If you feel pessimistic about where this country is headed right now, I understand. I feel it too.
I follow American and global news – financial and otherwise – about as closely as anyone. I see the political divisiveness that seems to touch every conversation. I see the labor market data, the inflation numbers, and the very real affordability problem facing families who work hard and still feel like they are falling behind. I see a technological revolution in artificial intelligence that could reshape, and in some cases displace, large parts of our workforce in ways none of us can fully predict yet.
Those are not imaginary problems. They are not media inventions. Anyone who tells you there is nothing to worry about is not paying attention and anyone who tries to sell you certainty about exactly how all of this plays out is selling you something. I don’t know exactly how the future unfolds. But no one does.
But when I sit down, think deeply, and play out as many combinations and permutations as I can for how the rest of my lifetime in America actually unfolds – the good versions, the bad versions, and the messy ones in between – I come out in the same place every time: I am still optimistic. Not naively optimistic. Not optimistic because it is comfortable. Optimistic because the evidence, over any period that actually matters historically, points that way.
Every generation has believed it was living through the end
Put yourself in America in 1861, as the country tore itself apart in a Civil War. Or in 1917 and again in 1941, sending a generation overseas to fight world wars with no guarantee they would come home and no guarantee the country they left would be recognizable when they did. Or in 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression. Banks were failing, unemployment was at levels we can barely comprehend today, there were breadlines in American cities. Seriously.
If you had lived through any of those moments, pessimism would not have been irrational. It would have been the most reasonable conclusion available to you. The people living through them did not know how the story ended. We do. And that perspective is the only advantage we have when we judge our own moment.
At Berkshire Hathaway’s 2020 annual meeting, Warren Buffett put it plainly, recalling that he was convinced America would prevail during World War II, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, after 9/11, and during the financial crisis:
“Nothing can basically stop America. We faced tougher problems and the American miracle, the American magic, has always prevailed and it will do so again.”
That is not some slogan preached by a politician. This country has endured difficulty in every era of its existence. There has never been a point in American history when struggle was not relevant.
The long record is better lives, not just higher markets
It is easy in a hard week or a hard year, to lose sight of how much better ordinary life actually is today, financially and in standard of living, than it was for the generations who endured those earlier crises.
Buffett made that point with his own life as the measuring stick. In his 2015 letter to Berkshire shareholders, he noted that America’s real GDP per capita (adjusted for inflation) was roughly six times what it had been in 1930, the year he was born. Six times, in one lifetime, through a depression, world wars, assassinations, stagflation, and financial crises.
He made the same point about investing in 1942, when, as an 11-year-old, he bought his first stock in the spring of that year while the United States was suffering heavy losses in World War II. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 99 on the day he has often recalled. His lesson from that moment has never changed: “Never bet against America.”
Most of us will not measure our lives in Dow points. We will measure them in whether our families are safer, healthier, better educated, and better equipped than we were; whether the tools at our fingertips let an ordinary person learn more, build more, and reach further than was possible a generation ago. By that measure, the trend is not ambiguous, even when the headlines are.
Competition is the point, not the problem
I also spend a lot of my time reading about American businesses – how they actually operate, where they are struggling, and what they have to change to survive. And they do struggle. Costs rise, customers change, technology makes a good business obsolete faster than it used to. Some companies adapt and some don’t.
That is not a sign the system is broken, rather that the system is working. A competitive society is supposed to be demanding. It rewards the businesses — and the people — who serve others better, who learn faster, and who refuse to assume that what worked yesterday will work tomorrow. Difficulty has always been the price of admission. What changes is only the form it takes.
Artificial intelligence will be demanding in exactly that way. It will change jobs, eliminate some, and create others we cannot yet describe well. That transition will be painful for real people, and we should say so honestly. But every major tool in American history — electrification, the automobile, the computer, the internet — arrived with the same fear that it would leave ordinary workers behind, and every one of them ultimately expanded what ordinary workers could do. The tools at our fingertips today are more powerful than any generation before us has ever held. What we do with them is still unknown.
Fix what can be fixed, and endure the rest
One of the most useful disciplines I have taken from Buffett and Munger, is not a stock tip. It is a way of dividing the world into two piles: the things you can control, and the things you cannot. And then acting accordingly: “You fix what can be fixed, and what can’t be fixed you endure.”
