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this Consumer price index The 6.2% printed today is the highest printing we have seen this year. If this is the highest print we have seen in the entire cycle, I wouldn’t be surprised.There is enough ink spilled on it, I don’t want to add noise¹, Or repeat myself. Instead, I want to discuss several reasons why we seem to have such difficulty with the concept of “transient”.

We may understand it intellectually, but we find it more difficult to manage emotionally. The French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal summarized our situation through observation: “All human problems stem from the inability of humans to sit quietly in the room alone. “

In modern times, the situation is worse. The forces behind our “unable to sit quietly” include the 24/7 news cycle, Recency effect, Social media, and even FOMO.Perhaps the most important thing is the concept TonName; More specifically, the way we experience time in the modern era.

Have Here now- That’s pretty much it.² Our memories are error-prone, memories with nostalgia, error-prone, and self-editing to make ourselves look and feel better. The future is unknown and unknowable, mostly wishful thinking, often unable to foresee (after the fact) obvious things, and always completely miss unexpected things.

Moreover, we hardly exist in these parameters. We are almost absent, get bored easily, and are always looking for distractions. and”immediately” It is the best result we can hope for.

Is it weird that we have a hard time accepting the concept of ephemeral?

Our time experience is not always like this. In his book, Four thousand weeks,³ Oliver Burkeman explained that only a few centuries ago, most people did not know the concept of time. The peasants in the Middle Ages did not experience time as “an abstract entity—as a thing”, but followed the rhythm of nature. There are seasons, controlled by the movement of planets and stars or the gods, depending on your education. Day and night, winter and summer. No problem can go wrong, but don’t worry, it may pass after a period of time (or not) soon, and then we can return to normal. This is the world.

This is not the way we operate today.

Today, we have formed the idea that things like inflation may be temporary, may last for 6, 9 or 12 months, and then gradually disappear. We understand the concept of supply chain disruption and pandemic reopening. We put this idea in a broader knowledge framework and imagine how it will affect global trade, the Federal Reserve and bond markets, and even the White House. We read it, study it, process numbers, and make historical comparisons. We fully grasped this idea and archived it in our own memory.

all happen A random Monday in March.

The next day brought other data consistent with it. Then the next day, some data is higher; the next day is lower. The market took a turn for the worse, and the flow of news accelerated. Every day after that, there were some new hot topics, another meme, and a new Twitter thread. House price bidding war! Used car prices! In the quarterly earnings, the CEOs mentioned inflation. Google Trends found that inflationary searches have risen sharply. Timber prices rose (and then fell), as did the prices of coal, steel, and oil. The increase in meat prices coincides with Thanksgiving. Anecdotes of rising prices are endless. Do you know how much it costs to buy 12 gallons of milk per week? No, why the fuck should anyone know?

Day after day, news, authority, data, and noise continue to flow.

All of this is not a coincidence, in fact Confirm original paper Inflation caused by supply chain disruptions and the reopening of vaccinations after a pandemic will cause prices to soar before prices return to normal.

We sit here at Here now, With the latest CPI data released, and at a 30-year high, there is nothing in the data Confirm the paper. We understand all this, but we still-still-lack Able to sit quietly in a room alone.

Before:
The return of inflationists (May 14, 2020)

Inflation reset (June 1, 2021)

Deflation, interrupted by the spasm of inflation (June 11, 2021)

inflation

_________

1. We have repeatedly discussed why I think Inflationist It is wrong. They misunderstood the general situation of inflation, and some of it was due to partisanship.

2. David Nadig exemplifies that we experience the world with a delay of 200 milliseconds, because this is the time it takes for sensory input to travel through our nerves and be received and processed by the brain.Which makes Here now Actually Here and 200 milliseconds ago, But for the purposes of this article, we will stick to “now”.

3. Assuming you can live to be 80 years old, your life span is only more than 4,000 weeks.

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