THE (RELATIVE) STRENGTH OF OUR CURRENCY...

...has let us see life from other perspectives.

If we had been born, if we had lived with the kind of problems typical of countries like Argentina, Venezuela, etc., the only outlook would be to work in the morning and eat in the evening. In a context of a destroyed, perpetually destroyed currency, there is no middle class. Instead there's a mass of poor people whose only goal is to bring something home to eat. So there's no future outlook at all: there's only the present, or the next few hours.

Most of you don't deal with these issues at all: for most of you, only your own perspective exists. The perspective of living off pensions, of living in Western comfort, of living clean, of living safe, of being able to make medium- to long-term plans. In short, of living off the relative strength of the currency: because this, and only this, is what has allowed us to live a life with different prospects.

Before the Great Shame I thought that, deep down, the European citizen had a more organized mindset, one that led them to manage things better. I was wrong. We're simply fish, like everyone else, that the current happened to favor.

The ugly, very ugly news is that we are certainly the next in line to fall into the same dynamics. I don't know whether to the same extent a Venezuelan citizen has experienced, but that changes little. The system requires this: it requires, cyclically and progressively, the fall of some peoples and the rise of others. There's no way out thinking in conventional terms. If the result of these years is a life that's the same, with the same thoughts you had before the Great Shame, you are certainly headed the wrong way.