The Choice of Generational Wealth
Every generation has one, all-important choice to get right. Get this one choice correct and you’ll stay ahead of life’s wealth and opportunity curve. Get this choice wrong and you’ll surely live a life of hardship at the bottom of the financial totem pole. What’s your generation’s one, all-important choice? This is what we explore.
The Power of Conscious Choice
What sets human beings apart from all other living creatures is the power of conscious choice. The choices of other animals, unlike humans, are driven by their instincts without any ability to do anything about them. If instinct dictates that they should run, they run without that activity being a conscious choice. This sets human beings on the highest known rung of the evolutionary ladder. It is the power of conscious choice that has led to human beings conquering and ruling over every other known species. However, with great power comes even greater responsibility.
An animal cannot truly make wrong choices, as the choice is not theirs to make in the first place; however, humans have to carefully consider if the choices they are making are correct, because each choice is accompanied by an ultimate outcome. While the gravity of each choice we make as humans is different, we all know that the consequences of making the wrong choice in some situations can be catastrophic.
It is my belief the every generation has one such choice they must get right. While those who are from their generation don’t have to get every choice in their life correct, there is an all-important one that will define the ultimate success or failure of those in that generation. Those who don’t know this choice are bound to get it wrong and will be doomed to a life of hardship, ceaseless work and financial discrimination. Those who are aware of the key choice will be the elites of their generation.
Let’s go over each of the all-important generational choices that had to be made in the past. We will end with the one, all-important choice which must be made today.
The Generational Choices
1) Late 1800s to Early 1900s. The great choice my great grandfather and the people from his generation had to get right was acquiring a skill. Somehow, someway you had to figure out how to become skilled at something useful. That skill could have been carpentry, or shoemaking. It could have been cooking, cleaning, farming, house painting or any one of the slew of skills in demand at that time. If you made the choice to become skilled at something useful, you were sure to live well beyond the means of those who failed to make that choice. Your life would be far more comfortable than those without this properly made choice. The ‘haves’ from my grandfather’s generation were all skilled workmen. The ‘have-nots’ were the unskilled.
2) Early 1900s to Mid 1900s. The great choice my grandparents (the next generation) had to make was that of education. The skills market became saturated, so to further distinguish yourself from the majority, you had to find a way to become “educated.” Those from my grandparents’ era who managed to make the choice to become college educated were practically guaranteed to live life on better terms than anyone without that education. They got better jobs, with better benefits and received and enjoyed higher standings in their communities. This is not necessarily the case today as this is somewhat of an old, outdated choice, but life was as good as it gets for anyone with education in my grandparents’ era. Now I’m fully aware that many did not have the proper means to make this choice, but as you will see, each new choice becomes measurably more difficult to make. For each new generation, the bar is raised much higher.
3) 1960s to 1990s. Let’s fast forward to my parents’ generation. The choice you had to get right in their era was home ownership. Property. If you got this choice wrong during this time, you were truly left out of the wealth game. This era offered one of the first times in history in which ordinary people (not just business moguls and titans) could become millionaires. However, you had to get the choice of home ownership right to take advantage of it. My mother bought a home for $3,000 down in the early 1970s. She would go on to sell it for over $850,000 20 plus years later. This was the power of this choice and it was made by millions of people, fortunately. In fact, this choice was made so easy and available that it led to the 2008–2009 housing collapse that brought the world’s entire financial system to its knees. But that’s another topic. The point is, if you did not get the home ownership choice of this generation right, you lived a life at the lower rungs of the financial totem pole.
4) 1990s to 2020. This is my generation and if you know anything about me, you’ll know the choice I believed I had to make to carry the torch into the next era: The stock market. Those who did not see that the new choice became investing, missed out on one of the greatest wealth generating periods the world has ever witnessed. More people became wealthier via stock investing than any other thing that every existed before it. Mutual funds, ETFs (exchange traded funds) retirement plans such as IRAs (in America), pension funds and the like gave millions of people access to this choice. Yet many more millions did not make this choice in my era and as a result fell far behind the wealth curve, helping to widen the every growing wealth gap to epic proportions. This choice, investing in the stock market, was the most rewarding the world had every seen. But let me make this clear. This does not mean that home ownership or college degrees or even skills became irrelevant. All choices from the past maintain some degree of relevance throughout all the subsequent ages. However, the new choice always dwarfs all prior ones by an order of magnitude. The benefits that accrue from making the correct choice get bigger and bigger, while the consequences for not doing so become more and more severe. So if this was the world’s biggest choice ever, what could possibly dwarf this for the next generation, the generation my children belong to? Well, let’s take a look.
5) 2020 and Beyond. I consider myself very fortunate to have be born during a time that gave me the ability to make the choice that belonged to my grandparents, my parents and the choice that belonged to my generation. I can truly say that I have benefited greatly, more than I ever hoped for, from all three. I am grateful for that. But, I am fully aware that the choice that lies before us today, this new choice that actually belongs to the generation of my children, will be so epic, it’s difficult if not impossible to fathom. This one special choice today, this one move which I believe has the power to raise the level of wealth and equality of my children to levels never before seen in history is none other than Bitcoin. Skills development and education, choices that were difficult to make in past generations are today available to all for free, thanks to the internet. However, after the bubble of 2008–2009, something broke. Homeownership, while easier to attain before the bubble, has now become near impossible for the generation of my children to acquire. The system was supposed to make property ownership for my children and their children easier to attain, just as the internet made skillsets, education and stock market access widely available and practically free to those of my generation.
For the first time in history, the next generation is not better off. For the first time in the history of the world, my children’s generation does not have better opportunities than I did. Young adults today do not have better options laid out before them and they do not have a brighter future than I enjoyed, unless they make the right choice: Bitcoin.
I truly believe that Bitcoin has come on the scene to correct a great wrong in our society, to fix what is broken. It has come to give back was has been stolen from my children and their children, the right to property ownership. All life is geared toward expanding one’s property beyond the first property we are born with, our bodies. But Bitcoin is the ultimate property. It is the scarcest property, the rarest and the most universally available, making it the best property to ever exist. What’s more, it’s digital and we are moving deeper and deeper into a digital society.
Bitcoin is digital gold. It’s digital property. It’s digital equities, art and collectibles. In short, it is ‘digital value’ that is programmed to go up over time forever. Those who don’t make the choice of owning some Bitcoin today will see the same fate of those companies in the mid to late 1990s who didn’t believe that the internet (a digital way to do business) was a thing. Value is being digitized. There is no getting around this. From written letters, to books, to education, to music, to movies, to even dating and our photos, everything we hold dear and valuable in this world has been or is in the process of being dematerialized, digitized. Only one thing up until now escaped this massive wave of change, financial value.
Financial value remained untouched by this great digital transformation, but that has all changed now thanks to Bitcoin. Bitcoin has arrived to dematerialize all financial value and make that value accessible to all who would choose it. Bitcoin is better than all the choices before it. It’s better than stocks. It’s better than physical property which is taxed, cannot be moved and is not free from confiscation. It’s better than gold. Bitcoin is the only thing that can free and liberate a generation who has been unfairly left out of the wealth generation game, by no fault of their own. We messed things up for my children’s generation. Bitcoin will fix it, but only if it’s chosen by them, only if it’s chosen by you. Make this choice and your family’s future will be free. Fail to make this all important choice and the consequences will make the failings of past generations look like child’s play.
This I believe with all my heart and therefore share it with you, freely.
#HODL
