Schiff Sovereign The big story over the last few days has been ‘reopening the economy’.
And that’s certainly a nice idea. Countless people have been living in despair over the last month, and the prospect of everything going back to normal soon feels really great.
I certainly hope for the best.
But a couple of weeks ago I quoted James Stockdale– one of the toughest men who ever lived– talking abut how he cultivated the mental strength to survive 7 torturous years as a Prisoner of War in North Vietnam.
And I thought it would be relevant to re-post his advice here.
When asked, “Who didn’t make it [out of the POW camp],” Stockdale replied,
Oh that’s easy. The optimists. They were the ones who said, ‘we’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And then Christmas would come, and Christmas would go.
And then they’d say, ‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And then Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving. And then it would be Christmas again.
And they died of a broken heart.
“This is a very important lesson,” Stockdale continued. “You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose– with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.
There’s clearly been a lot of positive data lately showing that the growth rate of the virus seems to be slowing, and that the mortality rate is lower than originally estimated.
This is all good news.
But we’re seeing a lot of ‘Stockdale optimists’ right now who only look at the good news and refuse to confront brutal facts.
Many of the world’s most prominent financial markets have been bitten by Stockdale Optimism; stocks, for example, are way up because investors believe everything is about to return to normal and the economy will experience a ‘V-shaped recovery’.
(This means that the economy will bounce back as quickly and aggressively as it stalled.)
But anyone with the discipline and emotional courage to confront the most brutal facts of our current reality realizes that ‘normal’ is still far away.
Here are a few things to consider:
1) Hardcore PTSD
We’re now living in a world where hugging is considered an act of biological terrorism.
It would be silly to think that everyone will come out of hiding and go back to normal… packing bars, airplanes, shopping malls, elevators, offices, etc. like we used to do.
