In this week’s article, we take a breather from the market and just are, bro.
Distraction Factory
Looking towards the future, we were begging for the past
We knew we had the good things, but those never seemed to last
Everyone’s unhappy, everyone’s ashamed
We all just got caught looking at somebody else’s page— “Missed the Boat,” Modest Mouse
For those who think that by understanding finance, you will be freed from want of money and the necessity of work, you may end up sorely disappointed.
To actively participate in financial markets means being a slave to just another set of forces beyond your control. The incessant news cycle, the panic of bears, the euphoria of bulls, the connections between international markets or different asset classes, the sub-second price ticks measuring in the hundredths of pennies, and so on.
If you aren’t careful, life becomes a world of missed opportunities.
All the trades that “could have been” and all the trades that “should have worked.” Feeling like a sucker for not betting the farm on a leveraged natural gas future because you saw a stranger on Reddit make 1000% in a weekend. Acting like people have a clear grasp on trends that have life cycles longer than natural human lifespans. The complexity of modern markets is such that a thousand different things can influence your portfolio and all you can manage to reflect on is that you “should have known better.”
When you step back and realize that all this time, all this money, and all this pain is flowing into an ultimately impossible task, to not only predict the future but to do it better than the next guy, financial markets begin to seem quite silly.
Dasein
The German philosopher Martin Heidegger had a concept of human existence that he called “dasein.” A logical choice as dasein is simply the word “existence” in German. For Heidegger, it means a little more than that.
Shamelessly plagiarizing from Wikipedia:
Dasein for Heidegger is a mode of being involved with and caring for the immediate world in which one lives, while always remaining aware of the contingent element of that involvement, of the priority of the world to the self, and of the evolving nature of the self itself.
The opposite of this authentic self is everyday and inauthentic Dasein, the forfeiture of one’s individual meaning, destiny and lifespan, in favour of an (escapist) immersion in the public everyday world — the anonymous, identical world of the They and the Them.
Basically, the way I understand dasein is that we can change the world, our lifespans are limited but are ultimately important to us, and that who we really are is independent of what other people think of us or the cultural norms of our time.
In a similar vein, what money means to you and what you choose to do with it is more important than what it means to somebody else or what somebody else thinks you should do with it. It is like a form of social energy, but how you choose to wield that energy is exactly that: your choice. Don’t forget that.
How will you cultivate your environment, your networks, and your talents? Financially speaking, how will you cultivate your portfolio? Will you follow the herd and invest your retirement into a cap-weighted market index because “everyone else is doing it?” Did you do the same when everyone was YOLOing into Gamestop?
Be
Money or not, your presence in the world is what counts.
Who are you? How will you be? Is it the life that you think someone else would be proud of you for living, or is it your true, authentic life?
There are no second chances.
Be there.
This was a refreshing “side-venture” from your usual post; and an important one. Important because life really does come down to so much more than the immediate analysis and subsequent change in direction because of this, that, or other things that continually barrage us throughout our day(s). We’re not going to win every battle, but we are capable of winning the war.