We live in a world that feels increasingly volatile, yet our minds remain stubbornly linear. As we navigate the headlines—tensions flaring in Iran, the spectre of AI displacing labour, the crushing weight of housing affordability in Canada, and the relentless drumbeat of money printing—it is easy to succumb to a narrative of inevitable decline. We project current trends forward in straight lines, assuming that today’s pain points will simply become tomorrow’s catastrophes.

But this linear mindset is a fundamental flaw in how we process reality. It ignores the most powerful force in human history: change or innovation is exponential because economic systems and human behaviour are at least as complex as the weather. This complexity gives rise to a transformational multiplier effect—one that the linear, finite mind often cannot perceive. To compound the issue, when the mind cannot perceive or understand, it can succumb to fear, as fearful interpretations are often more accessible than complex truths.

As established above, due to our linear thinking, history teaches us that disruption is misunderstood and feared in the short term, but for those who are willing to broaden their view, disruption often proves to be beneficial in the long term. When the steam engine arrived, it didn’t just improve travel; it rewrote the geometry of civilisation. When electricity was introduced, it didn’t merely light a few rooms; it birthed entirely new industries and redefined the concept of time itself. Make no mistake, the candle maker was disrupted, jobs were lost, and yet new jobs were found in new electrified industries.

When it comes to economic history, the gloomy forecasters have been mostly wrong in any era you care to delve into. They saw the smoke and predicted the end of the world, missing the dawn of a new age. Let us repeat that: in every era, the economic forecasts of gloom and doom have been overwhelmingly wrong.

Consider the current anxiety surrounding Artificial Intelligence. The fear is palpable: machines will take our jobs, rendering human effort obsolete. This is a classic linear projection. It assumes that the demand for human labour is fixed and that technology only subtracts from it. However, history shows that technology primarily transforms the nature of work rather than eliminating it. The loom didn’t end weaving; it shifted the focus from manual weaving to design and management. Similarly, and looking once again at history, it’s highly unlikely that AI will replace every worker on the planet as feared; in fact, for many that have embraced it, their output has been amplified. The strategic thinker has been empowered and freed from rote calculation to focus on the deeply human elements of trust, empathy, and complex judgement that are non-negotiables to managing complex business and life decisions.

The transition will be complicated and disruptive, just like the Industrial Revolution, but the destination is a society capable of solving problems we currently deem practically impossible. This same logic applies to our economic anxieties. In Canada, the affordability crisis feels insurmountable. When combined with the perception of endless money printing, the linear conclusion is hyperinflation or total collapse. But this narrow-minded view misses the deflationary power of innovation. Technology drives down the cost of goods and services, often faster than monetary expansion can inflate prices. The smartphone, once a luxury, is now a utility that costs a fraction of its original price while offering infinite capability. This is why people who misplace their phone look as disconcerted as if they’d lost their car!

Likewise, if we look at energy, all we have to do is look at recent history and how directional drilling and fracking transformed the US from a net importer to a net exporter of energy while the linear forecasters predicted doom for North American energy. The linear mind sees a wall; the exponential mind sees a door.

The challenge for all of us in taking care of our families is to stop forecasting the future based on the past’s slope. We must embrace first-principles thinking: what is fundamentally true about human ingenuity? What is the nature of progress? The answer is that humans adapt, create, and overcome. This is the story of history.

We live in the safest, opportunity-laden, and most prosperous time in human history, but the news media has one job: to not let you believe it, so you will stay tuned in to the "news". The story of prosperity rarely makes headlines: steady economic growth, rising incomes, and new businesses opening every day are seldom front-page news. But stories of layoffs, market crashes, or business closures quickly capture attention. We know this to be true, but fear nags at our minds, so we keep ingesting scary reports and the doomscroll.

The current turbulence is not the end of the story; it is the growing pains of a new chapter. By refusing to be trapped in linear thinking, we position ourselves not as victims of change, but as those able to participate in the transformation. Keep enough cash for tomorrow, invest your long-term money for growth, and invest when stocks go on sale. The story has not changed.

Randy, Ian, and Harrison