Economic shocks will happen

The idea of "economic stability" or "long-term investments" within our economy is very dubious. Is buying a house when you are young really all that safe considering it locks you down to one place which might be subject to environmental catastrophes, spending your most productive years on paying large amounts of interests and a house too big which makes lifestyle inflation creep into your life?
Similarly, is compromising for an office job really the most stable career considering that it is utterly reliant on the technological system to be remotely useful? It might be a good way to earn money in the short term, but what about the long term?
If you believe in societal collapse, it is obvious that shocks will happen in the economy and that the usual wisdom of house-buying and careerism cannot be taken for granted. If you believe in perpetual technological progress, then the sense of value in an economy is wildly destabilized by new powerful technological innovations, which will happen because technological growth is not one smooth ascending curve, but instead is made of regular discontinuous breaks due to how discoveries utterly change the playing field which came before them. Those breakthroughs then lead to massive shocks in the economy, which inevitably lead to losers of said changes, i.e. people whose skills and investments are now worthless.
This has happened several times in history, and it will happen again if we assume that society can keep going up on the technological scale. I do not believe in this obviously, but I am here noting that the rosy future techno optimists imagine isn't so rosy for individuals who will continually have to relocate their skills and sense of value to fit within the system.
Of course there are limits with this simple analysis:

1. There are more scenarios than collapse or perpetual technological progress, though no matter what happens, I seriously doubt that no significant shocks will happen in the coming decades, as stagnation strikes me as far more unlikely considering the unsustainability and dissatisfaction of our world
2. Even though there might be economic shocks, the sensible things to do and invest in might not change. That being said, the most fragile assets and skills are those which are directly reliant on our technological system, which is incredibly fragile by the nature of highly complex technology and interconnected systems, and as a result, I would say that the typical path of careerism, having a single income source on a hyperspecialized skillset, being dependent on the system to even cook your food, living a highly wasteful lifestyle more focused on impressing others than genuinely developing anything of value, has very little chance of making it through.
3. There might not even be a need for an economy, according to the most optimists of techno-optimists, who believe that soon enough we will live in a post-scarcity world. Honestly though, I don't have enough faith in their worldview to even imagine how such a thing would happen. We are already in ecological overshoot ⁵ so how in God's name would a post-scarcity world come into place? ⁶

Footnotes

³ There's a 2nd part about it not working on shameless people, especially if they like the attention, but it didn't feel super relevant to my life.

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2024-12-14