by theluckycountry » Sun 12 Oct 2025, 06:29:14
Optimistic Mindset Linked to Poor Decision-Making
But we'll get back to that.
Some classic investment speak that traps people in losers.
-Invest for the long haul
-Buy the dip
-Markets always go up after taking a little beating
Similar ones abound for real estate
-They aren't making any more land.
-house prices always go up
Well they don't need to make anymore land because unless you're on Hong Kong or Singapore Islands the countryside has more land than could ever be used by humans. What the marketeers of this doctrine never mentioned was that it was scope-locked on city residential, which as we are beginning to see doesn't have the brightest future. They (cities), made good sense in the days of the industrial revolution when heavy industry was just outside the city and light industry was spread all throughout the city, and communications were limited. They were needed prior to that period too, with ports and warehousing etc, but that's not the case today. A ship can offload it's cargo direct onto the dock and then subsequently onto trucks or trains to be shipped out to distant hubs where it's sorted and distributed, bypassing the entire city and its burbs. Plus the fact that a single machine, like a huge container crane or massive forklift, has now supplanted tens of thousands of city workers who used to do it all manually. You only need so many clerks, so many bookkeepers, so many lawyers.
95% of city populations serve no needed function now, and without the property bubbles I doubt they would have held the interest of the masses. Instead of cities supplying the labor and smarts to facilitate trade and manufacturing as in bygone days they are now just hubs of human existence where people groom each other, feed each other, and entertain each other. Introverted jobs/behavior that generates no new wealth or prosperity but instead consumes it, all enabled by debt of course. Just think of the massive road upkeep! Hardly any of which is there to serve the business sector. It's all there so people can drive to and from the supermarket and their pointless jobs. Same with the water and electricity grids. They make money for the companies supplying the utilities but the people don't benefit at all financially and it doesn't add to nation growth, quite the opposite in fact. This is why all sectors of Government, business and household are in debt to the eyeballs. For decades upon decades they have been doing nothing productive in the cities they are a part of.
That's why rural real estate has boomed in the last 5 years. Covid was the kickoff, people began to realize how pointless their existence in the suburbs were and those with the means began fleeing to greener pastures. And these aren't people (for the most part) interested in "building wealth", they just want a clean safe environment to raise their kids or spend their autumn years. I don't have to prove this transition, the world's jungles and wastelands are littered with the ruins of former great cities, all abandoned when the empires that built them failed. The city model only works when you have abundant free energy flowing in to sustain them and abundant manufacturing output. Be that oil and coal, or slaves and produce from conquered lands.
So we get back to the title of the post, "an Optimistic Mindset is Linked to Poor Decision-Making" Cornucopians dreaming of space tourism and self-driving cars have no room in their thinking for "what if?" They dismiss such facts as stated above as Doomerism, Negative thinking, fatalism. "Surely we as an intelligent species, the spearhead of evolution on the planet, will overcome these petty obstacles and go forth to rule the galaxy. Or some such nonsense. It's pure humanism, "I think, ergo I can achieve anything."
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'W')hile the power of positive thinking may boost confidence, it may not be the best path to successful financial decisions. Although a positive mindset is often associated with success, a new study suggests that excessive optimism often leads to poor decision-making, especially when it comes to finances.
The study, conducted by the University of Bath in the United Kingdom and published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, sought to determine whether people with an optimistic mindset had worse decision-making cognition than people who were more realistic. The researchers found that people with lower cognitive function tended to be more optimistic, which led them to make poor financial decisions.
Study Findings Explained
The study examined more than 36,000 individuals and found that people with realistic expectations and planning processes tend to make wiser decisions than people with a more optimistic mindset.
Researchers discovered that people with the highest cognitive ability were 22 percent more likely to be realists (or pessimists) when it came to financial planning. They also had a 34.8 percent decrease in optimistic tendencies compared with people with lower cognitive ability. Cognitive ability was measured based on various cognitive skills, including verbal fluency, numerical reasoning, and memory. The results suggest that optimism bias causes people to expect unrealistically positive outcomes in life decisions, especially regarding their finances...
What Is Optimism Bias?
Optimism bias causes people to believe they are less likely to experience negative events than they actually are. About 80 percent of people have an optimism bias—so it appears to be an integral part of human nature...
How Does Excessive Optimism Lead to Low Cognition?
Optimism innately causes people to take risks without properly considering the consequences. Excessive optimists may also believe that everything will turn out well in the end, even though they do not do what is required to achieve that outcome.
People with a more realistic or pessimistic mindset tend to make wiser decisions and display better judgment than optimists, suggesting that low cognitive ability is an underlying cause of an excessively optimistic mindset...
https://www.theepochtimes.com/health/op ... ng-5572279The power of positive thinking is a book title that made it's author a fortune, but not it's readers. It was based on crap but designed to reinforce the positive mindset of it's readers, who lapped it up. "Rich Dad Poor Dad" was another work of fiction that made it's author a fortune. But use your Brain why is it the vast majority of people over history retire with a low living standard? Why is it the vast majority get caught in traps like the Dotcom bubble and the GFC, the housing bubbles and the recent collapses of the EV industry and the SPACS? Why? Because they had a positive mindset and believed that this was it. This was there time. Never did they look at the fundamentals behind the scenes, at the actual
Reality of the sector they were investing their life savings in. So they lost, and the wealthy purveyors of the trash walked away with their money.
We're 17 years past the peak now and the 3rd World is going hungry and dark. We'll be next, we're well on the way in fact.