Not sure how many years you have on me. I'm 64.

I understood enough about debt, at 20, that when the country had a choice between Carter saying to put on a sweater, versus Reagan saying to put it on the credit card, the country was fucked.

My situation is that as I've spent my life in various aspects of agriculture, mostly raising and training race horses, but the last 8 working on old farm machinery, is that life has been a constant reality check. I do something wrong and something gets hurt, so there is no problem admitting when I'm wrong and trying something else. Trial and error.

It's our ability to process and store information that might be our strength, but it is equally a weakness, as those grains of sand at the center of the pearl become outdated long before the reality check arrives and the longer it takes, the bigger the crash.

Shut up and calculate becomes garbage in, garbage out, when the premises are flawed.

Here is my most recent essay, picking apart mental modeling;

https://johnbrodixmerrymanjr.medium.com/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-western-mind-906dc73cffe2