Some things in life feel like getting teeth pulled.
Tomorrow, Smallsteps is going to get a feel for it first-hand, as she has to get her two front teeth taken out, as they are not coming out on their own, despite being wobbly. If she doesn't lose them soon, her adult teeth will grow crooked. At the moment at least, she is pretty upbeat about the procedure, yet I think that once we are standing behind that door, it is going to be a different story.
Without experience, it is hard to predict how we are going to feel about an even in the future and often we either overestimate or underestimate reality. For instance, as a kid with my friends, we would plan a New Years party of some kind, getting all excited about how good it would be, only for it never to reach the heights of our expectations. Similarly, we rarely accurately predict how bad something is going to make us feel, for example, being broke. And sometimes, especially when there is fear present, our imagination run wild, making us feel that a future experience is going to be much worse than it actually will be.
Our brains are amazing tools, because they are able to imagine the non-existent. The brain can build entire worlds of fantasy and then use the designs as guides for making them a reality, bringing art to life. And whilst amazing, the brain is the same tool that brings us nightmares and imagines monsters under the bed, even if we don't want it to. Our thoughts might be our own and private, but we don't have complete control over them.
I think that a lot of people who may not have experienced a bull market, underestimate the affect it will have on them, especially if they have been collecting tokens during the bear. When the values of holdings go 5x, 10x or 20x in the space of a few weeks, it is very difficult not to be affected, and to feel confidence creep in and that sense of power that can come with greater financial wealth. It happens so fast and like it or not, people feel better. Happier.
Did money just buy happiness?
Of course though, it isn't lasting, because dips will arrive and the bear will always return. and, that fear creeps in, the one that makes us question what we are doing, makes us wonder which will be the best decision to make - hold, sell, convert? Because the dreaded bear is going to take that smile away.
Yet, for anyone who has experienced a bear or two, it is only really bad when living needs rely on having high prices - which is never recommended. But, if there are other things to do, such as work a job or play on Hive, bear markets aren't that bad at all, especially if some time is spent with people in a similar situation, those not worried too much about a bear market. Surround ourselves with fear mongers however, and it is a different story, with all kinds of doomsdayers ramping each other's emotions up, amplifying group fear without voices of reason.
Who we occupy our lives with matter a lot and it is something that I have been wondering about as so many people narrow their social circles and isolate into digital worlds. Yes, all the information might be at our fingertips, but so much of our activity is shifted through peer interaction and examples and I am not sure we are going to get as much opportunity to build solid reference groups. Instead, we see a lot of fantasy and embellishment, and rarely are the relationships deep enough to speak openly and honestly.
The view we get of our references, is not close to the reality of them.
And I think that this is going to create a multitude of issues for individuals and society, because the online world is one that encourages consumption - whether it be the advertisements that drive it, or the "showing off" of what has been consumed on social media - paid or unpaid. "Influencers" holding up some face cream to their cheek, leaning on someone else's supercar, carefully curated images of them on a tropical beach.
When do we spend time with digital references in their actual reality?
We don't. And we don't want to. We want to believe that the fantasy is real and we use that powerful of imagination to justify our position. We want to believe that we can ahead without hard work. We want to believe that we can be wealthy without even having a proper job. We want to believe that when that bull run comes, we will do the right thing, so that when the bear arrives, we are sitting pretty.
It is incredibly rare.
It isn't impossible, but it is highly unlikely, yet we overestimate our chances that it will happen to us, and underestimate what needs to be done to actually get ahead in this life, to build the kind of wealth we are after. We are terrible at predicting what we haven't experienced and if we don't have strong reference points and role models to observe, we don't even have a second-hand model to follow and improve upon.
In all likelihood, you like me, are pretty average. And if we look at the results of the average, they are unlikely to be as good as what we want for ourselves, or our children, unless we are below average already. What we should be trying to do is increase our chances of success and on average, the way to do that is to work for it and improve our mindset and our behaviors to support the activities that will most likely get us there.
We know that fear holds us back, but as an indicator for our brains to wake up and pay attention, it is a brilliant tool. If we fear the bear, we need to learn how to prepare to meet it, not hope it doesn't visit, because it is inevitably going to arrive. The only people the bear market doesn't affect directly, are the people who own nothing. Maybe they are happy, but I am yet to meet one who isn't bitter at the world for not providing them with more opportunity.
Smallsteps will lose her teeth tomorrow and in the process go through stages of fear, likely building up the event to much larger than it actually is and afterward, saying like normal, it wasn't that bad. She might one day even learn that in general, the things we think are going to be bad, aren't as bad as we think they are going to be. And often, some of the things we think won't be that good, are far better than expected, because we didn't get our hopes up too high.
If we do our best, when things go well, we can smile, and when things fall apart, we can bear it.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
