Today i got a call from the monthly magazine “Leva” (glossy life-management mag. http://www.leva.nu/) that wanted a few quotes from the people that has been contributing various material to their editions over the years. I am one of them.
So, the caller asked me a few questions.
The one that stuck was…”What changes will we see in the world over the next five years?”
Well… i delivered at short quote saying “A financial collapse of some kind will force parts of the humanity to seek out new ways and solutions.”
This is what i believe.
Soon the market-driven society reaches critical mass and starts to implode.
The market has pushed the whole concept of growth and consumption too far in the naive illusion that it will be able to sustain continuity and even increasing consumption for all eternity.
Well, let me put it like this;
-If the last industrial generation, -people born in the 40´s and 5o´s were to live forever, this may have been possible. But those very reliable consumers will be out of the consumption-loop in about a decade as active high-octane consumers. (Allthough they may live another twenty years after that of course.)
The next bunch, after them, is not as eager to maintain the same consumption rate. This will redefine the terms of a market-driven world from the ground.
I do not know one person my age, that absolutley has to exchanche his one year old Audi for the newest model every year, as a lot of old people do.
Then i look at my 18-year old son and his friends. They seem to have completly different consumtion patterns than any generation before them. They just don´t care about the status and prestige-aspect of it. It will be very hard to sell them a Rolex, that´s for shure.
Shure, there will be lots of young people still, consuming in the same manner the generations before them did, but not enough of them to maintain the needed growthrate.
As stockmarkets and global banks are very sensitive to any form of reduced growth, the collapse of the European- and American finacial systems will take place very fast and the consequenses will be grave.
I can´t prove it yet, but i think, as China and India are about to repeat the same mistakes that the rest of the old industrial countries have done over the last fifty years (and are just about to learn from) we will see a lot of painful changes on western markets in general.
This, combined with a rapid change of business models, decreasing overall consumption and i-n-s-a-n-e oil-prices, will throw us into a deep recession eventually, probably in he next five years.
This will force us to change the way we think about ourselves, the world and societybuilding in general. We need to let go and shake off the last remains of the 1900´s and move on.
This is what i truly believe. I back it up with a lot of business intelligence mixed with a fairly good understanding of human behavior interacting with financial mechanisms alltogether.
These threats seem to be invisible to business- and market analysts. They never think outside of the box or takes a holistic approach to what could be affecting the world economy. They seem very secure in beeing able to handle whatever comes in their way. Well, they will have a rough day on the job for shure when these parameters that i speak of, starts to kick in and all the financial rules they thought was carved in stone becomes obsolete in a flash.
-This will be a good and healthy process of course. The world really needs to reboot. The market is getting silly really. I mean, just watch the desperation in todays advertising and you must be blind not to see the tendencies.
In the end, the changes will lead to major opportunities of creating a new sets of values and agendas for the future. Some things really need to burn to the ground before any constructive change can take place.
Hell, i´ll even be there, throwing gas on the fire, just to speed things up.
/Stefan
