The Apocalypse Is Here
or are we just finding an excuse to get into a recession?
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Recession. Recession. Recession. Everyone needs a recession. The economy has been booming for far too long and a recession is long overdue.
It’s the same headlines everywhere, where ever you look.
I know this is going to sound weird, but I’m actually looking forward to the recession. Or rather, I just want to get it over and done with. The last time one hit, I was too young and uninformed, following along with the herd with the doom and gloom world view.
Ten years later, a little bit more grown-up and a little bit wiser, here are my thoughts on the issue.
Everything runs in cycles
By definition, a recession happens when there is a general decline in economic activity. It happens when there’s a drop in spending. The last time that happened, it was about 10-ish years ago.
I survived through it as a clueless uni kid at the time.
10-ish years before that, to herald in Y2K and whatever apocalypse worthy scenario that was happening at the time, I was in grade school and was probably working on convincing my parents to get me my first desktop computer.
We survived through that too. Well, my parents fell into the credit card debt trap that took them another decade and a half to get rid of. Lessons were learned from that era.
And if we went back further to the early 90s, which according to the history books, was also another recession, I was probably just starting kindergarten and coming to terms with the reality that playdough is not real food.
The thing with the 2020 recession is that it’s like an overdue period. We’ve been predicting it since 2018, talking about it since 2016 but it just never officially came into existence when it was supposed to. When things like these are late, it turns us all into anxious wrecks.
With the forceful nudge from coronavirus, travel bans, general fear and anxiety with people running to the shops to stockpile like it’s a 2% survival rate, it’s time to finally get the recession over and done with.
2% mortality rate, concentrated towards the compromised
The news finally broke in my little island of a country yesterday — a woman in her 60s is now the first confirmed case of coronavirus. The natural response has been the same as everywhere else — go to the supermarket and stockpile up.
There are reports of overly long, Christmas-eque queues and waiting times with shelves not quite re-stocked in time. Looks like I won’t be having canned tuna and cheap bottled water for a while.
Out of curiosity, I decided to go and look at the official stats to gauge the actual potential severity and my chances of dying as a fairly healthy female on the brink of 30.
So far, reports have been that if you’re older than 80, you have a 15% chance of dying from it.
Here’s a graph from the Business Insider for reference. It should be noted that this is only representative of what’s happening in China. Three-quarters of confirmed patients had no pre-existing conditions and death in that group was less than 1%.
In comparison, the Spanish flu had about the same mortality rate. It was bad then, on a global scale — with 30 million people wiped away by it.
But so was the transition from the Ming to Qing dynasty during the years 1616–1683 with an estimated 25 million deaths. The Thirty Years Wars took a good 3 million to 11 million lives. Napoleon contributed to approximately the same numbers during his expansion years.
The Taiping Rebellion in China during 1850 to 1864 reported around 20 million casualties. World War I saw around16 million people dead, not including the Spanish flu that was happening at the same time. The second World War more than quadruple in numbers with an estimated 56 to 85 million dead.
In the grand scheme of things, we probably kill each other more than when Mother Nature deals her hand.
According to the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) there’s an estimated case of 35 million people infected by the flu between 2018 to 2019. Out of that 35 million, 34,157 are estimated to have died.
According to the World Health Organization, about 10 million people get hit with tuberculosis each year with about 1.5 million people dying from it as a result.
Ebola has a fatality rate of 50%.
Something will eventually kill us. If it’s not some disease, aliment, old age, the bus, people or a gas leak because you’ve forgotten to turn the stove off properly.
The end is near…
The risk of a recession that many people face is the potential loss of employment. During the 2010s, unemployment sharply rose to around 10%. This is a major number because it means less spending within these households, which fuels a further cycle of businesses needing to cut back on employment in order to survive.
With the travel bans and restrictions of general movement between countries, there will certainly be a negative impact, especially in the tourism and airline industries.
For businesses that haven’t figured out the AI and automation game, downsizing and investing in technology can be a painful process as they’re forced to pivot and upgrade their supply chains and processes during a time when profits are lower.
This imposes a certain degree of risk and fear for those that are trying to get into something that they may not actually truly understand. So they end up spending in the wrong places and operations fall into itself as cost savings and efficiencies do not materialize in the form they need or in time to save the business from itself.
When businesses fall apart, people get laid off. Unemployment rates go up and spending goes down. At some point, the unemployed either finds a new employer or figure out how to make money outside the structures of a normal 9 to 5.
Final thoughts
What does one stockpile up for in during a zombie apocalypse?
Everyone is probably thinking food. But one thing people often forget about is toilet paper.
With good long term thinking and planning, food can be grown. Dry goods like chickpeas, lentils, rice, and beans can last an eternity in our house. Toilet paper, however, that stuff will probably sell for hundreds on the black market if I plan my next grocery shop right.
Whatever happens, I’m sure we will all manage to survive through it like last year’s man-flus, almost hospital worthy fevers, the rising cost of living, shortage of affordable avocados, never-ending student loan repayments and whatever else we are constantly hit with.
A lot of people will go through the personal experience of a recession at some point, if not sooner or later. As humans, we tend to look at our situation through colored and biased lenses. The task of surviving everything with your sanity intact also depends on your mindset, world view and ability to step back and look at the situation for what it is.
So remember to wash your hands. Coronavirus is here and so is the recession, in addition to every other life problem that everyone else is having on a global scale.
Bad things happen on a daily basis and sometimes, you just need to keep your focus on the positive side of life to keep it all from breaking you mentally — because that’s what happens when you focus too much on the negatives.
The general media can fuel that feeling because that’s what they do for clicks, views, and sales. And they’ve been doing it for years, for as long as I can remember.
The apocalypse is here. It’s always been here, ever since the beginning of time. Now is the moment to figure out what’s most important to you and enjoy it while you’re alive.
