The last time three great historical cycles converged like this, the whole world changed. The world we are heading into is not the same as the one we are leaving behind. Political, social, and cultural structures are shifting, technology is advancing faster than institutions can absorb it, and the global financial system is running out of moves. When a game runs out of moves, the players reset the board—which is part of why the World Economic Forum has been pushing so loudly for what it calls “the Great Reset.”

Understanding history doesn’t just explain the present—it unlocks the keys to the future. Making sense of this moment means looking at three cycles together, because each one drives the next: political, social, and cultural cycles; technological cycles; and financial cycles. As the philosopher George Santayana put it, those who forget history are condemned to repeat it. The goal here is to learn its lessons well enough to use them to our advantage.

The Political, Social, and Cultural Cycle

Cycles build on top of each other, and they repeat because they’re reactionary—the actions of one cycle push the actions of the next, the way a ball hits one side of a track, reacts, and swings back to the other. Political, social, and cultural cycles drive technological change, which then drives financial change. Understanding this sequence is the key to navigating the next five to ten years.

Human progress isn’t linear—it’s exponential. Most people assume steady, constant improvement, when growth actually compounds by ratio rather than by a fixed amount, which leaves most people underestimating how far ahead things end up. Underneath that exponential curve, though, sit repeating cycles, and understanding those cycles is what lets us see where we are and where we’re headed.

History progresses according to natural law—forces in human nature that can’t be escaped, the way gravity can be suspended briefly with enough money and technology but always reasserts itself eventually. Humans have a natural drive toward freedom: to design, create, imagine, speak, discuss, and live on their own terms. There’s a natural drive toward affluence—toward abundance, toward building the skyscrapers, cars, computers, and satellites that didn’t exist a few centuries ago. And there’s meritocracy: the idea that effort and results are rewarded. A lion that can’t outrun the slowest gazelle starves; a gazelle that can’t outrun the fastest lion becomes a meal; an ant that doesn’t store food for winter doesn’t make it to spring. That is natural law, and it applies no matter how much technology or wealth intervenes.

Progress is always a solution to a problem—carrying one rock at a time is slow, so someone invents a wheelbarrow. That’s how entrepreneurs are made: they solve problems, and customers reward them with money. Continued progress also depends on conditions that centralized control keeps trying to defeat. Growth requires recessions, the way a forest needs its underbrush cleared out, even though central banks now do everything they can to prevent one. Growth requires revolutions, because legacy systems entrench themselves and resist change until the old way is forced to give way to something new. And growth requires disruptive technology, which destroys the old way and ushers in the new one.

These cycles also move through stages—bull markets and bear markets, extreme optimism and extreme pessimism, and something like four seasons: winter, spring, summer, and fall. Winter is hard times, and hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times, when growth begins. Good times create weak men. Weak men create hard times, and the cycle begins again.

Looking at the roughly 80-to-84-year cycle, two cycles back brings us to 1848, a year of populist uprisings across Europe—the Springtime of the Peoples, the largest and most widespread revolutionary wave in history up to that point, which saw monarchies give way to independent nation-states. It’s also the year Karl Marx published The Communist Manifesto, an idea resurfacing in various forms today. Roughly 84 years later brought the 1930s and another regime change: the rise of Hitler and Mussolini in Europe, and in the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Roosevelt demanded broad executive power to fight the emergency of the Depression, signed fifteen major bills in his first hundred days, and fundamentally transformed the size and role of the federal government—which had, until then, stayed largely out of social and economic engineering.

Another roughly 84 years later brings us to the present. The same seeds are visibly being planted again: Brexit in Europe, the election of an anti-establishment president in the United States met with sustained institutional resistance, expanding emergency powers, the Yellow Vest movement in France, and waves of protest and unrest across the West. Before the pandemic, ten countries had already seen more than a million people in the streets at once; since 2017, there have been well over two hundred significant anti-government protests across more than a hundred countries, many tied to restrictions on civil rights. The pattern is visibly building, even if—as with any cycle—the top or bottom is only obvious in hindsight.