I cannot control the political temperature of the country, the Federal Reserve, the inflation print next month, or the pace at which AI changes industries. Worrying about those things is wasted energy.
What I can control is smaller: how hard I work, how honestly I deal with people, how carefully I make decisions with other people’s trust, how much I learn, how I treat my family and my fellow citizens, and whether I keep building when building is hard. Buffett’s famous rule for markets, to be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful, is really the same idea applied to temperament. Don’t let the mood of the moment make your long-term decisions for you.
Endurance is not passivity. It is how you stay in the game long enough for compounding to do its work.
Inflation-proof your own abilities
There is one advantage that does not depend on the economy at all and it is what has put me in position to start a business, build networks, and learn and adapt efficiently: the character traits and abilities a person builds in themselves. No election, no inflation print, and no new technology can take them from you. Most importantly, they compound for a lifetime.
Think of it as inflation-proofing your own abilities. Each of us makes a decision, every single day, to improve, to learn, to make mistakes and absorb the lesson, to be intelligent about the choices in front of us, to communicate effectively, to lead others and be liked doing it, to bring great energy and give incredible effort, to take calculated risks, and to work toward mastery of whatever our craft is. Those traits hold their value in every environment, no matter how gloomy the future looks. On the hypothetical chess board of the years ahead, improving yourself is always the best move available.
That means being genuinely willing to improve on the weaknesses you already know you have. And it means hunting down the ones you don’t. This requires setting your ego aside and actually receiving the feedback of the people around you. It is the only way to get better.
The worst quality I see around me is not a lack of talent or opportunity. It is the stagnation of people who become so down or so sorry for themselves, that they quit on constant learning and improvement altogether. I have an enormous amount left to learn, and I know it. But I am actively trying, putting in the effort to the best of my ability, every day. Mastery of the craft may take a decade. It may take a lifetime. I may never fully reach it. The willingness and the effort are the point.
Twenty to thirty years from now
If I project out twenty or thirty years, I believe our kids and grandkids will live better lives than we do today. Not because progress is automatic, but because the raw materials for it are all still here: a competitive system that rewards adaptation, technology and innovation that keep expanding what is possible, and, most importantly, ordinary Americans who still want to succeed, provide for their families, and build something that lasts.
Good initiatives have a way of prevailing in this country because enough people, in enough places, keep choosing to do the work in front of them well. I am optimistic about my fellow Americans not in the abstract, but because I meet them: in uniform, in business, in my own community. The desire to succeed has not left this country. It is visible everywhere, if you are willing to look past the worst parts of the present moment.
We can endure what is in front of us, and we will prevail through it. Not because history guarantees it, but because Americans, generation after generation, have done the enduring themselves.
The risk I keep coming back to
Optimism should not mean blindness. I want to name a risk I see in America that I believe should be addressed sooner rather than later, among the others I have mentioned: wealth inequality.
We now speak seriously about trillionaires and the list of billionaires grows longer every year. At the same time, the lowest and poorest Americans fall further behind with each passing decade, and younger generations watch the basic building blocks of a life - a home, an education, the ability to start a family, etc - drift further out of reach, while wealthier families claim a larger and larger share of the nation’s resources.
There is a familiar argument that the rich worked hard for their money and that taking any of it away would be “socialist.” I understand the argument, and I believe success should be rewarded, not punished. It is the engine of everything I have praised in this piece. But I also believe there is a point where that argument stops being reasonable. If you are fortunate enough to reach that highest level, I hold firmly that you carry a duty - internal, if not societal - to lift up your fellow citizens. How that duty gets fulfilled is a whole other topic. But a fortune one family could never spend in a thousand lifetimes, sitting beside working families who fall further behind every year, is not a balance a healthy country should be comfortable with.
To be honest with you, I do not have a definite solution, and it is a difficult problem I will need to keep thinking about. But at what point is enough, enough? How do we redirect resources that one person could literally never use toward the people who truly need them, to lift society as a whole? I think it is important to ask out loud.
Overall, I look forward to what the future holds. I am eager to see how the current development of innovative technology shapes the future of the greatest country in the world, how the standard of living for human civilization is lifted up as society remains focused on progressing further, and optimistic that the world we know today will be largely better for future generations.
Thanks for reading!
Kyle Delmendo
Founder & CEO, Time Horizon LLC