Becoming Me. The Nudges of Life.
Macro Economist, Henrik Zeberg, has 190.000 followers on X. He is an expert in Business Cycles and has “Broken the Macro Code” by developing a Macroeconomic model which tracks the real economy and predicts recessions.
"I was born in Horsens, Denmark, in 1975 - the first child of two very young parents. My father had only just turned twenty. My mother was twenty-one. We moved to Sønderborg when I was three, and that’s where my childhood unfolded. Neither of my parents had an easy childhood and neither did I. I was late into my 40’s, when I learned about the concept of generational trauma and the psychological damage inflicted from it.
My father had a powerful presence and a sharp temper. He also lacked emotional intelligence. My mother, warm and kind by nature, obediently followed his lead. My father’s mood swings were frequent and severe, and you never really knew what would trigger a new outburst. His outburst would be accompanied by my mother’s silence. To keep the peace, I found my own strategies. I learned not to take up too much space. At school I became a diligent student because I learned that my achievements earned me praise.
That pattern followed me into adolescence. I moved to Copenhagen in 1994. It felt like a new beginning. I began studying Economics. While studying I became a top-national level athlete. Six years later I had a master’s degree in economics. I became a consultant. I got married. I felt unconquerable. In 2007 I had my first child, a son named Tobias. Like all other first-time fathers and mothers, the arrival of my first child changed me and I, like other parents before me, understood the meaning of unconditional love. Two years later I had my daughter, Isabella.
The First Struggle: Financial Distress
When the financial crisis hit in 2008, I was a father to a newborn - and heavily leveraged in investments in real estate. Each day I feared getting a call from the bank. Would they take our house? Would I lose everything I had built for my family? My work as a consultant was beginning to feel meaningless - endless meetings and a lot of office politics that seemed out of sync with the gravity of what was happening. Until now, everything had gone my way. Everything I had touched so far had turned to gold.
The economic distress had, to me unknowingly at the time, created the first crack in my carefully constructed hyper-rational consultant persona. Fear, fatigue and a general feeling of emptiness was beginning to accompany me in everyday life. I was a provider. I kept going. By 2011, I was beginning to recover. I began wondering why no one, not even reputable economists, had been able to predict the crisis. We accept the use of scientific and mathematical principles for the engineering of rockets, but why had no one applied the same principles for making accurate economic forecasts?
My wonder grew and would eventually transform into something much larger.
The Second Struggle: Loss of Control
In January 2012 my son’s kindergarten bus was in an accident. The bus overturned after hitting a passenger car. For four hours, I did not know if my son was alive. He was thankfully unharmed. I wasn’t. The four hours of fear-rooted uncertainty triggered a stress response from my already dysregulated nervous system. I couldn’t sleep and I was no longer able to calm myself. Eventually my doctor gave me a referral to a psychologist. I was sceptical. I did not believe in introspection. I believed in discipline and extrospection.
My psychologist didn’t ask me to solve anything. She taught me to feel. A new journey towards emotional language and understanding had begun. She helped me unlearn the psychological rigidity I inherited from my father. I learned to use self-compassion as a tool. With her help I overcame stress. With her help I continued to cultivate my emotional literacy. I wanted to use this newfound awareness to become a better man and foster more meaningful relationships.
The Third Struggle: A Crumbling Facade
According to the Dutch psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, past trauma can suppress your intuition.
From the outside I had what, for some, seemed to be the perfect relationship with my ex-wife. The inescapable fact was, that I had spent years nurturing a toxic relationship. Verbal and emotional abuse had become recurring events on a weekly basis. In retrospect I had internalized, and was now mimicking, the harmful relationship dynamic between my parents. I had become my mother.
In my twenties I had mistaken love bombing and toxic volatility for passion and love. If I were to give my younger self relationship advice it would be to focus on developing your intuition and learning to trust it.
In 2020 I got a divorce. With it came the grief of losing a family unit deemed utopian from the start. Guilt and self-blame became the dominant feelings. My psychologist helped me navigate my emotions. I learned to be more vulnerable, and I found myself craving for authenticity.
Becoming Deliberately Aware
The biggest, unexpected gift you get from hardship is awareness. Daniel Kahneman has written a brilliant book about how cognitive biases influence our decisions making, and how unaware we often are of these systematic deviations from reality. The anchoring bias had prevented me from acknowledging that the person I married was a stranger hiding behind a facade. That proved to be too energy consuming to uphold over time. In my previous marriage I was constantly being ridiculed for pursuing my hobby, spending time analysing macroeconomics and financial market data.
In 2011 I began developing my own macroeconomic framework. I was obsessed with gathering information, building models and studying cycles and posting my thoughts online. My online following started growing fast. For the first time in many years, I was following my intuition and curiosity.
In 2020, I launched “The Zeberg Report”. In 2022 I became Head Economist at Swissblock. My voice, once stifled by my surroundings, had become clear and strong. People were now listening. And the journey has still just begun!
In a session with my psychologist, I had expressed a fear of not being able to fall in love. My fear was gently brushed off by her. Life then gave me the least anticipated gift of falling in love, when I met a girl named Noor. A 22-year age gap made the mental connection even more surprising. Our energy was playful and light, yet deep. I became acquainted with the feeling of being with a person who is the embodiment of feeling “at home”.
Who I Am
Virginia Woolf once wrote: “If you do not tell the truth about yourself, you cannot tell it about other people”. I was a late bloomer when it comes to understanding people and their intentions. I had to overcome a strong projection bias.
Today, I am faithful and thereby also a much more stable person for my surroundings. I learned that multiple personal crises will eventually break you, if you aren’t taking care of your mental health and living in alignment with you core values. The last involves surrounding yourself with people who value, love and accept your core.
I am curious and I love to challenge the current state-of-affairs in macroeconomic theory, but most importantly I am a devoted father and a devoted partner. For the people I care most about, I will always be loving and present.
The Nudges of Life helped me find my purpose and to become me!
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To me dearest Noor! Thank you for your invaluable contribution to this piece. You lifted it from shattered words to a sincere summary of my life. And thank you for being here for me – and with me. You are my great love!"
