Offshore

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EndGame Macro
I don’t think any of this starts where we usually point. It doesn’t start with fentanyl, or smartphones, or even COVID. Those things made it worse, no question. But they didn’t create the hole. They poured gasoline into something that had already been smoldering for a long time.

If you go back to the late 90s, a lot shifts at once. That’s when OxyContin gets pushed hard into the medical system. Pain stops being something you endure or manage and becomes something that should be eliminated completely. Doctors are told addiction risk is low. Patients are told relief is basically guaranteed. And everyone trusts the system because why wouldn’t they? It’s wrapped in credentials and white coats. When that story falls apart, the damage doesn’t unwind. It just mutates.

At the same time, work is changing in ways that don’t show up cleanly in charts. Manufacturing keeps shrinking. Unions lose leverage. Jobs get more flexible, which mostly means less secure. A lot of people are working just as hard, sometimes harder, but feeling more disposable. And when work stops anchoring people, the rest of life starts to wobble too.

Then the prescriptions dry up in the late 2000s. That’s supposed to fix things. Instead it just pushes people to heroin. Same pain, fewer rules. And then fentanyl hits in the early 2010s and rewrites the entire risk equation. At that point, it’s not about recklessness. It’s about the fact that one mistake can be fatal. There’s no buffer anymore.

Now layer in the economic side of this. Since the late 90s, most of the gains flow to people who already own assets. Stocks, housing, anything financial. If you’re in, you’re fine. If you’re not, you’re chasing a moving target. The middle gets squeezed. The bottom barely moves. That stress doesn’t stay in spreadsheets. It shows up in drinking, in depression, in people quietly checking out.

You see it in alcohol deaths almost doubling. You see it in suicide rates rising, especially among middle aged men and younger women. You see it in how much time people spend alone now compared to twenty years ago. Fewer places to belong. More screens. Less face to face life. It’s not that people forgot how to connect. It’s that the scaffolding that made connection normal just eroded.

COVID ripped the cover off. Isolation got sharper. Coping mechanisms broke. Deaths spiked. And even now, as some numbers improve, they’re settling at levels that would’ve been unthinkable a generation ago. That tells you something didn’t heal. It just reset lower.

This feels like decades of decisions that optimized for efficiency and profitability and quietly removed resilience. Institutions learned how to protect balance sheets and reputations, not people. When things broke, whether it was health, money, or work, people were left to handle it on their own. Most did for a long time. And then, at some point, they couldn’t anymore.



What a chart. 
 h/t @LukeGromen https://t.co/35yn90gWnl

- Martin Pelletier
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