The global economy is defying gravity. So are you. That's the problem.

“Defying gravity”

The Guardian reports that policymakers at the IMF’s annual meeting in Bangkok this week kept using one word to describe the global economy: “resilience.”

Sky-high oil prices, geopolitical turmoil, shock after shock, and yet, as one expert put it, “a lot of countries are sort of defying gravity.”

So I read that and I thought: yeah. That’s exactly what a lot of self-employed people say to me about their own finances.

It’s messy, but we’re okay. I know I should sort it, but nothing’s actually gone wrong yet. Somehow it just keeps working.

Sound familiar?

The danger inside the calm

Here’s the thing the IMF was actually trying to say, because it wasn’t a celebration. The Guardian reports that the IMF’s own flagship publication carried the message “Resilience under strain, urgent choices.” And the IMF’s managing director, Kristalina Georgieva, warned that “each new shock has pushed debt levels higher,” and called on governments to “make urgent repairs to the fiscal house before the cracks widen.”

The resilience was real. And it was also masking something.

That gap, between things feeling okay and things actually being okay, is exactly where a well-known behavioural bias lives.

Normalisation bias

Normalisation bias is what happens when your brain takes a situation that should feel alarming and quietly reclassifies it as normal.

Think about how it works physically. You walk into a room that smells strange. After ten minutes, you can’t smell it anymore. Your brain adapted. It decided the smell was background, not signal.

Normalisation bias does the same thing with financial chaos. The first month you had no idea what you took home, it felt stressful. The third month, a bit uncomfortable. By month eight, you’re not even registering it. It’s just how things are.

The irregular income, the tax you’re not quite sure about, the months where you genuinely can’t explain where it all went, the buffer that never quite builds. It was once alarming. Now it’s Tuesday.

And that adaptation, which feels like coping, is actually the risk. Because the chaos hasn’t gone. You’ve just stopped seeing it clearly.

Why this hits self-employed people harder

When you work for yourself, there’s no payroll department smoothing things out. No HR sending you a pension statement. No system running in the background.

You are the system.

So when the system gets noisy and you adapt to the noise, the noise doesn’t go away. It just keeps running, underneath. And then a shock hits. A big tax bill. A slow quarter. A client who doesn’t pay. And suddenly the thing that felt fine reveals itself not to have been fine at all.

The IMF’s Georgieva put it like this about governments, and honestly it translates directly: too many “did not use the post-pandemic recovery to rebuild fiscal buffers, and each new shock has pushed debt levels higher.”

Now swap out “post-pandemic recovery” for your good months. Swap out “fiscal buffers” for your financial cushion. Swap out “each new shock” for the next quiet patch, the next unexpected bill.

You see it, right?

This is not about being careless

Normalisation bias isn’t a character flaw. It is a feature of how human brains manage stress. You couldn’t function if every piece of financial disorder felt as sharp on day 200 as it did on day one. Your brain protected you.

But now the protection is working against you. The chaos feels manageable because it feels normal. It isn’t necessarily either.

One small action this week

Just look. That’s the action.

Not fix, not overhaul, not build a spreadsheet. Just open your accounts this week, and ask yourself one question: if I saw this for the first time today, would I feel okay about it?

That question breaks the adaptation. It puts fresh eyes on something your brain has been quietly filing as fine.

You don’t have to do anything with the answer yet. You just have to get the answer.

Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s work on how we process risk tells us that the way information is framed changes how we respond to it. Seeing your finances as a stranger would see them, rather than as you’ve normalised them to be, is a reframe. It can shift what you notice.

So just look. Honestly look. And if what you see surprises you, that’s the bias lifting.

For anything structural, anything about tax, savings or how to actually build the buffer, that’s a conversation to have with a qualified financial professional who knows your situation. What I can do is help you understand why you’ve been avoiding the look in the first place.

That’s exactly what we work through in The Money Story Method, my 12-week one-to-one programme for self-employed people whose money feels chaotic. If that sounds like the right next step, you can find out more at Way of Wealth.

Or if you’d rather start smaller, The Thursday Money Note is my free newsletter where I do exactly this every week: take something in the world and connect it to what’s happening in your head. Link in the bio.

The global economy is apparently defying gravity. So are a lot of self-employed finances. Neither can do it forever.

Source: The Guardian

Joel