When COVID slammed into the world a few years back, the so-called developed world finally learned a lesson it absolutely should have known already: we’d outsourced reality. Everything came from China… until it didn’t. And when the conveyor belt stopped, we discovered how naked we really were. We weren’t just short on respirators and high-tech wizardry; we couldn’t even get the clownishly simple stuff. We ran out of hand sanitizer. We ran out of masks. We ran out of the cheap, disposable plastic armor we pretended would save us.
Then came the second shock: everything is a supply chain, even the most basic necessities we smugly assumed were permanent features of civilized life. Rice disappeared. Toilet paper evaporated like a myth. Entire categories of “obvious” goods simply ceased to exist overnight. And here we were, modern enlightened societies, staring into empty supermarket shelves like bewildered cavemen wondering who stole the fire. The really funny part? Even after COVID supposedly “ended,” many of those shortages never fully went back to normal. Some things became seasonal. Others just… drifted away. The era of “you can have anything, anytime” quietly died and nobody held a funeral.
Now we’re graduating to the next lesson, and it’s uglier. Tech from China doesn’t just come cheap. It comes with little gifts hidden inside — strategic dependencies, security traps, and built-in leverage. The shiny “green” trinkets shipped to us at bargain prices don’t just undercut our own industries; they poison our infrastructure and burn holes in our strategic autonomy. They’re cheap because someone else pays the environmental cost, someone else eats the human cost, and we pay later in ways far more painful than price tags.
We got addicted to the sweet deal — endless goods, endless convenience, endless savings, no downside if you squint hard enough and drink the Kool-Aid. Now the bill is being slapped on the table and reality is collecting. We’re going to discover, in slow and increasingly unpleasant installments, that dependence has teeth. That fragility has consequences. And that you don’t get to outsource resilience.We loved the fantasy. Now we get to live with reality on its own terms. And no, we’re not going to like it.