Systems always rebalance. Equilibrium is unavoidable. The question isn’t if balance returns, it’s how violently it happens.

The Louisiana Purchase, the boom in credit, and the Panic of 1819 aren’t just footnotes in history, they’re case studies in human psychology. They show how our evolutionary wiring, our distorted view of risk and reward, and our reliance on quick fixes push us into cycles of boom and bust. Economies. Bodies. Relationships. The pattern repeats everywhere.

The Louisiana Purchase: A Cheat Code That Wasn’t

In 1803, Jefferson doubled America’s size with the Louisiana Purchase. Land at pennies per acre. To most people, it looked like free money.

• Land was cheap.
• Crops were selling at record highs thanks to war in Europe.
• Demand for American exports looked infinite.

To the average farmer, risk vanished. Reward skyrocketed.

Evolutionary psychology explains this perfectly. Our brains are wired for survival in environments of scarcity. When the reward looks abundant and the risk invisible, we chase it. Hard. Passing up a ripe orchard in the wild could mean starvation. Passing up cheap land and booming crop prices felt just as foolish.

The result? Frenzy.

• Farmers borrowed aggressively to buy land.
• Banks printed notes faster than they could back them with gold and silver.
• Legislators stripped away restrictions that acted as natural brakes.

The country bent over backwards to rebalance the risk/reward ratio.

But it was a trap. We have a cognitive bias that makes us think that present conditions will last forever.

Equilibrium and Artificial Resistance

Every system seeks balance. But the rate of correction is everything.

Think alcohol: one drink tips the scale, three drinks unbalance it, and the hangover forces your body back into equilibrium. Same with caffeine: today’s energy high becomes tomorrow’s withdrawal crash.

America’s economy was drunk on expansion and easy credit. Inflation soared. And when Europe’s wars cooled down, crop prices fell. The correction arrived.

Enter the Second Bank of the United States. Its mission: restore order. Force banks to back their notes. Bring discipline.

But discipline delivered at full force becomes shock therapy.

• The Bank demanded gold and silver redemption immediately, crushing state banks overnight.
• Entire regional economies collapsed.
• Corruption inside the Bank eroded trust even further.

The cure became its own destabilizer.

The Whiplash of Change

The problem wasn’t imbalance. It was speed.

Systems don’t break because they rebalance. They break because we force them to rebalance too quickly.

The Second Bank cracked down overnight—shock. Then Jackson dismantled the Bank entirely—shock in the other direction. Each swing was an overcorrection. Each correction set the stage for the next collapse.

The Panic of 1819 wasn’t a random crash. It was the inevitable hangover from reckless expansion followed by violent correction.

That’s why the way the U.S. handled money after the Civil War matters. Instead of ripping off the bandage overnight, they slowly retired the Civil War greenbacks. It was painful, but gradual. By stretching the adjustment over years, the system could absorb the shift without shattering.

This shows the hidden danger of policy: when it overwhelms natural resistance instead of aligning with it, correction becomes destructive instead of stabilizing.

How This Plays Out in Life

The same cycle plays out in our personal lives every day.

• Guarana Extract. I once used it as a pre-workout. At first, it was rocket fuel: energy, focus, mood. But push it too far, and I couldn’t drag myself out of bed. Inflation followed by collapse.
• Caffeine. Coffee “prints” energy like banks printed notes. But dependence builds. Withdrawal hits. Same cycle: inflate → crash → repeat.
• Pharmaceuticals. One drug solves a symptom but spawns side effects. Another drug patches those side effects but creates more. The cascade destabilizes the whole system. Like central banks piling patches on deeper imbalances.
• Relationships. We invest heavily in people when the reward feels abundant: attention, affection, validation, but we ignore underlying issues. When imbalance hits, connections crumble, and we scramble to patch them, often compounding the problem.
• Money and work. Chasing fast money or shortcuts can give the illusion of control and reward, but neglecting fundamentals leads to burnout, debt, and instability. Patching one financial misstep with another quick fix often destabilizes the entire plan.

We don’t break because of imbalance. We break because of the speed of imbalance and the artificial fixes we lean on to delay the pain.

The Evolutionary Trap

The Louisiana Purchase and the Panic of 1819 are more than history. They’re reminders that our brains evolved for a different world.

• We over-chase when reward looks infinite.
• We underestimate risk when it hides in the background.
• We tear down natural resistance (gold reserves, moderation, sleep) for the illusion of speed.
• We demand fixes, then get shocked when the fixes destabilize everything further.

Nature doesn’t care. Equilibrium will return. The only question: gently or violently?

Key Principles

1. Equilibrium is inevitable. Every system balances itself. The question is how painful the correction will be.
2. Rate of change matters. Gradual adjustments build resilience. Sudden shifts destroy it.
3. Risk/reward drives behavior. When risk looks invisible, people overreach.
4. Resistance is necessary. Guardrails—whether gold reserves or healthy limits—protect stability.
5. Artificial fixes destabilize. Quick solutions create deeper long-term problems.

Key Takeaways

• The Louisiana Purchase distorted risk/reward, igniting speculation.
• War in Europe created temporary abundance that made risk invisible.
• Banks inflated credit, and legislators removed natural brakes.
• The Second Bank tried to restore balance but delivered shock therapy.
• Jackson’s dismantling of the Bank was another destabilizing swing.
• The Panic of 1819 was the inevitable hangover of inflation and overcorrection.
• In life, we repeat the same pattern: inflate, crash, repeat.

The lessons: Get to the root of the problem instead of piling on fixes. Don’t shift too fast, gradual change stabilizes, violent swings destabilize. And gain knowledge of how systems work so you’re not carried away by evolutionary psychology. The system always balances, you only get to choose whether it feels like a stumble, a collapse, or whether it remains in balance at all.

Thanks for reading my stuff,

MJ