It’s Time We Start Shorting Ourselves

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Well, folks, I fucking did it. I finally got off my ass after sitting on it all day while staring into a screen just to sit on my ass again and stare into another screen and write a goddamn article on here for once. Look at me, I’m two run-on sentences into this thing and I’m already acting like my work here is done and in some ways, it is. Let me elaborate. You see, everywhere we turn these days, Millennials are getting spat on. It’s been this way for awhile now and it’s nothing new or revolutionary. In fact, we as a generation have been vapidly stereotyped to the point of borderline nausea with the same redundant, thematic jokes about our spending habits being irresponsible, or our laziness, or our dreamy “snowflake” mindsets that aren’t tethered to reality when in reality, reality isn’t even tethered to itself anymore since it’s been packaged up and sold to the highest bidder without our consent and in some instances, without our knowledge. Every article written by some clickbait piece of garbage thwarts us and paints us into a corner with sweeping generalizations that make readings from The Onion more factual than the actual news outlets they write for. Everything is backwards and has been for a long time, and that’s by design. But there are loopholes in the system that we as a generation need to start exploiting much like the for-profit prison industry does to non-violent drug offenders. However, instead of ruining lives of the innocent, we will better the lives of the deviently intelligent and by that I mean us, the Millennials.

You see, things aren’t going so well these days even though things seem to be going really well if you’ve looked at the stock market. Maybe you’ve had the chance to reap some of the reward by making some calculated investments. Maybe your 401K that will probably get robbed before it’s time for you to go collect it looks pretty solid right now. That’s all great, and for a small few, it’s fucking Tony The Tiger level great, but all great things come to an end eventually and the only flakes getting frosted in this institutionalized box are us and our futures. In a society that’s built off of debt through fiat currency, it’s hard to measure true sustainable economic growth, especially when the predatory loan sharks start circling the waters for their money back at the smell of a drop of blood while interest rates rise. This makes all that outstanding debt even more expensive to pay back because currency isn’t liquid, actual money is and they are two separate things that conveniently get blurred on purpose around here. There’s a reason why our currency has a marketing slogan written on it that says “In God We Trust,” because it’s faith based and it isn’t backed by anything tangible anymore.

Currently, our generation is in ~$1.4 trillion in student loan debt and default rates are on the rise which means the outstanding balance owed is on the rise as well. This will only get worse as interest rates climb, costs of goods and services increase, and disposable incomes shrink. It’s bad enough we live in an economy where health care costs have risen +2000% in the past decade while the level and quality of coverage has decreased, education costs have risen +1000% while saturation has occurred to the point where having a four year degree doesn’t make you or anyone else really stand out anymore, and average incomes have remained relatively flat since the late 1970s.

At this moment, we are the most productive as a species than we ever have been, and that’s largely due to technological advancements. Yet we are not compensated for the growth in our own productivity by the very companies who employ us, the same companies who would use this said technology to replace us if/when given the chance because it benefits their bottom line. Sounds like an advanced form of serfdom but with more steps in between. This is very strange in a society that rewards productivity output monetarily (GDP) in terms of a country and the companies that operate within it even though this country in and of itself is just a giant shell corporation for the people that own it with arguably the best marketing and PR team ever assembled.

If I just made you upset or offended, good. You should be. We all should be because remember, while people are getting violently offended for other people kneeling at a sports game during the national anthem, those very same people are passively accepting a lower standard of living that only seems to offer diminishing returns and never really getting offended by that. Things aren’t all bad though. For instance, we are the most educated generation in human history, we are the most adaptable technologically speaking, and we have the opportunity to change this antiquated form of society’s operating system that was coded and architected by the very shady characters who spread their asses and take dumps on us via the media and laugh at us at the poker table as they sit around smoking cigars, sharing stories about when they were young, and not getting laid by their wives who are only with them because at this point, dying alone seems pretty lonely while looking at all inclusive riverboat tours in Europe through a brochure that was sent to their mailbox via a targeting algorithm that was probably coded by none other than a Millennial from another country.