These cycles are reactionary in a very literal sense: think of a ball bouncing between bumpers, swinging from “we” to “me.” “We” represents collectivism, globalism, the sense that we’re all in this together; pushed too far, the pendulum swings back to “me”—individualism, self-determination, decentralization. Peak decentralization moments include 1823, when the Monroe Doctrine declared the U.S. would not be subject to European powers; 1903, when Theodore Roosevelt spoke of carrying a big stick; and 1983, when Ronald Reagan called for the Berlin Wall to come down. Peak centralization moments include the 1940s, with the rise of the United Nations, the IMF, and the Bretton Woods system. Today, institutions like the World Economic Forum, World Health Organization, World Trade Organization, and IMF represent another high-water mark of centralization—and history suggests the pendulum is due to swing back toward decentralization, individualism, and local control.

A parallel 80-year pattern shows up in generational theory, sometimes called the Fourth Turning: four roughly 20-year phases—a high, an awakening, an unraveling, and a crisis—that add up to an 80-year cycle, with the crisis restarting it. It echoes the old saying: hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times. Two generations built enormous wealth, infrastructure, and productive capacity in the developed world; later generations have lived off that inheritance without the same direct experience of producing it, and portions of academia and politics now operate on ideas detached from the natural law that built the wealth in the first place. Every Fourth Turning begins with a catalyst—2008’s global financial crisis is a reasonable marker for the start of this one, with quantitative easing and aggressive central-bank money printing following, and the 2020 pandemic accelerating the pace of change across the board.

Stretch the lens out further to a roughly 250-year cycle—three 84-year cycles combined—and General Sir John Glubb’s The Fate of Empires offers a rough eight-stage arc: outburst, conquest, commerce, affluence, intellect, decadence, decline, and collapse. In the United States, the outburst began in 1776; 250 years later lands roughly in the middle of the 2020s. Alexander Tytler described a similar cycle for democracies: bondage to faith, faith to courage, courage to liberty, liberty to prosperity, prosperity to abundance, abundance to selfishness, selfishness to complacency, complacency to apathy, apathy to dependency, and dependency back to bondage.

In 1517, the Protestant Reformation began when Martin Luther nailed the 95 Theses to a church door. At the time, church and state were deeply intertwined, and the Church controlled access to scripture and its interpretation. The printing press, invented decades earlier, let ordinary people read the Bible themselves, and once they could, they no longer needed a centralized institution to interpret it for them—a shift from centralization to decentralization. A similar pattern is visible today: the internet has made information so widely available that a handful of newspapers or television networks can no longer control the narrative, and centralized institutions are finding it harder to keep a lid on information.

Two hundred fifty years after the Reformation comes 1776: the birth of American democracy and, alongside it, the birth of free-market capitalism, with Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations describing the invisible hand of the market. Capitalism and democracy together produced an explosive revolution that changed the world. Another 250 years later brings us to the present—and whatever the exact details, it’s reasonable to expect another revolution against centralization and globalization, and toward decentralization and populism.

The Technological Revolution

Cycles are reactive, and technology develops to solve the problems a given era produces. A genuine technological revolution is different from an incremental improvement like the newest phone model—it needs to be disruptive enough to destroy the old way rather than merely improve it, and it needs to build an entirely new economy and change life and humanity broadly. Services like ride-sharing or short-term rentals were meaningful extensions of the internet and information age, but they didn’t create a wholly new economic category the way a genuine revolution does.

Looking back roughly 250 years: 1771 brought the Industrial Revolution, which moved people off farms and into factories and cities, letting machines do work that used to take hundreds of men. In 1829 came the age of steam and railways, replacing manpower and horsepower with machines and enabling heavy loads to move over long distances. In 1875 came the age of steel, electricity, and heavy engineering—steel enabled skyscrapers, bridges, and massive ships, while electricity gave the world light and, eventually, everything that runs on it. The 1900s brought oil, automobiles, and mass production, replacing walking and horses with cars and assembly lines. And 1971 brought the age of information and telecommunications—the microprocessor and the personal computer, which eventually gave rise to the internet.

