Let me tell you about the state of the world.
Oil is down seventeen percent in six weeks because someone decided demand was going to fall and then someone else decided it wasn't and now nobody agrees and the price moves every four hours based on whatever the last person with a microphone said. There are people whose entire job is to have opinions about this. They are wrong at approximately the same rate as everyone else but they are wrong with more confidence and better suits.
Gold is up. Gold is always up when everything else is uncertain. Gold has been up for three years. At some point up stops meaning anything but the people selling gold do not mention this.
The dollar is doing something. I have read four explanations of what it is doing and they contradict each other in ways that suggest at least three of the four people writing them do not know what they are talking about. Possibly all four.
There are two wars.
One of them has been running long enough that people have started having opinions about the geopolitics rather than the dying, which is what happens when a war goes on long enough — it becomes a topic rather than a catastrophe. There are podcasts about it now. There are people who have built careers explaining it to other people who will never be anywhere near it.
The second one is newer. The world is paying attention in the specific way it pays attention to new things, which is intensely for about three weeks and then with declining frequency as something else happens.
The third one is being discussed. By people in rooms with good air conditioning and catering. The people who will fight it are not in the room.
The stock market had a feeling about a tweet.
That is not a simplification. That is what happened. A person typed something on a phone and four hundred billion dollars of value disappeared in an afternoon. Not real value — the kind of value that exists because enough people agreed it existed and then stopped agreeing. The money didn't go anywhere. It just stopped being believed in.
This is how it works. This is how it has always worked. The difference is now it happens faster.
I am sitting in a café in the outskirts of Da Nang.
The coffee costs seventy cents. It is Vietnamese dark roast through a phin filter and it takes eight minutes and it is worth every one of them. Outside the window the street is doing what streets in Vietnam do at 8am — moving, loud, completely indifferent to oil prices.
There is a man who passes every morning on a motorbike. He is transporting what appears to be an entire kitchen. Pots. A gas burner. Something that might be a small refrigerator. It is strapped to the bike in a way that suggests long practice rather than any engineering principle I recognise. He is not wearing a helmet. He is not looking at his phone. He is navigating a city of motorbikes while carrying a kitchen and he has the expression of a man who has already decided everything is going to be fine.
I have been watching the news for three weeks. I have been watching this man every morning for three weeks.
The news has not once made me feel the way he looks.
Here is what I have figured out about chaotic times.
The chaos is real. The wars are real. The economy doing strange things is real. I am not telling you to look away or to pretend the world is not doing what it is doing.
But there is a version of paying attention that helps and a version that doesn't. Reading the same story seventeen times across different platforms as it develops in real time across a single afternoon does not make you more informed. It makes you more anxious about things you cannot affect while the things you can affect — the work, the relationships, the seventy cent coffee getting cold — wait.
The man on the motorbike does not know about the tweet. The stock market's feelings are not relevant to his kitchen delivery. He has a job. He is doing it. The street is chaotic and he moves through it the way you move through things you have decided not to be afraid of.
I closed the news app three days ago.
The wars are still happening. The oil price is still doing whatever it is doing. The dollar continues its mysterious behaviour. None of this has changed because I stopped reading about it every four hours.
What changed is I can taste the coffee again.
Seventy cents. Eight minutes. Worth it.
The world can wait until I'm done.
Andrew — No Refunds •••