15 Predictions for 2024

If you could see slightly into the future, what would you do with that information? Every successful person tries to peek into the future to figure out how to use it to their advantage. Those who are able to do it to see how the world will eventually look like end up rich and successful because they play a part in shaping it. That way. So let's do this together, shall we?

Here are 15 predictions for 2024. First up, it may be a little bit obvious. Prices will continue to climb or you'll pay the same amount for half the product. You'll look to buy larger volumes to save on cost and price-focused retail will do well. Things are not getting any cheaper. You'll not be able to afford a home unless you're a business owner or have specific skills or knowledge that are in high demand. Your salary will not go up unless you can tie your earnings to performance.

Your company will struggle to make payroll as the rising costs cut into your profits. But more on that in a second. Let's focus on the people right now. Next up, the realization that you've been overspending hits you hard. This generation isn't living paycheck to paycheck, as they say. Instead, you're living holiday to tooth surgery. You've been ordering too much food. You've been on two or three too many trips. You live that no regrets life. And now the regrets are starting to creep in.

You've gotten so used to the aesthetic life trying to match what you see on social media because you believe that's how everyone else is living, that you don't realize just how stupid you've been with your money. Years have gone by and there's nothing to show for it apart from your 32 likes on Instagram and a couple of uncomfortable clothes that only look good in pictures.

You now realize you've been living above your means. The apartment you live in is too nice and the rent is too expensive. You suddenly find it hard to pay rent, utilities, and cover your basic necessities. The government is eating up too much of your income through taxes and you're considering a second job. But your main one is rocky to begin with, since you're not one of the top performers because you've been coasting by. If you lose your job, you're two months away from being homeless or moving back in with your parents. Shit just got real.

Media tricked everyone into thinking they're famous and they should live like a movie star, disregarding the fact that you don't earn like one. It's time to act. Your wage politics everywhere. This is an election year in most countries around the world, so the manure storm is going to be everywhere. Extremist candidates have become the norm and the conversation in the US will shift not toward policies but to just how old Biden and Trump are.

We hope to see a ceasefire in Ukraine, but it's unlikely. With every war popping up, it normalizes new ones and gets leaders thinking about it. Taiwan has been sleeping with an eye open for months now. Since the war is highly profitable, military companies are financially incentivized to keep the war going for as long as both parties have the resources to keep paying. The faith in politicians around the world will be at an all-time low.

Since the world is evolving faster than they're able to implement policies because they're too busy fighting amongst themselves, this leaves the population feeling isolated and the everyone-for-themselves mentality starts to take root, which is the opposite of what we actually need, which is community. And speaking of what we need outside of social media, we're going back to the old ways, my friend. People are going back to nature. Farming is becoming cool again, building and holding something real in your hands that's not your smartphone is the new Enlightenment.

Bare bones camping and sleeping in your car becomes appealing as it's seen as a new experience that's also cheap. Everyone just wants to be away from the digital world and slow down. Our brains feel like they've been on digital juice for far too long and we need to escape. Anti-technology becomes a thing, and as a generation, those who choose it will experience technology withdrawals. Nostalgia grows even fonder. Vinyl sales will reach all-time highs. People will ride bikes more often, try to recreate Mama's recipes at home, and grow food themselves or buy from farmers while being price conscious.

Alcohol and smoking become not cool as people finally realize just how much money they've been wasting on the detriment of their health. Businesses run toward efficiency to save themselves. You or someone you know will lose their job. A lot of people will lose their jobs, actually, unless you can monetarily prove your value to the company. You are at risk of being laid off. We know you think you're special, but either a guy or someone in the Philippines will be able to deliver the same kind of results you do at a fraction of the cost.

And if letting you go means the survival of the company as a whole, well, you'll be let go. In order to keep your job, you'll most likely have to take on the work of another employee. That's being laid off for the same salary. You might think you've got options. But it's the same story everywhere you look. Happy will be those who can find a job, even if for the first time in their career they're taking a pay cut to get it. The reality is most employees have been overpaid and got complacent.

And since the cost of doing business is going up, the companies are waking up and looking for alternatives. Self-everything everywhere is the new norm. You'll walk into Zorra, scan your own products, pay on your own, remove the security tag yourself, and bag the products yourself. Self-checkout has gone mainstream. Congratulations. You're now doing the work of someone who used to be an employee of the company. A guy is evolving faster than you were expecting. It used to require three people; now it requires one plus AI.

Layoffs will generate a year of excitement as these exact employees will try to start new businesses that they've been considering for years now. But after a little bit of traction, almost all of them will fail. The war on cash begins and crypto is back in the news again. Governments everywhere are pushing a cashless society and heavier tracking and reporting. Cash will be presented as being dirty and used by criminals.

