of the same predictable, anti-individual freedom, authoritarian left that started when Lenin took power. As the labels "socialist" and "Marxist" change definitions depending on who you ask and don't really capture all the non-economic leftist characteristics currently in abundance, I will unfortunately resort to using the broad, but fitting term, leftist.

Last summer I remember Australia going full tyranny with the Covid mandates. Canada is now  making Australia look like the little leagues. Before the trucker protest, I could not imagine a well-established liberal Western democracy enact emergency powers, threaten, arrest, and seize bank accounts of people for having "unacceptable views." And those views are totally understandable and quite reasonable for people who actually have to live with the rules the elites created, and have been for 2 years. Now that it is illegal, I feel the urge to donate.

They are building the border wall. They, as in the Dominican Republic. I only mention this because I am interested to see the both the reaction and the results. Do physical barriers impede physical movement? The experts the TV told me to trust disagree with each other! But we'll find out soon enough! 

Inflation is hitting me pretty hard, and I just got a big raise. I was trying to save up for a car, but those prices went way up and I think I'll try to wait it out. I have been wanting to buy a house for over a decade, but since I don't want to buy a piece of trash fixer-upper in a bad neighborhood, everything in the area was prohibitively expensive. Now that I have nearly tripled my income, new houses (including many 35 year-old houses) are still prohibitively expensive. I live in Utah, not California. And now the weekly grocery bill is getting out of hand. I very rarely eat out, I save as much as I can, and I thought I was being more or less frugal. But I'm going to have to find new ways of frugality while maintaining my sanity. I have the strong but vague sense the country is going to shit, while acknowledging the fact that every aging man has said that at one point; I know I may be wrong--but I really want to and want to know how to hedge against the shit-country scenario (cryptocurrency is still experiencing growing pains, faces significant government pushback, and is not yet up to the task, sadly). 

Am I being part of the problem? Not sure, but my small real-estate investments are one of the few paying good dividends. If you can't beat them, join them? A guy has to look out for his own; I can't fix the world by myself. Less so if I am poor. What am I gonna do?

It's been shown to be the case before and it will again: with high confidence, I predict leaks in the coming years showing big tech has cooperated with government to silence, censor, deplatform, and/or freeze financial tools/assets of those with "unacceptable views." That this kind of cooperation was without the backing of law.