Happy New Year, my friends.
I like to think we do a decent job of forecasting the future over here at Surviving Tomorrow headquarters.
Only time will tell.
This article is written in declaratives, but of course, it’s simply speculative.
Circle back in a year and see how our predictions fared!
Let’s start with the good news first:
1. We don’t all die in a global nuclear war
Nukes are for Boomers.
Thank heavens for mutually-assured destruction on a planetary scale. There are more than 15,000+ nuclear warheads on planet Earth, but clear through the end of 2022, the nine nuclear nations will continue their good work of keeping planet-destroying weapons out of the hands of rogue actors… for now.
This is where we cut to a banger of a quote from Albert Einstein that only a small percentage of the population will understand:
“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
Luckily, WWIII won’t happen in 2022.
2. The stock market doesn’t crash
That’s 2023’s job.
We’ll see moderate growth in the stock price of vampire corporations and the corrupted real estate market — though certainly not in real, productive, contributive growth.
While the Great Quit and the booming union negotiations will provide some temporary relief for union members, overall there will be no meaningful rise in workers’ real wages when you factor in crushing inflation.
3. Bitcoin hits seventeen billion trillion dollars
Just kidding.
The crypto crackdown will continue as:
a.) Central banks see the real threat it now poses to their corrupt money monopoly.
b.) They get serious about launching their dystopian surveillance coins.
Also, bafflingly, Tether will continue to keep its fraud alive (and likely won’t get indicted as a $60+ billion crime until after the greater market crashes.)
4. The metaverse is a flop*
*For now.
Adults just don’t want to “live” in virtual reality, or have the virtual world invade their lives via augmented reality.
From a historical perspective, the pornography industry typically innovates first. (Think: pop-ups, pop-downs, pop-unders, secure payments, age verification.) And even porn hasn’t seen widespread VR uptake. Plus Google glasses were a huge bust and Oculus isn’t winning over the 35-plussers (basically, people with real lives.)
Accordingly, Meta/Facebook/Instagram/etc will have to keep doing what it’s been doing for years to create markets for its life-threatening products:
Target children.
5. Inflation doesn’t go away
Yay money printing, overpopulation, and resource depletion.
Real inflation including assets has already exceeded 10% for the past two years in a row, and it will continue through 2022.
If you need it, buy it now, because it will be more expensive tomorrow.
Also: “Transitory” enters the lexicon as a joke word. (Think: “My girlfriend and I didn’t break up, our relationship is just transitory.”)
Surviving Tomorrow encourages all readers to ignore the fake government numbers and calculate their own personalized inflation numbers.
6. Supply chain challenges continue to plague humanity
And some of them will be straight-up manufactured by Ch!na as they test their ability to constrict supply flows in order to extract wealth from the West.
They’re pure geniuses, folks — practicing monopoly-capitalism abroad to enforce fake communism at home.
The tiniest of silver linings?
There’s a microscopic opportunity for localism to make a reemergence if ya’ll would stop shopping at Walmart.
7. Republicans win the mid-terms
Not by the usual landslide, but enough to freak the deluded Dems.
(The GOP is also going to take the Presidency in 2024, whether they win or not.)
8. More predator corporations move to the Subscription Serfdom Model
Toyota recently began retroactively charging customers $8/month to start their own cars, and we’ll see more companies dip their claws into the not-for-sale model in 2022.
Under subscription serfdom, it’s only a matter of time before you won’t be able to afford a house, car, or mattress.
9. Airbnb continues to ruin families and communities
Thanks to its unsustainable grow-forever business model, Airbnb hosts will continue to outbid working families for residential homes, which will make sale prices rise, rentals disappear, and the few remaining rentals skyrocket in price.
We won’t see the widespread smashing of windows and torching of Airbnbs quite yet, but it will eventually be the thing to do, like it was with Jehovah’s Witness buildings in the seventies.
Over on CNN+, their soon-to-be #1 host, Scott Galloway — despite his genuine care for the next generation — will remain publicly silent about one of his favorite companies. But late at night, while cuddling his adorable dog, he’ll quietly start to realize what we already know:
That Airbnb is a global threat to affordable homeownership and rentership.
10. No more lockdowns
Multinational corporations made a multi-trillion-dollar killing during the lockdowns, but even their rented politicians and privatized media corporations won’t be able to muster up enough fear to keep everyone indoors for another year.
We’re already seeing revolt in Australia and within Boris Johnson’s UK Conservative party, and if any government is stupid enough to try to place its citizens on house arrest over an infectious-but-mild variant, there will be revolts in the street.
Sadly, even without lockdowns…
11. Loneliness and depression increase
Because we’re engineering our society for loneliness.
After all, it’s far more profitable to divide and conquer your customers so they all stay home and spend online. No one makes money from a walk in the wild.
Between the loss of restaurants, cinemas, shopping, outdoor play, mass gatherings, and human-to-human sex, we’re seeing a long-term decline in face-to-face human interaction.
Soon, being together will be a radical act.
12. Social media continues to destroy society
Congress will do nothing meaningful to stop Facebook.
War criminal Mark Zuckerberg will make some basic tweaks to his algorithm in the wake of Frances Haugen’s important disclosures, knowing full-well his must-make-more-profits algorithm stands at odds with civil discourse and democracy.
Expect social media to continue to divide society as the machine generates more extremists on both sides of the political aisle.
13. Ch!na continues to dominate America
America and Ch!na are already at war, but one side doesn’t know it yet.
Though they’ll have to spend a lot of 2022 shoring up their crumbling foundations (IE massive debt and a real estate bubble that’s ready to explode), expect Ch!nese global domination to keep more or less on schedule, with additional port purchases, debt traps, surveillance rollouts, and economic colonization of developing countries.
