Joe Withrow is just an average, hardworking American who did everything by the 'American Dream' handbook.
He took advanced classes in a public high school and graduated with good grades. He then went on to earn a finance degree from a public university.
Upon graduation, Joe moved to a metropolitan city and played the corporate game, working for two different mega banks and earning several minor promotions/pay raises/bonuses for his efforts.
Joe bought a starter home, met his wife, and settled down to live the American Dream – just as he had been “educated” to do. He contributed the match rate to his 401(k) and he maxed out his contributions to a traditional IRA – just as he had been “educated” to do.
Joe was doing everything the “right” way and a storybook life appeared to be unfolding before him.
But then something strange happened.
Joe started to see that the rat-race had no light at the end of the tunnel and no rewards worth reaping.
He began to realize that the ‘American Dream’ was at best a myth and at worst a means of control. He began to see how the monetary system itself worked against him. He began to see how constant central bank inflation stole his purchasing power and transferred it to the political and financial elite. He began to realize that his annual wage increases could not possibly keep up with inflation over the long term and therefore he was stuck on a perpetual tread-mill despite doing everything the right way. He began to realize that the stock market could not possibly go up exponentially forever no matter how many CNBC talking heads swore up and down that it would. And he began to see how his tax dollars were being used by the political class to systematically destroy the very principles America was founded upon – free markets, individual liberty, self-reliance, privacy, and property rights.
So Joe started to do a lot of independent research and he started to do a lot of introspective examination. He quickly came to the realization that he had to build a more self-reliant lifestyle if he wanted to have a chance to create a Mindful life for himself and his family. So Joe ended his career in corporate America, sold his home, liquidated his government-approved retirement accounts, and moved to a rural area up in the mountains to begin the next chapter.
Joe has since been working to gradually make his small homestead as resilient as possible while also building anti-fragility by minding his asset allocation model in an effort to prepare for the “Great Reset” that he sees as inevitable within the next decade. While Joe does think the coming decades will be the most difficult time period in more than a century from the American perspective, he also expects a decentralized and individualist society to eventually emerge as the fallacy of Keynesian central planning and the true nature of government is finally revealed to all, even those not interested in seeing.
