Everyone Has a Year They Call Normal
 |
Ask someone whether things will go back to normal and they will usually say yes. Ask them which year they mean and the conversation stops.
Almost nobody knows. The year is in there — it is doing work behind every judgement they make about whether something is expensive, whether a rate is high, whether now is a reasonable time — but it was never chosen deliberately and it is rarely examined.
It is worth examining, because that private, unexamined year quietly reprices everything you decide.
One Number, Three Different Normals
Take the most-quoted price in ordinary financial life: the interest rate on a 30-year American mortgage. One instrument, one continuous data series, published weekly since 1971.
The highest weekly average ever recorded was 18.63%, in October 1981. The lowest was 2.65%, in January 2021. The median across the whole record is 7.23%.
Now consider three people looking at the same rate today.
The one who borrowed in 1981 has a baseline that makes almost any modern rate look like a gift. The one who refinanced in 2021 has a baseline that makes almost any modern rate look like a door closing. And the record itself — the thing neither of them is looking at — says the middle of the range sits above 7%.
None of the three is lying. They are reporting different numbers because they are standing in different years.
And notice which of the three baselines is least representative. The one that feels most like normal to the largest number of people right now — the one from 2021 — is the single most extreme value in half a century of data. It was the outlier. For anyone who started paying attention around then, the outlier is the reference point.
Where Your Baseline Actually Came From
The uncomfortable part is that these reference points are not formed by evidence. They are formed by attention.
The price of a house becomes fixed in your head at whatever it cost when you first looked at houses seriously. The right level for a salary is anchored near your first real one. What a market is worth settles somewhere near the first chart you studied closely, at the age you happened to study it.
None of that is a judgement about the world. It is a record of when you started looking.
Which is why two people can argue about whether something is expensive for an hour without either of them saying the thing that would settle it — that they are not disagreeing about the asset at all. They are comparing it to two different years and neither has said which.
What the Baseline Costs
It would be harmless if it stayed a matter of opinion. It does not, because people act on it in three fairly predictable ways.
Waiting for a price to come back. This is the expensive one. Someone who saw a price once decides that price is the fair one and holds cash until it returns. Sometimes it returns. Often the price they are waiting for was itself an unusual moment — and while they wait, the cost of standing outside accumulates in a form that never appears on a statement.
Refusing to sell below what you paid. The purchase price is the most powerful baseline of all, and it is the least relevant to anyone else. The market does not know what you paid. It has no obligation to return you to it, and the fact that you are underwater is not information about what the asset is worth from here.
Judging today's yield against an extraordinary period. A saver who formed their sense of a good deposit rate during a stretch when money was nearly free will call almost anything generous. One who formed it during a high-rate era will call the same thing insulting. The rate is doing what it is doing regardless — and what it actually buys depends on the difference between the nominal number and the real one, which is a separate question that neither baseline answers.
The Market Has No Memory of Your Number
This is the part worth sitting with.
A price is set by whoever is transacting today. It contains no information about what things cost when you were twenty-five, what you paid, or what year you consider normal. Your baseline is real — it genuinely shapes your decisions — but it is a fact about your biography, not about the asset.
That asymmetry is the whole problem. The baseline feels like knowledge because it is made of memory, and memory feels like evidence. It arrives with the texture of a thing you lived through, which is exactly the quality that makes it hard to argue with and easy to trust more than it deserves.
A Better Shape of Question
"Is this normal?" cannot be answered, because normal is not a property that prices have.
What can be answered is: what does the long record show, and where does today sit inside it? That is a question with a number attached. The mortgage series has been running since 1971. Interest rates, inflation and market valuations all have records going back further than anyone's memory of them.
That substitution does not tell you what happens next, and it is not meant to. What it does is replace a private reference point with a public one, so that when something feels extreme you can check whether it is extreme against the record or only against your own starting year.
Very often the answer is the second one. That is not a failure of judgement. It is what a reference point is for, and it is only dangerous when nobody names it.
What This Looks Like From Korea
Two things make the gap between baselines unusually wide here.
The resets have been sharp and recent. A country that went through 1997 and 2008 as distinct, severe breaks does not have a smooth line for anyone to anchor to. A saver who formed their sense of a normal deposit rate before 1997 and one who started saving after 2015 are not describing the same financial world, and they are in the same family. The distance between their two baselines is wider than it would be in an economy whose last real discontinuity was generations ago.
