# Daily Inspiration: “Make it make sense? Nope. Not right now.”
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"Make it make sense? Nope. Not right now." - Futurist Jim Carroll We live in a time when countless numbers of otherwise rational, intelligent people are making decisions that are anything but intelligent or rational. And the rest of us silently scream each and every other moment, 'make it make sense!' I've come to conclude that we can't, and we won't, until such time as the inevitable conclusion comes about that we know will hopefully finally bring an end to this era of madness. In the meantime, the world is watching the real time decline of a once mighty power. If you don't believe me, read my post of 2017 - I nailed almost each and every point. Think about where we are - often at the events where I speak, I spend a lot of time around economists and smart business executives Good ones. The kind with three letters after their name and decades of models that used to work. Lately, more than a few have said some version of the same thing to me, off the record: I don't get it anymore. That's a big deal, coming from that crowd. Their entire profession rests on one assumption - that people, in the aggregate, act on their own economic interest. Show them the data, the math, the outcome, and eventually behaviour lines up with reality. Except right now, it doesn't. And I've got a front-row seat to the confusion, because I've spent my career on stage with the very people living it. Think about what I've seen. Back in 2015, the United Soybean Board had me in to talk to the top 500 soybean farmers in the country about the massive market opportunity building in China. They knew their future ran straight through global trade. Then came a trade war that gutted those very orders. Many of them made the very decision that gutted their opportunity. Dozens of other agricultural groups have booked me over the years - farm credit coops, major agricultural companies, cattle ranchers and farmers, all of whom eagerly embrace an agenda that effectively destroys their global opportunities, increases their costs of doing business, eliminates vast numbers of their agricultural worker base and more. Then there's manufacturing. I've keynoted groups such as the IMX Interactive Manufacturing Exchange in Las Vegas, the BigM Manufacturing Summit in Detroit, and the American Manufacturing Summit - same city, same "bring the factories back" energy. The rest of my client list reads like a who's-who of the sector wanting to compete globally - Magna International, Caterpillar, Chrysler, Volvo, PPG. And I've done deep-dive work for state-level manufacturing associations chasing robotics, 3D printing, and advanced production. Most of those associations have since had their funding cut, some are shutting down, and the tariffs sold as their salvation are quietly raising their input costs and pushing investment further offshore. But ask many of them about their pathway to the future, and they still subscribe to an insane belief that building up tariff barriers and destroying global relationships is the best way to build the sector. Healthcare? Pfizer had me address their global leadership team in Paris, six months before the pandemic hit. ICON PLC - the company that ran the actual clinical trial for the Covid-19 vaccine - brought me in to talk about AI in pharmaceutical development. The American Association of Orthopaedic Surgeons had me open a session on the science reshaping their field. Genentech, a leader in genomic medicine, had me speak to their leadership on where healthcare is headed. Every one of them operates on the same premise: rigorous, peer-reviewed science. And every one of them is now trying to serve a public where a meaningful share of patients have quietly decided that same science is negotiable. Meanwhile, I clearly see what happens in the rest of the world. I get involved in an event in Abu Dhabi at the invitation of the Prime Minister's Office of the UAE, or take the stage at the World Government Summit in Dubai, and see a completely different reaction - a mindset that is fully aligned to reality, open to the future, conversant with a global economy - and a focus that is full-speed-ahead, no hand-wringing, no re-litigating whether the future is allowed to happen. In the meantime, they are impacted by a war that they did not choose, and a lack of pathways to find any reasonable escape from its consequences. Same message. Same futurist. Wildly different response, depending on which room I'm in. None of that is a coincidence. I've watched it build for the better part of a decade, one soybean field, one factory floor, one conference stage at a time. And it makes no sense. People are actively fighting their future, putting real barriers in the way, and the degradation and destruction that is occurring is real. We are witnessing the end of the North American automotive industry - that much is clear. Other nations have succeeded into stepping into the global void of agricultural supply to make up for erratic unreliable supply partners. Medical science and research infrastructure are relocating to nations who believe that science is a thing. And the damage is systemic, long term, and not easily reversible. What's new is how hard it's become to make it add up. Economies are supposed to run on a feedback loop: something hurts, people notice, they adjust. That loop is jammed right now. The pain shows up on schedule, and the response isn't a course correction - people are actively choosing a second helping of the thing that caused it in the first place! Is it sheer stupidity? I don't know:  I've used the term "confident stupidity" before to describe the confident rejection of things we already know to be true - and it's not about intelligence at all. Maybe it's fear, dressed up as certainty. Maybe it's anger. Maybe it's pure racism and hate. The fact is, when people are caught up their own madness, it's easier to blame a trading partner, a scientist, or some vague "them" than to sit with the discomfort of a world changing faster than anyone can plan for. So people reach for the simplest story on offer, even when every available fact says the simplest story is wrong, that it won't work, and that it will do more harm than good. And in the meantime, the rest of the world is actively working hard to move on. So here's where I've landed, at least for today: I've stopped expecting the economy to make sense in the old way, because the old way assumed people mostly act on their long-term interest. I've stopped expecting otherwise rational people to be rational, because nothing seems to allow them to see into the madness. And I only expect the irrationality to get worse - because right now, a lot of people are willing to eat real, measurable, short-term pain in exchange for a story that just feels good. And until enough people get tired of the pain, don't expect the numbers to start adding up either. Make it make sense? Nope. Not right now.

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Source: https://jimcarroll.com/2026/07/daily-inspiration-make-it-make-sense-nope-not-right-now/