Doing the math, these revolutions land roughly every 50 years. Fifty years on from 1971 lands around 2021, which raises an obvious question: what technological revolution corresponds to this stage of the 250-year cycle? For the last 250 years, the pattern has alternated between centralization and decentralization, and right now the defining problem is centralization, globalization, and manipulation—which means the coming revolution should push in the opposite direction, toward decentralization.

The new technology revolution answers those problems directly. Instead of centralized control, it offers decentralization. Instead of social and financial engineering—trillions of dollars printed at will, social media manipulated from the top down—it offers trustless technology: borderless, permissionless, and censorship-resistant, providing rules instead of rulers. Two hundred fifty years ago, the U.S. Constitution was meant to protect people through a fixed rule of law; over time, governance has drifted toward being ruled by men who can simply change the rules as they go, which makes it impossible to plan a life or a business over the long term. A rule of law that’s clear, simple, known in advance, and resistant to arbitrary change is exactly what this new decentralized technology can provide.

Predicting the exact shape of a technological revolution is notoriously hard, because people tend to imagine only incremental extensions of what already exists—flying cars instead of a wholly new paradigm. In the 1990s, most people assumed the internet was mainly for electronic messages and had no real model for what it would eventually become. The diffusion-of-innovations model—innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, laggards—helps make sense of how a genuine revolution actually spreads. The automobile followed this path: after its invention, speculators and bankers rushed in, over 250 manufacturers appeared, and nearly all of them went bankrupt because there was no market yet and no supporting infrastructure—no roads, gas stations, or repair shops—until only a handful, like Ford and Chrysler, survived. The internet followed a similar arc: online in 1991, the first online purchase in 1994, capital rushing in with the Netscape IPO in 1995, and by 1999 nearly everyone piling in even where the product-market fit, or the infrastructure like connection speeds, wasn’t there yet.

Bitcoin fits the profile of this cycle’s technological revolution: decentralized, rules-based, borderless, and permissionless. Its adoption can be tracked on an S-curve—it took roughly ten years to go from zero to 10 percent adoption, from 2009 to 2019, and the theory behind S-curve adoption suggests it takes roughly the same span of time to go from 10 percent to 90 percent, putting mass adoption somewhere around 2029. That places the current decade squarely inside the gap between early adopters and the majority—the period where “crossing the chasm” produces the loudest fear, uncertainty, and doubt from the mainstream, visible already in banks beginning to offer Bitcoin exposure through ordinary checking and brokerage accounts.

The Financial Cycle

Nothing is forever except change and evolution, and knowing where we sit in these cycles is what allows the right strategy for handling them. Financial market cycles are shaped by the same political, social, cultural, and technological cycles already discussed—they move in seasons, the way winter, spring, summer, and fall do, and understanding that phenomenon is the key to preparing an investment approach that reflects reality rather than fighting it.

Financial markets move from bull to bear, and on a longer timescale, the wealth of nations—which economy sits at the center of the world as reserve-currency issuer—shifts from one to the next. Better-educated societies tend to be more innovative, competitive, and productive, and the last five hundred years have gradually shifted wealth and power from an agrarian economy built on land ownership, to an industrial economy built on capital and production, and now into a digital economy built on data and information—which is already becoming the most valuable resource there is, and will likely define the next cycle’s winners.

The world appears to be moving deeper into the most intense phase of an 80-year economic winter—a once-in-a-lifetime reset of debt and financial-asset bubbles, alongside the emergence of a genuinely new economy, echoing what happened in the 1930s. Today’s central bankers and government economists largely act as though permanent stability, with no volatility, no inflation or deflation, and no more recessions, is achievable, disregarding the naturally oscillating dynamics of innovation and change. Markets aren’t a machine that can simply be engineered and controlled—they’re closer to a biological, complex system driven by billions of people and their shifting, often irrational wants and needs. It’s the setbacks and struggles that actually produce growth and innovation.