The government will want to know everything you do with your money. Digital banks and alternative online payment services will pick up traction. Payment processors and big banks will be the big winners as they'll take a piece of every transaction happening in the economy. Developing countries will be forced to digitize payments. It'll become so inconvenient to use cash that most people won't accept it. Terms like the digital dollar and digital euro come up more frequently than before, and all of this talk of digital money will put wind in the sails of the blockchain community.

With the Bitcoin halving around the corner and an aggressive pursuit of digital money, we expect Bitcoin to do decently well. Some internet guy will get rich trading Solana and a new gold rush begins. But it's short-lived since retail is a lot more price conscious this time around. And then there's Gen Alpha coming online. These are the kids born between 2010 and 2024. The oldest of them are now a part of the online community doing what every generation did to the previous one.

If Gen Z laughed at millennials using emojis, Gen Alpha laughs at using the word slay or BET. Gen Alpha has acronyms for everything. Y'all don't even want to know what that means. Be honest. Y'all just looked it up, didn't you? It's okay. It's okay. So did we. This is why you subscribe to ALUX. We're keeping you young over here. It's part of the agreement that we've got. You subscribe and click the like button, and we keep you in the know.

For the first time, we've got a generation that's less technology-savvy than the one before it. Why? Well, technology already matured before they came into contact with it. For them, everything is an easy-to-use app. They don't use folders, file types, or windows as an operating system. Their ability to troubleshoot a technical issue is non-existent because they expect everything to just work out. What happened to millennials with the hard labor skills? Be honest, none of you know how to change an electrical socket.

Same thing happened to these kids only digitally. 2024 will be a year we say goodbye to YouTube to MP3 converters since they no longer require you to download MP3s. FS in the chat for YouTube to MP3 converters. Switching gears to something more serious now, even more powerful climate events will continue to occur as we ignore climate issues because of the realization that we can't enforce our policies worldwide. Remember when they said it's the plastic straws? And we're not even joking about cow farts that are heating up the atmosphere.

Well, this is a video from Kuwait where they're burning over 40 million tires. It turns out Kuwait is a dump yard for toxic rubber since the government turns a blind eye to anything climate-related. And they're okay with burning it out in the open. Last year, we saw some extreme climate events with massive floods, unseen before winds, and droughts. These will likely become more frequent throughout the year. We'll see a rise in doomsday narratives and post-apocalyptic content.

Content-wise, you'll find escapism in religion-centered fantasy or sci-fi. And speaking of sci-fi, A.I. becomes a serious legal matter. Remember the companies that were stealing your data? They used it to train A.I. on it, even if it was copyrighted. They just didn't tell anybody. And now the lawsuits will ensue. The New York Times was the first to sue OpenAI for billions since they trained their models on their articles without consent or a licensing agreement. No matter the outcome, a bloodshed will ensue as every other publisher will follow suit.

And speaking of OpenAI, they'll tease their first hardware interface to chat GPT. They've been in talks with former Apple designer Jony Ive to join OpenAI and lead the project. The tech billionaires in the Valley sense the time has come for a new revolution in hardware and the way we interact with the internet. Humane Eyes pen launched last year. We didn't buy it. Earlier this week, another A.I. centered device called Rabbit made news. It seems like there's a race happening here for an innovative way to interact with A.I., but we're a little bit skeptical.

The most likely outcome is that Google's BART and Apple's Siri will get updates after updates and deploy instantly to all of their devices. Meta and OpenAI will be the other two key players and they'll enact a walled garden around user interface A.I. I guess we'll see what happens. The transfer of wealth picks up pace. Old rich people are dying or their businesses are getting disrupted by what they call the youths. The largest wealth transfer in human history is happening right now, with money flowing from the analog generation to the tech-savvy ones.

That money is changing geographies. Since the internet enables worldwide participation in the marketplace, more billionaires will come out of the emerging countries as more value is captured there since they can acquire talent for cheap. We'll probably get the first African tech billionaire outside of telecom, and it's likely to come out of Nigeria. India only has seven tech billionaires and 169 billionaires in total. With their rise in population as well as their ability to extract economic value from the West, that number will rapidly go up every time a generational wealth transfer happens.

The value is captured by those who understand the flow of money. And if you want to learn how to put yourself in a position to take advantage of this key moment in time, go to alux.com/app. Right now, we've built the only app designed to measurably improve not only the quality of your overall life but specifically your ability to generate wealth for yourself. We are days away from our 2.0 release and we couldn't be more proud of what we built. Information without a clear path of applying it is just entertainment, and we fixed that.

More people than ever are pulling their kids out of schools. We've known for years that traditional education is failing to prepare our kids for the real world. But nobody did anything about it. So people who have the means are taking it upon themselves to protect their offspring. It's not homeschooling per se; it's private tutoring or micro schooling. What we're seeing these days is rich people pulling their kids out of private schools.