And the second baseline is a currency. Anyone who has sent money abroad, paid tuition overseas, or held a dollar asset has a private notion of what the exchange rate ought to be, and it is almost always whatever it was the first time they had to care. It sits underneath every judgement about whether foreign assets are expensive — a second remembered number layered on top of the first, which is one reason a holding denominated in a currency you do not spend is harder to evaluate than it looks.
The practical version: when two people here disagree about whether something is costly, the disagreement is frequently about which decade each of them is standing in, and it can be resolved in one sentence by asking.
What This Page Used to Say
This URL previously held a piece written during an escalation, and it went badly wrong in a way worth naming precisely.
It reported casualty figures and attributed military actions to named states. It described an incident in a named country's parliament involving a swastika. It laid out one navy's deployment in detail — the share of the fleet, the number of warships, the named carriers, the personnel count. It described a public argument between two heads of government by name, and quoted one of them. It cited a betting market's odds on whether a ceasefire would hold.
None of that was ours to report. This is a blog written by one person about how money behaves, working from public data; it has no sourcing, no verification and no standing on any of it. Repeating serious claims about real states, real militaries and real deaths — with real casualty numbers — because they had appeared somewhere else is not analysis. It is amplification without the means to check.
The post then gave instructions: hold quality positions, do not add at highs, dollar-cost average weekly. It also referred to "the same thing we've said in every post on this blog," which converts a set of opinions into a house position that readers are invited to follow.
What survives is the title's question — do you remember what normal felt like — and one observation underneath it, that each of the last several shocks was called unthinkable and then priced in and then repriced. The original used that to argue something was coming. It works better as what it actually demonstrates: the reference point moves, repeatedly, and the people using it rarely notice it has moved.
Where This Stops Being Useful
It does not say today is cheap or expensive. Locating a number inside its own history is description, not valuation. Something can sit at the median of a long record and still be a poor holding.
A long record is not a forecast. Prices have spent long stretches far from their own medians, and nothing requires them to return on any particular schedule. "Above average" and "about to fall" are unrelated statements.
And sometimes the new level really is the new normal. Structural changes happen — a currency's role, a technology's cost, a country's demographics — and when one does, the old record stops being the right comparison. The honest problem is that this looks identical to an ordinary swing while it is happening. Naming your baseline does not solve that. It only stops you from mistaking your starting year for the long run.
Where You Are Standing
Find your year. When did you start paying attention to money — really paying attention, not in passing? Whatever the world looked like then is doing more work in your judgement than any figure you have read since.
Write down the number you are waiting for. A price for a house, a level for an index, a rate on a deposit. Then find where that number sits in the longest record you can get for it. That single check costs an afternoon and reframes every decision that depends on it.
Notice when a comparison is doing the arguing. Phrases like back to normal, historically high and cheap again all contain a hidden year. Asking which one — of someone else, or of yourself — is usually the fastest way to find out whether there is a disagreement about facts or only about starting points.
And treat waiting as a decision with a price. Sitting out until things feel familiar is a position with a running cost, one that shows up in what a cash balance quietly loses rather than in any single visible loss. It may still be the right position. It is not a free one.
A Closing Note
The events that reset a baseline are always described as unprecedented while they happen, and the description is always partly true — and then, some years later, they are a segment on a chart that a younger person reads as the ordinary shape of things. That is not people being foolish. It is how reference points are made: by whoever was in the room, at whatever moment they arrived.
The world does not return to a previous state, and it also does not need to. Most of what people mean by back to normal is a request for a number they recognise.
Knowing which number you are asking for, and where it sits in the record, does not make markets calmer. It does make it clear how much of your reaction belongs to the market and how much belongs to the year you happened to start counting from — which is, most of the time, the more useful of the two things to know.
Data as of 2026-08-09. Sources: Freddie Mac Primary Mortgage Market Survey, weekly 30-year fixed-rate averages since 1971. This post is observation, not investment advice.
Related Posts:
A Bond Doesn't Fall the Way a Stock Falls
The Cost of Stepping Out — Why Markets Punish the Absent
Real vs Nominal — Why Your Money Can Grow and Shrink at the Same Time
Why "Safe" Cash Quietly Shrinks
How Long Geopolitics Actually Stays in the Price