Maybe they deserve to run the world…
14. The climate crisis continues to worsen
Manhattan won’t be underwater by the end of 2022, but we’ll continue to:
Spew heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
Poison our rivers.
Fill the oceans with microplastics.
Frack the foundations of our landmasses and ocean beds.
Deforest tens of millions of acres (roughly the size of Panama.)
Rape the soil another half-inch, leaving us with just a few dozen more natural harvests before we have to move to synthetic food production.
The world’s largest polluters will, of course, continue to play their massive game of misdirection by shaming the middle class into not eating meat, using plastic straws, heating with woodstoves, driving fast, or taking baths.
But at least three more people will wise up to their con.
15. Debt increases
And not just Federal debt, which is a given.
We’re talking about personal consumer debt.
In 2022, people will burn through their Covid savings runway and get back to tapping their credit cards as they return to semi-normal commercial life.
After the Republicans win the mid-terms there will be no more free handouts, which will force many people back to work, which will cue corporations to push back against unions and resist real wage increases.
16. Global democracy remains in decline for the sixteenth consecutive year
Freedom House will release its annual report and it will contain more of the same — increasing authoritarianism across the planet.
Yet, sheeplike citizens will keep voting for corporate-captured mainstream parties instead of defunding the corporations who bankroll the sociopathic politicians that execute the will of private interests.
Weep for us, Athens, for we held your dream in the palm of our hand and smothered it to death.
17. The rich get richer
While elites won’t add another $5.5 trillion to their net worth in the year ahead, they will likely add $2+ trillion as the markets continue to ride a wave of inflation, rising consumer prices, and the last of 2021’s printed money.
America will go yet another year without a democratic wealth tax, with groveling billionaire sycophants continuing to scream that anything less than unlimited wealth accumulation is socialism.
18. The poor get poorer
Last year, the British National Health Service (NHS) got a 1% pay raise.
But real inflation was 10+%, so they actually got a 9% pay cut.
In 2022, food, transportation, and especially housing prices will rise, and while many people will receive the tiniest of pay raises, they will be significantly poorer in real relative wealth.
Several million people will also fall out of the job market due to automation, monopolization, and financialization — made economically inefficient — never to return to the workforce for the rest of their lives. As a knock-on effect of permanent poverty, American drug addiction will continue to claim more lives than 2021, as will suicide.
19. Governments desperately try to stave off a crash
After temporarily slowing down the money printer in a weak attempt to slow down inflation, the markets will react poorly (read: numbers go down) and corporations will push their rented politicians to do something.
Yet, the big banks see the writing on the wall, and push a counter-narrative to their rented politicians. The result will be a mishmash of conflicting economic maneuvers, crazy risk-taking, and fiscal decisions that will baffle seasoned economists, Wall Street, and Main Street alike.
If the market sees a full quarter or more of losses, expect the Fed to re-start up the money printer late in 2022, rather than doing the right thing and letting the whole house of cards burn to the ground in a reset to sanity.
20. Housing becomes increasingly unaffordable for renters
“Nobody gets seconds until everyone’s had firsts” apparently doesn’t apply to shelter.
Thanks to Airbnb, second house-owners, land-lorders, and institutional investors, the rental market will continue to evaporate, forcing working renters to surrender a far greater portion of their hard-earned wealth to passive extractors.
And that’s for the “lucky” renters who can find any places to rent in their area.
For the bottom of society, it simply means hundreds of thousands more people will end up on the streets while former family homes sit empty for much of the year. Wealthy people will continue to leave homeless-filled cities like Los Angeles, pretending “not to understand” exactly why there are more people on the streets now than at any point since the Great Depression.
21. Homeownership becomes increasingly unaffordable without massive debt
House prices won’t rise as quickly as they did during the Covid flight to the suburbs, but the same purchasers who are outbidding renters will continue to dominate middle-class working folks.
Out of desperation, millions of young-ish families will try to pole-vault the massive chasm into homeownership, loading themselves with multi-six-figure debt, effectively wage-enslaving themselves for forty years to a bank that simply printed digital credit into their bank accounts.
22. Most people find a way to carry on
Because every human being is a miracle.
I met a woman when I was in Transnistria — the dystopian half-nation between Moldova and Ukraine that’s controlled by the Russians — who showed me the scar on her chest where her husband tried to stab her in the heart before burning their house down and abandoning her and their two children. She still had the fortitude to smile.
I’ve been to North Korea, where I witnessed malnourished children drawing water by hand from mud wells. I didn’t see a single piece of wildlife in five days — no birds, nor rabbits, nor squirrels, nor rodents — because they’ve all been eaten. Yet our Korean brothers and sisters soldier on.
I’ve visited the largest garbage dump in Africa, where thousands of men, women, and children spend their entire lives digging through the trash for anything of value. Do they know how precious and strong they are?
It’s awe-inspiring how resilient human beings can be.
It’s also scary when you realize that predator corporations know it, too.
They know how much more life can still be pressed out of the middle class.
On a personal note…
Baby Concord will take his first steps, and his first spoken phrase will be either “corporate corruption” or “sic semper tyrannis.”
Surviving Tomorrow, which grew to 15,000 followers in this its first year, will grow to 50,000+ followers as its wonderful and intelligent readers consistently and purposefully clap, share, and strongly insist that all their friends and family join the conversation and follow along.
In conclusion
Trajectory is everything, my dear friends.
Insanity, as you know, is doing the same things and expecting different results.
As long as we keep buying products from the same corporations, incinerating our time on the same extremist-creating social media sites, and voting for the same corporate-captured political parties, we’ll keep going where we’re already headed:
Democratic destruction, ecological collapse, and economic irrelevance.
Thanks for reading Surviving Tomorrow.
All my love,
