Memeconomics: How To Feed a Bear

Earlier today, I was venturing my long forgotten facebook page. To my surprise I saw someone in a group post the following:

"When will ripple surpass Bitcoin?"

It is understandable that this person just entered the crypto market and was wondering when he will become a millionaire. Most likely, he also does not understand shit about market caps or even possess any ability to compute basic calculation. If he was able to do that he would realize that for his assumption to be fulfilled few trillion dollars need to flood the ripple market alone.

This is nothing to be ashamed of. In every single economic crash people like this our friends cause hype and drive the prices through the roof. They are the reason the rich become richer. I am not sure if anyone has coined the term before but in my world view this is what I call Memeconomics. When something becomes a meme, aka well known and established smart people get out while the sheeple are left holding the bags. The meme collapses from those who hyped it the most. Ironic huh?.

Memes are more or less fashion on steroids. Once an idea is conceived, it is then evaluated and applied. Thereafter, with some help from entropy and a push from lady luck the trend catches up fire and becomes popular. Memes apply to everything from education, sex habits, books, religions and of course markets. The most popular market memes are the ones that caused the biggest crashes in history. The tulip mania of the 1630's, the South Sea Bubble of 1711, the Japan's Real Estate and Stock Market Bubble in 1980, the Dot-Com Bubble during the 1990's and housing bubble in 2007. Every single meme promised to humanity something that everyone could have. Every single meme was widely adopted and every single one came down harder than it rose.

Memeconomics are literally everywhere if one is careful enough to look. For example, everyone getting a college education today is following a meme. With the current rate, eventually everyone will have a degree (or even higher degree of some sort) which will render the power of degrees down to null. This is the reason more and more major companies ask to see actual work/portfolio/projects rather than a paper signed from a institution that sells education.

Clothes, cars, singers, movies heck even atheism, religion, social justice warriors, science — all have become a meme, a cool thing to do because everyone is else is doing it. I had a friend that wanted to be a scientist because the graphics from the discovery channel looked cool. He was always in awe with the labcoats and the "cool" visual aspect of science. Little did he know that what science means for the most part is evaluating the same data on SPSS over and over again. He bought the meme, not the actual thing. He soon gave up, like many others. Similarly, more or and more people jump into the idea wagon without understanding what the actual thing is all about. They do it because everyone else is doing it and because it is advertised a certain way. This temperament quickly degrades the original idea and causes a massive pullback/correction.

I tend to notice memes in every single thing around me. From organic food to tv series heroes. Keep an eye on things and you will easy pick up changes in people's behaviour based on cultural trends. Initially, I started doing this from a young age out of sheer anthropological interest. I always found humans fascinating beings and I was rather interested to learn why we do what we do. Later in life when I started observing the same patterns, I noticed that I was able to "foresee" in a way basic behaviours. The way people use to flirt. What is considered bad-ass. Why people get tattoos. Why people hate tattoos. Why sushi suddenly became western mania. Why the adidas superstars are worn by all teenagers. It is so easy to observe some things if you keep your eye on the masses. Most believe they are being unique but really, most people are copies of other people. They just think they are original because they are copying different trends.

Aggregate all these memes together and you can predict economic trends, the end of friendships, when people lie, how they lie and what they aspire in life. This is what I call the blood and soul of the bear market. When a meme reaches it peak, it brings down all of them that elevated it there.

Memeconomics is an evolutionary mechanism of natural correction. A reminder that there is no such thing as equality and that eventually when one thing becomes too popular the system self regulates back to basic dynamics. The easiest way for one to keep themselves ahead of the game is to go against the trends. Always create the trends, never trail them.