A Call to A Year of Radical Honesty
Facing Our Debt, Our Demographics, and Our Destiny
By Vaughn Woods, CFP, MBA
As the year draws to a close and the winter solstice brings the longest nights, we often find ourselves looking for a light to guide us. In our work together this year, we have navigated a landscape that feels increasingly complex—a “societal conundrum” where high-tech marvels like Quantum Computing and Nuclear Fusion exist alongside crumbling old-world problems like record-breaking debt and declining birthrates.
As we look toward the New Year, we must move beyond the “Dark Age” of denial and embrace a “Bright Age” of radical honesty. This is our year-end report on the state of our world, the “red flags” we face, and the ancient wisdom that can help us build a resilient future.
The Great Disconnect: Debt, Atoms, and the “People Math”
We are living in a moment of extreme contrast. On one hand, we are on the verge of the “Reverse of Quantity.” For decades, the world grew by simply adding more—more people, more factories, more debt. But today, the math is changing. We are transitioning into a world of Precision.
With Quantum Computing, we are gaining the ability to calculate the uncalculable, designing materials atom-by-atom to solve climate and energy crises. With Nuclear Fusion, we are learning to bottle the sun, promising a future of limitless clean energy. These are not just gadgets; they are the “quantitative mechanisms” that could push back against societal decay.
Yet, there is a shadow over this high-tech horizon. The world is carrying over $100 trillion in debt. At the same time, fertility rates in almost every developed nation have dived well below the 2.0 replacement level. We are trying to build a “Star Trek” future on a “Roman Empire” fiscal foundation. We tell ourselves that debt doesn’t matter if interest is low, or that technology will automatically replace the shrinking workforce. But these are “dishonest stories.”
A list of Dishonest Stories vs. The Reality of the Math
To improve our society’s conundrum, we must first stop lying to ourselves. We have spent years telling stories-half-truths-and falsehoods that ignore the “red flags” of demographic and fiscal decline:
- The Debt Myth: We pretend public debt can be rolled forever, ignoring that aging populations shrink the tax base.
- The “Everything” Promise: Politicians sell unfunded pensions and defense simultaneously, even as the worker-to-retiree ratio collapses.
- The Fertility Denial: We treat low birthrates as a “lifestyle choice” rather than a geopolitical and fiscal crisis.
- Housing as a Casino: We treat homes as speculative assets, pricing young families out of stable lives.
- Blaming the Young: We call Gen Z “free riders” while ignoring wage stagnation and the staggering cost of childcare.
- Work Precarity as “Flexibility”: Gig work transfers risk to the individual, making long-term family planning impossible.
- Messaging Over Reality: We try to fix social distrust with PR and censorship instead of actual honesty about trade-offs.
- The “Tech Bailout”: We assume AI will fix the fiscal arithmetic of pay-as-you-go systems without human workers.
- The Permanent Bribe: We tell voters they can have more benefits and lower taxes without any trade-offs.
- The Neutral Institution: We pretend schools and media don’t shape norms about marriage and sacrifice.
These false narratives create a “fragile” society. When we ignore the material constraints of housing, labor, and the cost of children, we aren’t just being “secular”—we are being unrealistic.
A Different Frame: The Wisdom of the Season
As we celebrate the birth of Jesus, it is worth asking how his teachings provide a moral frame for these technical problems. Jesus doesn’t provide a “technocratic blueprint” for a central bank, but he offers something more foundational: Truth-telling, restraint, and the priority of persons over money.
Turning Toward the Light: 10 Ways Wisdom Can Heal the Math
If we want to avoid a descent into an accelerated trend in societal decay we can apply these timeless principles to our modern policy and personal lives:
- Truth Over Spin: “Let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes’.” This means budgets and campaign promises must finally match hard numbers. No more off-balance-sheet accounting.
- Serving One Master: We cannot serve both the common good and “Mammon” (quarterly asset returns). We must stop organizing society solely around stock prices and start organizing it around families.
- Reordering Treasure: “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” If we prioritize luxury consumption over education and children, our society will continue to age and fade.
- Preferring the Least: A budget should be judged by how it impacts the “least of these”—children and the structurally precarious—not the most powerful.
- Debt and Realism: The call to “forgive us our debts” suggests we need Jubilee-style resets for things like student debt, paired with the discipline to never recreate those traps.
- Vocational Dignity for Parents: If we “receive a child” as a sacred act, we must treat caregiving as honored work, not an “economic deadweight” to be minimized.
- Challenge the 24/7 “grind culture” teach and support the time and energy versus rest-ethic necessary for marriage and parenting.
- Refusal to Flatter Power: Just as Jesus spoke truth to Herod, we need a “prophetic” voice to call out unsustainable debt and regulators who should force discipline but who are aligned with the indebted institutions and investors, not with hard working citizens
- Community Care: Early Christian mutual aid- which dates back to about 30 AD- provides a model for local structures that buffer families against economic shocks, reducing the isolation of modern life.
- Calling the Heart to Change: Reform of debt or housing won’t work without a change in personal honesty and restraint. We cannot “drift into virtue.”
Our Task for the New Year
The “medicine” for our current decline is often seen as worse than the disease. People fear that addressing debt or prioritizing family might lower short-term economic growth. And in the short term, they might be right. But the alternative is fragility.
As we move into the New Year, our task is to bridge the gap between our Quantitative Tools and our Qualitative Values. We have the “atoms” (Fusion) and the “bits” (Quantum) to create a world of abundance. But that abundance will only serve us if we have the “spirit” to tell the truth about our debts and the “heart” to welcome the next generation.
If we move from denial to truth-telling, and from fear to hopeful solidarity, those “red flags” of debt and demographics don’t have to mean the end of the West. They can be the catalyst for a Renaissance.
We are the first generation that can “math” our way out of a collapse, provided we have the courage to face the numbers. This Christmas and New Year, let us commit to being builders of the “Bright Age.”
May your holidays be filled with the warmth of family, the clarity of truth, and the hope of a future we build together.
Sincerely,
Vaughn Woods, CFP, MBA
Vaughn Woods Financial Group, Inc.
2226 Avenida De La Playa
La Jolla, CA 92037
858-454-6900
Sources:
The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. (2016). Crossway Bibles. (Original work published 2001). [Includes Matthew 6:21–24 on treasure and masters; Matthew 25:40 on the “least of these”; and Mark 2:27 on the Sabbath].
Doran, P. (2023). The fusion age: Modern technology and the quest for clean energy. Oxford University Press.
Ganson, H., & Hanson, V. D. (2021). The dying citizen: How progressive elites, tribalism, and globalization are destroying the idea of America. Basic Books.
International Monetary Fund. (2024). Global debt monitor: Tracking the $100 trillion threshold. IMF Publications.
Kearney, M. S. (2022). The baby bust: Who will be the parents of the next generation? Brookings Institution Press.
Nielsen, M. A., & Chuang, I. L. (2020). Quantum computation and quantum information: 10th anniversary edition. Cambridge University Press.
Pope Francis. (2015). Laudato si’: On care for our common home [Encyclical]. Vatican Press.
Tainter, J. A. (1988). The collapse of complex societies. Cambridge University Press.
United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. (2024). World population prospects 2024: Summary of results. United Nations.
Wright, N. T. (2018). Jesus and the victory of God: Christian origins and the question of God. Fortress Press.
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