How Empires Fall

I want to preface this by saying that I have little understanding of this complex world and what I am writing below is probably totally wrong. Will be worth seeing counters with AI later to what I have written. Maybe even edit the post later. I am just writing my own thinking down. It is about the joy of thinking, not being 100% correct.

The idea of this post actually comes from Gold prices. Yep. Gold and Silver. As I am writing this, both these metals are soaring in price and are at all time highs. I saw posts celebrating this and talking about how old uncles and Indian moms have outperformed all asset classes, getting rich, the real wisdom was with them etc. A dunking on stock market and other asset classes. Fair. Congrats to the ones making money. Let's not get too cocky though. Let me explain. At the end of the day, a nation's strength is in fact, not its Gold and Silver. You can't eat those. You can use them in industrialization, but they won't be your cheat code. They won't build your supply lines. Preserve wealth? Sure. Great track record. But if a nation's people are only interested in hoarding wealth- be it through these metals or financial assets, they give up building industry. Hyper fictionalization, the lure of easy money, moving to service based economies, not a great combo. You hoarded Gold, became rich. Your country's transport is still bad, roads, railways etc. You don't have great industry and institutions, you did not build them. You grew rich and stopped competing.

What happens next? Other nations caught up and far surpassed you. You were stuck in your own heaven. But got looted. This explains China's rise to an extent. The west gave it the keys to its supply lines. China manufactures everything. We got great stock market returns. Now China can bully anyone. No one screws with them because the West abandoned its supply lines. US cannot simply bully China. Europe is a lost cause. They grew rich and then abandoned industrialization. India used to be one of the richest countries in the world. I don't have all history memorized, but I do believe that internal power struggles and this contentment led to it being ruled by invaders for centuries. It didn't bother defending its sovereignty and seeing the bigger picture. Let's call this phenomenon: Developed Hell. I am sure there is a better name for this. India still hasn't recovered from it after centuries as service based easy money is preferred. There are other reasons of course, but this I believe to be the main one. Inherited generational laziness. Will probably happen to Europe and US too. When you are at the top, you can have what I call "Luxury beliefs". Like Veganism, Wokeism, too much Liberalism etc. You lose sight of keeping at the top. Not maintaining supply lines, keeping your army trained, industrialized. Empires lose their edge. And something else takes their place which is more motivated to dethrone them.

Again, this all might be missing the point. But some food for thought.