Chris Liss on Nostr: It’s hard to know what’s *really* going on. I walk around here, and everyone is ...

It’s hard to know what’s *really* going on. I walk around here, and everyone is still doing their usual things — coffee shops and restaurants are full, the security guard at the college track where I run still says, “Bom dia, Creeshtofare” to me when I arrive.

I was in Marseilles this past weekend — reminded me of NY in the 1980s, graffiti everywhere, garbage blowing around in the street. But restaurants were full, people were out and about, super friendly.

There was no sign of hyperinflation, or impending collapse at all. My daughter saw a guy with no feet, a drug deal and a prostitute while walking with my wife, but pretty much par for the course in a grittier city.

Sometimes I think everything around us is fake — the coffee shops won’t be able to stay open, the restaurants can’t survive on meager fiat, the tyrants in the EU will stop them from getting meat and dairy.

And yet, none of that is relevant day to day. Some people are hurting, of course, but that’s always been the case. When I was growing up, there were legions of homeless.

It’s really strange to see one world online and another in person, and while some cracks are surely there, nothing has shifted in an obvious way yet in Lisbon.

Bottom line, I could see myself looking back on these years and thinking, “Wow, you were really paranoid, social media really got into your head” or alternatively, “wow, you really had it good back then when society was still functioning. You had no idea of the hardship that was coming,”

The range of outcomes is so wide, I really don’t know what to make of it.

Maybe it was always this way, and surely on one level it was, as you could always be killed or crippled in an accident, even in the best of times.