What's Your Exit Threshold? — Community Piece

"When It Gets Bad" Is Not a Plan.

I want to ask the community a direct question this week. Not a rhetorical one — an actual one that I want actual answers to.

The United States is in a hot war with Iran. The institutional analysis I published at The Long Memo has reached a point where I’m writing about the first direct US-Iran talks since 1979, which collapsed before they produced anything, about an extraction economy operating at the state scale, about the category error that has broken American foreign policy at the civilizational level.

This is not abstract anymore.

It is the news.

Which means the question I’ve been asking implicitly in everything I write here is now worth asking explicitly: what is your exit threshold?

Not the vague version — “when it gets bad enough.” I’ve written before about why that formulation is a cognitive trap. “When it gets bad enough” is an open-ended commitment that moves with the circumstances. People who said “I’ll leave when it gets bad” in 2020 didn’t leave. They said it’s not that bad yet. The threshold moved. It keeps moving. That is how the threshold is designed to function — as a permission structure that never quite triggers.

I want to know your specific threshold.

Is it a specific political event — an election outcome, a court ruling, a piece of legislation? Is it a financial threshold — a tax rate, a capital controls event, a dollar devaluation? Is it a security event — a draft, a civil disruption, a change in travel freedom? Is it a family event — your kids reaching a certain age, a health situation that makes US healthcare untenable, a professional transition that untethers you from geography?

Name it. In the comments. Seriously.

I ask because the most valuable thing this community does is make the abstract concrete. When someone says “my threshold is if they reinstate selective service” or “my threshold is if the capital gains rate hits 40%” or “my threshold is when my youngest graduates in 2028,” they’re not just sharing information. They’re committing to a position. And commitment to a position is the first step toward building a plan that actually reflects it.

What’s your threshold?