03.08.26
Return from holiday · concerns about the future
I have returned from a wonderful, restorative holiday.
I had a chance to do very little, spend time with the family, have important conversations with my wife, and read, which I haven’t been doing enough of lately, and reading really is the key to everything. I remember Werner Herzog once being asked what advice he would give to young filmmakers, he said “Read. Read. Read”. I’ve certainly found that to be good advice throughout my life, there is no other source than reading for inspiration, for developing your mind, for developing your intellectual personality, taste and indentity. And reading is not on phones, it’s not scrolling, and it’s not bullshit. It’s books. And I hadn’t done enough of it recently.
Almost all the archive that I’m going to get came in while I was away. There are some outstanding bits and pieces here and there; if they dribble in, fine, if not, I’ll cope. I have most of what I need, including most of the critical materials. I’m ready to restart the edit.
The infernal heat persists. I hit wildfires while I was away, which, of course, was alarming: the shape of the landscape, everything parched, and brown, rather than green; rolling vistas of brown, dusty earth where fields usually are. Down here at my photo spot the sea is flat and heavy, shifting slowly under the weight of the sun.
It’s high tourist season, school holidays, and I was in a tourist spot, but there were very few people around, far fewer than I would have expected. In a way, it was great - it made for a light, airy break, we didn’t have to queue for anything. But on the other hand, it suggested to me that people are just not spending money. It does feel like some form of reckoning is coming, the heat feels as if it has a metaphorical quality, there is a sense of gathering portents.
I’ve been speaking to other guys I know who run businesses, and all of them are fairly glum, reporting that revenues are down, things seem difficult, costs are ever increasing. These are headwaters that I recognise from previous collapses. I remember 2008 very well, and the vibe, the portents were similar.
2008 was my first one. I didn’t understand about how to read the movements in the water, but I felt them, and I remember asking older entrepreneurs who were around at the time - it feels like something’s coming? “Yeah”, they would affirm.
We were about to launch a second business, with a new product line. My primary business had been running for several years by that point, and we’d been working on the new one for about four years. I remember sensing those disquieting signals and wondering whether we should be pressing ahead with this new company at all. Partly as a consequence of the sunk cost fallacy, and partly through inexperience, we did press ahead. It was a mistake, the 2008 crash came and that company failed.
I’m now much more attuned to the signals, and I’ve got that sense right now, I think there’s going to be some form of big downturn. Particularly given the rumbling disturbances in the general atmosphere - the continued global political instability, combined with whatever’s going to come from AI, together with a climate crisis long-threatened and which has obviously now arrived. There is troubling smoke on the horizon.
Ultimately, what can one individual do? I suppose you have to cut your cloth, but I’m conscious of the threats as I make plans for the future.
I had some more business ideas while I was on holiday, which I added to the list. I’m going to set aside some time and act on one of them this morning - a kind of wild and crazy idea which should only take a very limited amount of time to set up and determine whether it’s worth anything. I won’t specify what it is in this journal just yet, but the general theme is to run a test to see if I can stake a limited amount of capital in a particular area and make a fairly predictable return in a short amount of time. If the answer is “yes”, then I will expand it from there. Anyway, an interesting experiment I plan to run before getting back into the edit.