It is January 2026. If you look at the stock market, we just finished a year of record growth. If you look at the real world, however, the picture is very different.
Since the start of the year, I have been watching the global stage with a sense of dread. The potential breakup of NATO, the escalating tensions regarding China and Taiwan, the grinding continuation of the invasion of Ukraine and the flashpoints involving the US, Israel, and Iran. I see AI displacing jobs at a rate the unemployment office can’t track, and climate change accelerating faster than our infrastructure can handle.
As an autistic person, my brain works on pattern recognition. I don’t see the world as a solid, immutable thing; I see it as a loose handshake of social norms that we all agree to pretend are permanent. I know how easily that handshake can be broken. I still mask up for Covid because the science of risk hasn’t changed, even if society’s patience for it has. I see the cracks where others see pavement.
When you see cracks, you don’t just stand there. You act. You prepare.
So I spent December figuring out how to buy gold on the ASX. It turned out to be surprisingly easy. I wasn’t trying to get rich; I was trying to insure myself against a world that feels incredibly fragile. A world where the stock market and reality have stopped talking to each other.
And because I care about my friends, I wanted to tell them.
I didn’t tell them what to do. I didn’t say “sell everything.” I simply tried to open a conversation about global instability and mention that a common risk-mitigation strategy (allocating 5-15% of a portfolio to gold) was accessible to them.
I was met with complete, uncomfortable silence. Not disagreement, just erasure.
When I finally pressed a friend on why they wouldn’t engage, they shut me down with three words: “Investment is personal.”
As if the economy collapsing around us was a matter of individual preference. As if we weren’t all going to drown in the same flood.
The Lie of “Personal” Finance
I grew up in a family obsessed with money but lacking the education to manage it. My parents never finished high school. After the divorce, my mum did what society tells you to do: she went to a financial planner. She followed their “professional” advice to the letter and lost everything in the GFC. The house. The savings. The future she’d been promised.
That experience taught me that blind faith in authority is dangerous. It taught me that experts are often fixed in the current world, unable to envision the chaotic nature of the future world.
So when my friend told me they trust their financial planner over me, a Software Engineer who reads economic data for fun, I couldn’t fault their logic. But logic built on a world that no longer exists isn’t logic, it’s also faith. Financial planners operate on averages. They look at a Millennial’s age and say, “You have time to bounce back if the market crashes.”
But have you seen the world lately? We have lived through “unprecedented times” every year for the last decade. The pattern isn’t an anomaly anymore, it’s the baseline. Traditional wisdom relies on a stability that I don’t believe exists anymore.
More importantly, the idea that finance is “personal” is a lie. We do not exist in a vacuum. We all have Australian dollars in our bank accounts that are subject to the same inflation. We all have Superannuation invested in the same share market. We are all trying to buy or hold onto homes in the same property market.
We are a community of friends facing a shared economic reality, yet we treat our survival strategies like state secrets.
From the Village to the Paywall
I often think about how this would have worked a few generations ago.
In a small village, financial advice would have been shared freely over a pint at the pub. “Don’t shop at the general store, their prices are up. Invest in the local mill. Avoid that bank.” Survival was a community effort.
Now? We’ve commodified community care.
We used to bring soup when a neighbour was sick; now we send a Menulog voucher.
We used to drive friends to the airport; now we call an Uber.
And now, we’ve commodified wisdom itself. We’ve outsourced our critical thinking to “professionals.” We’ve decided that talking about money, talking about survival, is a social taboo.
This silence serves a specific purpose. It serves the capitalist class. Wealthy families pass down knowledge of how to dodge inflation and leverage assets from parent to child at the dinner table. They don’t need to feel awkward about it because it’s their language.
But for the working class, or those of us who grew up outside that bubble, we are told it’s rude to talk about money. This gatekeeps knowledge. It forces us to rely on pay-walled financial advisors or, worse, to do nothing and hope for the best.
A Different Way
It is frustrating to have the curse of seeing the possibility of a train coming whilst everyone else is happily standing on the tracks, convinced the schedule says it won’t arrive for another hour.
I understand that talking about money is uncomfortable. But we need to distinguish between boasting about wealth and sharing strategies for survival.
I am not a financial adviser. I am just a friend who is paying attention.
If we can’t share our fears and our strategies with the people we care about, we are fighting this chaotic future alone. And if history and my pattern recognition tells me anything, it’s that isolation is exactly how we lose.
So, this is my invitation. Let’s make it less personal. Let’s talk about it.
Because the train doesn’t care if you’re comfortable. And when it arrives, I’d rather we were standing together, ready to move, than scattered and alone on the tracks.