Four to five wealthy families come together and pay privately a top teacher to exclusively take care of their kids instead of 20 children to a teacher. You get 3 to 6 kids to someone who has the luxury of taking care of each one properly. The teacher gets paid way more than they would in an established school and has a lot less office politics to deal with. We're seeing a rise in non-religious and non-poor political ideologies here. Parents want their kids to learn math, physics, and computer science without the political or religious agenda found in some schools.

Anti-woke currents grow stronger. We are now beyond the peak of wokeness and cancel culture, as Newton's third Law taught us. For every action in nature, there is an equal and opposite reaction. We've seen a very vocal minority push in one direction, and now the pendulum is swinging. The likelihood that Trump will be the Republican candidate in the US will only add to this fire.

And it's not just in the US. Argentina's got a new president with the same ideology. The Canadian government has failed to keep the economy and costs under control and focused on alternative objectives. So the people are looking for alternatives to the European Union, which lacks a cohesive voice on the world stage. Since Merkel stepped down, from an overall perspective, the two core ideologies of the moment are clashing. The beautiful thing is that as a society, we need both of these extremes to keep each other in check so we can draw the good from each one and disregard the nonsense.

But we'll just have to wait and see how things unfold. And along the same line, old school ideological families, masculine men, and stay-at-home moms are starting to trend. The government pushed for equality and we ended up with equality and misery. When everybody does everything, nobody's happy with how things are being done. Weak men and overworked women are scared of the prospect of building a family because they can barely manage to keep a plant alive or care for a pet. Talk to most people around the age of 30 and they'll tell you they're not ready to have a child.

And that's okay because intrinsically we know what ingredients we require to be able to provide a child with the kind of upbringing we want. So how's the generation? We've been told it's okay to postpone it and it might be the thing that's biting everyone on the behind. The experiment has run its course and we can take the valuables and disregard the rest. It feels like society has pushed the strong independent woman fully focused on a career a little bit too hard.

And the countermovement is forming around the traditional stay-at-home mom. The reality for the average woman is they're not at home with their kids, and they're not professional and fulfilled because the job market sucks. So it's a lose-lose situation for dads. The economic pressure to provide, as well as playing an active role in the household, has gotten them to a point of exhaustion. But the good in all of this is spending time with the family through remote work. Nobody will raise your children with as much love as you can.

So raising your own child instead of shipping them daily off to daycare has become a luxury that many people strive toward. The ideal scenario is both parents are able to be involved in the bringing up of the children, with each of them playing different roles in their development without feeling essential financial pressures. Since most of you have fully become mature adults by now, the people that you'll look up to on social media are not the ones who travel the world all the time carefree, but those who are able to have a well-rounded family life.

Accelerated spending on anti-aging, health, and plastic surgery. Everyone is going through a health kick right now. Before the end of the year, you'll probably have a subscription to a customized cocktail of supplements. Looking young for as long as possible is incentivizing companies to spend more and more money on R&D. From supplements to non-invasive interventions to the bald head queuing up to fly to Turkey, people will pay good money to maintain the illusion of youth.

These are cyclical trends. After the boom in breast implants, we've seen a rise in the removal of plastic and a more non-invasive adjustment. Even pop culture has had enough of it. Everyone on Instagram looks the same: same jaw, same cheekbones, same lips. Natural beauty, the kind where you can't tell that work's been done, will start trending. Happiness is the ever-encompassing word driving you forward. Personal satisfaction comes from either the pursuit of professional success or the pursuit of internal self-actualization.

When one is no longer an option, people default to the second one. Turns out everyone wants to be happy, but very few people know how. More books than ever on the topic will hit the shelves. Talk show hosts will invite happiness gurus and creators such as ourselves will probably try to sell you a course on happiness because it's what you need right now. We're curious to see what this happiness trend will be labeled as since they need to come up with a new name for it to make it stick.

It might be slow living, gentle living, worry less living, or something like that. It's an invitation to look within oneself, to look at the things you already have and appreciate them more. And this narrative shift always goes along with the current state of events. And since people can't buy new things right now, there is the solution. But the list doesn't stop here, my friend.

What prediction that you have for 2024 that you think will come true? Let us know in the comments. And since we want to keep the tradition alive, of course, we've saved up a bonus. For those of you who always watch with us until the end, most predictions are off unless.

Well, the only way to accurately predict the future is to shape it based on your prediction. Everything else is nonsense. We want you to take this opportunity right now and make a prediction about your performance this year. What will you get done? Where do you want to end up? What's the realistic future that you are going to design for yourself? What challenge are you going to set for yourself and how does that reflect in your daily behavior? Once you have a goal, you'll want to be strategic in its pursuit.

Last year you set New Year's resolutions, but most of them didn't come true. If you want a proven framework for it, go to alux.com/goals and enroll in goal mastery. Use the promo code Crush2024 for $150 off at checkout. It's our way of thanking you for being here with us this year. Go use that course and make your goals come true.

Alexa, if this is your breakout year, write the phrase my year in the comments. Let's see how many of you have already gotten started.