These Are the Very Best of Times

I was at dinner last night at a very fashionable sushi restaurant, in an area that is almost rural. The line was long and the wait even longer. It took 45 minutes to be seated, so I went to the bar and ordered a few martinis. The bartender took her shaker tin and liberally spilled a cartoonish amount of premium vodka in it, nearly ruining an otherwise simple drink.

The restaurant was expansive and looked out of place in the neighborhood I was visiting. Gray and white marble draped nearly every inch of the walls and rustic black slate blanketed the floors — running through what must’ve been 10,000 square feet. River stones and tiny pebbles trimmed the marble and gigantic whorehouse mirrors festooned the walls downstairs next to the bathrooms. It was an elaborate and expensive set up, something I’d expect to see in Philly or NYC, but not 2 minutes outside pastoral rolling hills and working farms of central New Jersey.

Markets reach new highs highs on a daily basis and a new form of wealth has emerged with cryptocurrencies, now amounting to $175 billion in market cap, aka real money. There’s no denying that future generations will reflect upon these times and equate them with the decadence displayed during the roaring 20s. It’s always hard to appraise in real time, without the benefit of hindsight. But can anyone deny the fact that wealth is at record highs, alongside record levels of debt, alongside record levels of uncertainty for the future?

I’ve witnessed several boom to bust cycles in my lifetime and I’ve never seen such glibness, nonchalant superficiality, like I see now. One of my favorite follows on Twitter is @RampCapitalLLC, who spends his days discussing the fertile lands of Wall Street and the fruit he intends to devour thanks to it. He is unapologetic in his pursuit of Dow 1 million, bathing himself in the nectar of extreme extravagance and ornamenting himself with his very own wheeled chair, in spite of being well and able bodied enough to run marathons.

God I love bubbles

— Ramp Capital™?? (@RampCapitalLLC) October 13, 2017

We are living through the most interesting of times. The phrases BOMB N. KOREA and BOMB IRAN produce praise on Twitter — because they’re a hateful group of people who get in the way of our dreams. We’re invincible, a generation of do nothing wastrels presiding over a broken ATM machine that keeps spitting out $100 bills. We don’t even call bubbles bubbles anymore, instead unicorns, because it rolls off the tongue better and reminds us of childhood fairytales that made us sleep better at night.

We can’t lose. We’re asleep and reality is someone else’s problem, maybe an unfortunate in Puerto Rico, Syria or Iraq, which we’ll gladly help out with catch phrases and $5 donations through one of the many apps on our $700 phones.