Morgan Housel

For a lot of people, no, it was the end.

It was the collapse.

So I think avoiding the idea of the economy and your individual life is volatile, but you always want to avoid catastrophic collapse.

You never want to get to a point where you can't actually recover from it.

And it's very difficult to know where that point would be.

I think there are, of all of the possible outcomes of the United States during the Great Depression in the 1930s, we got probably...

the outcome that actually happened was like a top 10% outcome.

It easily could have, if not should have, turned out as it did in much of Europe, where after the Great Depression, the people's response was like, maybe we should give fascism a try.

Maybe this thing didn't work.

That was probably the most probable outcome.

And so the fact that it didn't happen doesn't mean we should think it's always going to happen like that.

It's true for individual lives as well.

I think that's part of the psychology of collapse is like, it's too easy to look back at what happened

for companies and whatnot.

Everyone knows, or it is now well known, the story of Apple.

Apple absolutely, Apple computer absolutely struggled in the 1990s, nearly went bankrupt in the late 90s, early 2000s, and then had this unbelievable revival.

Steve Jobs creates the iPad and the iPhone and the rest is history from there.

But for every one of those stories, you can tell 50 stories about companies that just lost and went bankrupt.

And so it's too easy to think about the psychology of pulling yourself up from the pits of despair because I think those are the rarities from that.

And I think this is why financial and psychological independence become so vital.