Markets are hard to predict and if you say it is going to go up (or down) often enough, eventually, you will be right. But, I don't mind waiting for things to start really moving, though I do feel that I have been far too inactive during the bear markets, as real life has been getting in the way of me trading much. One of the benefits of barely sleeping, used to be being able to catch more spikes and make a quick 10-15 percent here and there. Even if not done that often, by the time the bull comes, it does make a difference. Instead, I feel like I am just holding now -
and hoping a bit.
It isn't even about hoping to sell for a higher price, but when the prices are higher, there is a confidence that comes with it, like a safety net, or fallback position, just in case everything goes wrong in life. When there is no safety net however, all volatility seem precarious, life is constantly being lived on the edge.
The other day I was reading that an Australian won 100 million in the lottery, and I was thinking what I would do with that money and, how much would actually change. It was funny, I thought about landscaping the garden and doing the basement. Expensive for sure, but a couple hundred thousand would be the maximum.
Would I move house?
I don't know, maybe. But then, I think I would be more interested in getting this place the way we want it, if money was no object. And then, I think I would be investing into some apartments in some other countries, as well as here in Finland. The majority of it though, I'd have to give it some deep thought about what I want to actually do. I would definitely be buying some more HIVE.
Enough to spike the price.
What is that, 800K between where we are and a dollar? That won't even get me 2 million HIVE. Of course, I wouldn't be buying it like that, as the markets are far too thin and I would be massively overpaying, so I would have to buy in slowly. 100M or not in the bank, I still wouldn't want to waste it.
But that is the mentality of a poor person.
As much fun as it is to imagine "what we would do if" with things, the fact of the matter is, we actually have very little idea, especially when it comes to very large amounts of money. There is a difference between having 0, 10K, 100K, 10M or 100M available, and unless we have been in those types of positions, we don't know how we would behave. It is like getting into a fist fight - until it happens, you don't know how you are going to perform, or if you will perform at all.
Someone with experience enters the fight knowing their behavior.
I feel I know myself quite well, but I also know that even if I am correct, I only know what I know, based on the experiences that I have had. I can predict or extrapolate out on past performance, but that prediction will not be able to factor in all the little changes that will happen, but I didn't even know I needed to consider.
I was telling my wife about the winner in Australia and she said how we wouldn't need that much, just to be debt free, with no mortgage. But, while that would be great, I am pretty sure that once in that situation, more things will arise, our demands would go up. But, being debt-free doesn't mean having enough to do all of the things we might want to do beyond that, it just makes it easier to save for those things. Don't get me wrong, I'd be ecstatic to have no mortgage - but that is also not the goal of life.
So what are the goals?
The older I get, the more I believe that in order to be content as a human, we have to feel that we are part of something larger than ourselves. Survival alone is not enough. However, this is also a slippery slope, because we can be part of all kinds of things, and many people are joining "causes" which are actually thinly-veiled marketing campaigns that keep them busy, doing very little of consequence. Should life feel consequential?
I actually think that a big reason for the increasing depression levels is that people feel irrelevant in their lives, that they are not really doing much, other than surviving. In the past, we might have been just surviving, but the role we played in it was much larger, we had to work toward it, we were part of the movement of our lives. Now, we are more passive, less in control, passengers. No wonder the opioid epidemic is affecting middle class America so heavily - so many people disconnected from a community, disconnected from life itself - struggling to find a place in the world.
Money doesn't buy happiness.
But it does buy opportunity and used well, that can lead to satisfaction. It also buys control, because a person is no longer tied to their job because they need the money to pay the mortgage, they can pick and choose, they can decide what is consequential in their own life, what has meaning. It might be to maximize the time laying on a beach, or it might be to spend the time cleaning up the same beach instead - but there is a choice. And, it isn't go to work and earn and hope, or be unemployed and reliant on others.
Opportunity, we want more of it right?
Each day we wake up with the opportunity to improve our lives in some way. It might not make much of a difference in the grand scheme of things, but knowing we made an attempt is enough to bring some satisfaction and, perhaps if we do it often enough, it leads to generative habits that bring more opportunities, which opens us up to a new pool to fish from, and more opportunities again.
They say that the more money you have, the more problems, because while a poor person worries about not having enough, a rich person worries about protecting what they have. But, even this I think is the mindset of people like me, the poor. Just because we are always having to think about money, we assume that rich people are doing the same, just at a greater scale. It could be that it barely crosses their minds, other than in context of their daily activities that make more of it, or could cost them something. In some way, once you have enough money, you can step outside the money game mindset and just, do largely as you please, within reason.
It is hard to take the perspective of what we have never experienced.
The markets will do what the markets will do. I just have to make sure I am doing what I can do, to have the opportunity to increasingly take part in something meaningful. I feel I am doing that with parts of my day at least - perhaps in the future, I can do a bit more.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