There’s a light at the end of this tunnel, guys. I’m not 100% sure that this can work because there’s not enough data to calculate statistical significance…yet, for the sake of satire, let’s explore this aforementioned loophole. I’m assuming most of you on this site pay outrageous amounts of money each month toward your student loans. I do. I was thinking the other day when I saw NickArcadia’s tweet about student loans, what if we just stop paying them? As Nick mentioned, how pissed will all of us be if they just forgive younger generations of their debts while we’ve spent the past 10 years or more getting nowhere in life just to pay these things back? I understand that this forgiveness will spring up cost increases somewhere else in order to make up for the loss. This irks me to the core, but at the same time this too is by design from the people who actually make decisions in this world. Here’s the loophole. Imagine you are a cigarette company executive. You are most likely a millionaire and life is good because at the end of the day, money does buy happiness in the form of freedom and economic security around here so, stop lying to yourselves.

Now, imagine taking some of the profits you make from getting people hooked on your sinister, highly marketed drug and roll them into biotech stocks and pharmaceutical stocks that focus on treating cancer. In the eyes of pure predatory capitalism, you’re making all the right moves. Now layer in using your lavish wealth to throw your weight around in the political arena by lobbying against actually curing cancer by suppressing clinical trial drugs and treatment methods so that you keep rolling in the ROI strictly through “treating” while at the same time causing it as opposed to “curing” it because again, it’s all about the money around here and if everyone was cured/healthy, people at the top would lose a lot of money. After you combine all of these “accomplishments,” now you’ve accomplished what very few are able to here in America.

Let’s take that same evil approach but apply it to our own lives and the lives of our generation. Yes, we are betting against ourselves, and it’s purely by design. We will be “shorting” our own generation, and we’d be doing it in a way that makes insider trading at Enron look like a cryptic Elon Musk tweet right before quarterly earnings calls come around. Not only would we be shorting ourselves, we’d be shorting the entire market as a whole as well. What if we stop paying our loans as a generation and instead, roll that monthly payment money into the stocks of the defaulted loan collections companies that the lenders like Sallie Mae contract out to harass us and collect those debts from defaulters? Student loan default rates are climbing and they will only get worse in a market correction with raising interest rates. We’d essentially be justifying their existence by undermining our own, but since we have a vested interest in their ever relevant success now, the long term dividends could be promising as long as we sell off at the right moment because these days, if you’re not selling out someone or something, even yourself, you’re being sold a lie, even to yourself.

It’s all about the long game. We would still have to make small incremental payments toward our outstanding debts to fulfill and perpetuate this vicious cycle, but now we actually have a stake in our own generation’s demise. Just think bread and circuses, people. Bread and circuses! It’s like the Bitcoin craze, if everyone starts hopping on this ghost train, the value of these company’s stock inflates which make us more money, plus they pay a share dividend! Who’s laughing now, Boomers?

Again, it’s all by design, but this time we’re the architects. It’s time that we all become the Christian Bales from the movie ‘The Big Short’ and short ourselves like the character he portrayed (Dr. Michael Burry) did to the housing market in 2008. We can all be Aspergers geniuses and play the drums like an angry John Bonham on a coke binge except the drum skins we’d be smashing would be the faces of all the assholes who constantly punch down to us while hoarding everything from us. It could be like seeing the afterlife after committing economic suicide where God is like, “Hey, you figured out the ultimate life hack that you won’t find in any blog post on LinkedIn written by some entrepreneur CEO of a startup you’ve never heard of before on Middle Earth!! See, all you had to do was follow the money and trust me, I had it written on literally everything!”…damn, that was darkkkk. But seriously, in a time where self esteem of a generation keeps getting its head blown off by a mercurial figure in a grassy knoll in a public spectacle almost every day, what better thing to do than to capitalize on our own assassination?

It’s what our forefathers would have done, it’s what the people at the top do everyday, and it’s the definition of Capitalism. Listen, they’re already shorting us so why not add more volume and scale to the revenue pool? Feelings are great to create empathy for others but in a society that’s filled with people who generally hate themselves, masked behind inflated egos while at the same time only caring about themselves, what better way than to rise up out of poverty from it and then redistribute that wealth so we can fix a broken system that only benefits a small group of elite people who are conveniently going to die off right before major global catastrophic events occur thanks to them turning the blind eye to what they created for so many decades? What better way is there for us at this point but to deliberately fuck ourselves over better than the people who are currently fucking us over except we actually benefit from it after they’re gone? Just like many things in our society, it doesn’t make sense…so much so, that it actually begins to make sense. It’s the complete opposite of instant gratification. But there are other options to explore and I will cover them later. All I’m saying is think about it. I know I just contradicted myself from earlier when I said my work is basically done and that’s the whole point, the work is never done. Alright, I love you. Until next time! Lol

– Nived.

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Nived_Neirbo

Optimistic pessimist, Profoundly unimportant