Why It Took Us Five Years to Understand What Was Happening in Trucking
When you cannot explain the problem, you stop trying to predict the outcome. You shift your focus to the immediate.
This is a personal theory. It's not necessarily the absolute truth, but it certainly isn't naive either. Over the last year, I’ve talked with trucking company owners, drivers, and others who have lived inside this industry long enough to know when something is deeply wrong. I noticed a recurring pattern in each conversation, enough to develop a coherent, realistic, and difficult-to-ignore theory.
If you noticed a shift in 2025, you are not imagining it. 2025 was the year we finally understood what happened to the trucking industry.
The Industry We Thought We Knew
The trucking industry is cyclical. It always has been. Freight rates go up, freight rates go down. Capacity expands, capacity contracts. This isn’t a controversial concept; it’s just the way it is.
Every experienced business owner knows this. They’ve built their operations around knowing how to survive the cycles. They know how to weather downturns, cut costs, park equipment, and wait for the market to correct. That’s how trucking has worked for decades, but what started in 2020 was not normal trucking.
It Wasn’t a ‘Freight Cycle’
After 2020, everything we’ve ever known stopped working. The ones who had survived multiple downturns stopped offering timelines. Analysts stopped attempting to predict when the market would turn. There was no longer a “next quarter” or “next season” when things would normalize.
At some point, the entire industry quietly admitted it did not understand what it was experiencing.
When you cannot explain the problem, you stop trying to predict the outcome. You shift your focus to the immediate. How to get through the next month, the next payroll, the next insurance renewal.
This is the core of my theory.
Survival Mode
It took five years to understand what was actually happening because no one had the luxury of stepping back and looking at the system as a whole. Everyone was laser-focused, locked into survival mode.
When a business is under sustained pressure, curiosity fades, and strategy narrows by necessity. Everything becomes short-term. Owners shifted from asking structural questions and analyzing industry shifts to ‘how do we get through next quarter?’
They were focused on protecting and caring for their people, keeping them paid and the doors open. For some, that meant preserving a multi-generational legacy. Others were owner-operators whose livelihoods depended on keeping their truck running.
There was no margin for abstract thought. The survival mindset dictates priorities and narrows the field of vision, which explains why so few paused to ask broader questions. It wasn’t because they lacked experience or awareness, but because the environment did not allow it. Strategic thinking requires stability, and reflection requires time. Since 2020, neither existed.
No one missed what was happening because they were careless or incompetent. They could not see it clearly because the industry was operating under a prolonged state of emergency management.
Moving Forward
Conversations changed in 2025. People began talking more openly about what they were seeing, and social media helped connect experiences that had been isolated for years. Drivers, owners, advocates, and analysts were no longer reacting to separate fragments of the industry. They started comparing notes. In many ways, the industry began reconnecting with itself.
Trucking is not just another market. It is an industry built on people, on relationships, on generational businesses, and on trust that the system, while imperfect, is at least grounded in reality. When that foundation cracks, the consequences extend far beyond rates and capacity.
There is still so much work to be done. Understanding what happened is only the first step. What comes next requires honesty, accountability, and a willingness to confront uncomfortable truths about how this industry operates. But for the first time in years, there is space to do that work.
That understanding comes with great loss. I am absolutely heartbroken for the companies and owner-operators who did not make it through this period. Many were disciplined, experienced, and responsible. They did everything right and still ran out of time. They were swept out by forces no one could name at the time. I wish, so badly, this reckoning had come sooner, before so much experience, livelihood, and legacy were lost.
I am cautiously grateful. Grateful that the industry is finally asking the right questions. Grateful that the people who lived through this period are still here to tell the story. And hopeful that what we build next leaves trucking in a much better, stronger place than we found it.
We cannot forget these years. Survival kept the industry we love alive. What we choose to do with what we learned will determine what comes next.
Really insightful on the survival mode blindspot. When the business requires constant firefighting, zooming out to see systemic issues becomes a luxry nobody can afford. I've seen this pattern in other sectors where prolonged crisis shifts everyone from strategy to short-term triage, and by the time things stabilize, the landscape has completly shifted.
It breaks my heart where the industry has gone! My kids grew up alongside dad taking them to the shop on Saturdays, sweeping out the bays, moving trailers, doing tire work, handing tools while I did an overhead while the others watched and learned. Riding along to drop a trailer or deliver a load so a driver could go and stay home. Those opportunities for small startups and family operations is pretty much gone. My thinking the primary cause; the Feds and states did not enforce the laws that kept the playing field level along with proscribing solutions instead of boundaries which would have allowed innovation. Sad.