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These are listed in no particular order because they’re all equally important and useful.

1. Your Own Business

We live in an era now where being an employee is far more risky and dangerous than having your own business.

In the past, it was riskier to be a business owner.  No longer.

If you’re an employee, if anything goes wrong with the company you work for, the boss you work for, or the industry you work for (like it goes out of business due to AI), then you immediately lose 100% of your income.

And there are going to be lots of those problems over the next 5-10 years.

But if you have your own business, especially if it’s structured correctly, this never happens. Even if something catastrophic happens and you lose a bunch of customers all at once, you might lose 40%, 50%, or 60% of your income, but never 100%.

And if that does happen, you can do something employees can’t; you can instantly pivot to some other money-making activity.

Usually you’ll be making money again within 30 days or less. I’ve done this myself several times over my 35+ year entrepreneurial journey.

Whereas the employee who gets fired or laid off has only one option: take his resume and go begging for some other company to give him a job.

It might take that poor bastard 6-12 months to find another job, and even if he does, it might be much less than what he was making before.

Having your own business used to be an option. Today, it’s mandatory.

2. Location-independent Income

If your income, even if it’s a high income and even if it’s from your own business, is rooted to one particular city or region in one particular country, this means that if anything goes wrong with this city, region, or country (which it will!), you’re screwed.

When the Western world was strong, stable, and rising, this was fine. I would have no objection to someone having location-dependent income back in the 1950s or 1980s.

But today? When Western nations get worse every year, with new huge problems damn near every six months (how did your stocks do a few months ago with Trump’s stupid tariffs?) having location-dependent income is insanity.

Your income should be coming to you no matter where in the world you are, regardless of how long you’re there.

Your income should come steadily, every month, with no fluctuations, regardless of whether you’re in Moscow, Philippines, Brazil, or Northern Canada, even if you’re switching between those locations on a regular basis.

3. Infrastructure-Light Lifestyle

If you have tons of bookshelves full of thousands of books, plus two dogs and a cat, plus a high-maintenance spouse, plus a really cool fish tank, plus two cars that you love, plus a mattress that you refuse to ever replace, plus an elderly parent down the street you feel compelled to take care of and visit several times a week, then it’s going to be almost impossible for you to do the things necessary to protect yourself long-term from Western Collapse.

If you are very wealthy already (meaning you have a net worth of well over $10 million, with a lot of that liquid), then you can more or less do whatever you like. But if you aren’t, you need to “live light.”

I’m not saying you need to live like a minimalist or a monk. I certainly don’t.

But I have far, far less infrastructure in my life than a typical man with my income, and this is a purposeful decision on my part. I want to be maneuverable and flexible at all times, period.

Your robustness and survival odds as the West collapses are inversely proportional to the amount of “stuff” in your life that you need to keep around, and this includes physical objects, obligations, and other people.

4. Strong Working Knowledge of AI

AI is taking over the planet right now, right this minute, as I type these words.

Your job (or business) is soon going to get taken from you by people who know AI better than you.

Then later it will be taken by AI itself (perhaps).

This means you need to constantly stay abreast of how AI is changing your industry, the AI tools you need to stay ahead of the competition, and have at least a basic understanding of any major changes AI may bring to your business over the next 12-18 months.

If you’re like most people and don’t pay attention to any of this stuff (other than hearing about it in an occasional news story) and just keep working like it’s 2023, then goodbye, you’re fucked.

5. Hyper-Flexibility

If you would never live in Paraguay because “it’s too gross,” or you’d never live in Dubai because, “it’s too Muslim,” or you’d never live in Panama because “not enough people speak English,” or you’d never live in Vietnam because “it’s too hot,” and so on, then you’re in very big trouble.

Again, if you are already extremely wealthy, then feel free to be as picky as you want. But if you’re not, you can’t afford to be picky in the era of Western Collapse.

The people who will survive and thrive as the economies and cultures of America, Canada, and Europe collapse into chaos and oblivion are those who are extremely flexible about their living conditions and what they will tolerate regarding the places where they spend most of their time.

If 200 little details bother so much that you absolutely must live in a 100% Western, 100% first-world, 100% English, close to 100% white nation where you absolutely must have Amazon, Target, and Doordash or else you’ll freak out, then you are the exact type of person who’s going to be crushed when the West collapses in your lifetime.

6. Political Disconnect

As I’ve shown hundreds of times on my blogs, videos, and podcasts, the West can’t be saved at this point.

Its economic problems are far too massive, ingrained, and systemic to fix and the traditional right-wing lost the culture war way back around 2011, which means Western culture is now solidly left-wing whether you like it or not and regardless of who the President or Prime Minster is for the next few years.

If your attitude is that YOU MUST STAND AND FIGHT TO SAVE AMERICA (or Canada, or the UK, or whatever), then you don’t realize you’ve already lost, and lost a long time ago. You’re just waiting around to be crushed at this point.

You need to have the balls, objectivity, and emotional control to admit that you’ll have to make some big changes in your life, including perhaps the country you live in, in order to save yourself (and your family if you have one) from Western Collapse, regardless about your emotional feely-feelings about a culture you already lost a long time ago.

Many other things will protect you from Western Collapse, but they get case-specific; the above six items apply to pretty much everyone who isn’t super wealthy.

As I keep saying, it’s time to get to work.

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