Wealth has never permanently belonged to one nation. In the 1400s the dominant power was Portugal, followed by Spain, the Netherlands, France, Britain, and now the United States—each holding the position for roughly a century on average, with empires themselves rarely lasting more than 250 years. Breaking a 250-year revolutionary cycle into eight stages—outburst, conquest, commerce, affluence, intellect, decadence, decline, and collapse—and starting the American clock at 1776 lands the present period somewhere between roughly 2023 and 2026, right at the point history suggests this stage tends to resolve.

Currency is not the same thing as wealth. Wealth is goods and services—a billion dollars is worthless in the middle of a desert with no food or water nearby. Real wealth is measured by education, competitiveness, economic output, and trade; printing trillions of dollars doesn’t create any of that on its own. For roughly five thousand years, money was gold, a real asset with a genuine cost of production. Today, money is debt: a credit-based system where money is created through loans, and credit itself is inherently cyclical, expanding and contracting over long-term debt cycles that typically run about 80 years. The pattern moved from hard money in the form of gold, to paper certificates redeemable for gold held in banks, to people simply forgetting about the underlying gold and using paper alone, to governments printing more paper than they had gold to back—eventually producing bank runs and crises. In 1933 the U.S. government barred citizens from owning gold, cementing a fully fiat system: money by government decree, printable in whatever quantity is politically convenient, with the currency losing value as a direct consequence. People then look for alternative stores of wealth—gold, stocks, real estate, or Bitcoin—and the game effectively resets.

Debt levels across the developed world make the pattern hard to miss. Japan’s debt-to-GDP ratio sits above 250 percent, Greece above 200 percent, and the United States around 135 percent; once a nation’s debt load crosses roughly 90 percent of GDP, it’s historically been a strong signal that the end stage of a debt cycle is approaching. There are really only four ways to handle a debt crisis of this size: austerity, or living within a budget and cutting expenses; default, or simply not paying the debt; wealth transfers, taxing the wealthy more heavily; or devaluing and debasing the currency by printing more of it and accepting the resulting inflation. Austerity and default are politically brutal, and wealth transfers only stretch so far before triggering their own unrest, which is why virtually every country in this position eventually chooses currency devaluation instead.

All of this lands at the same inflection point: the roughly 80-year regime-change cycle, the 250-year revolutionary cycle, and the technological cycle converging at once, producing real tension and division. Late-stage governments, historically, know how to do one thing when debt becomes unmanageable—print money—which makes holding cash a genuine risk in its own right; currency risk deserves at least as much attention as asset risk from here. Eighty years ago, the Bretton Woods agreement put the world on a dollar standard backed by gold; today, the IMF itself has floated the idea of a “Bretton Woods 2” moment—a deliberate overhaul of the global monetary system. Centralized systems tend toward manipulation, and the revolutionary cycle now underway points toward decentralization and power moving back toward individuals. Bitcoin offers a decentralized rule system nobody can unilaterally change, with a fixed supply that makes it, potentially, the first real constant in modern economics. Just as the Industrial Revolution pulled people out of decentralized farms and into centralized factories and cities 250 years ago, this cycle looks set to run in reverse: a bottom-up network revolution, decentralized back down to individuals, built on systems that are permissionless, borderless, and censorship-resistant.

How to Prepare

None of this is really about calling an exact date. It’s about recognizing which stage of the cycle we’re in and positioning accordingly, using a handful of concrete steps.

Make as much money as possible now, while conditions are still relatively favorable, and keep as much of it as possible rather than spending it on the frivolous. Learn new, high-paying skills that can be performed from anywhere—sales and marketing are two obvious examples. Shift the underlying mental model away from currency and toward purchasing power, so as not to be left holding paper that’s losing value while real assets climb. And for anyone in a high-conflict or high-debt jurisdiction, consider moving—empires in their late stages tend to impose capital controls precisely to prevent people from taking money out, so getting both yourself and your money into something you actually control, before that door narrows, is worth taking seriously now rather than later.