Find the struggle worth living for:

Talked to a friend today and couldn’t help but think, life is an ever lasting struggle. There will always be tough moments along the way. Things you didn’t expect to happen. Unseen circumstances that you couldn’t account for. Look at Covid. No one could’ve guessed how the world would react to a new pandemic. One not seen on this scale for over 100 years.

The world’s changed a lot in those 100 years. The one thing that is still constant is struggle. Struggle is a shared human experience no matter how high or low you are. Everyone deals with it. Everyone deals with things that happen to them in different ways. Some people choose to run away from problems and not confront them. For example, by turning to substances instead of tackling the issue.

Some people accept their fate. This is what life gave you. There’s no one coming to help save you, so create the life you want. No one is stopping you from doing anything. Fear is all in your own head. Yes there are circumstances you have to deal with and responsibilities, but life is what you make of it. It’s how you decide to see what’s happening around you.

You can see the negativity everywhere and it’s not hard to find. You can always find something to be mad, upset, or disappointed about. Whether it’s the latest news about what Trump’s doing or what your mother in law said to you or what your kids are doing - there’s always something to get upset about.

Yet the world is a beautiful place. There’s so much to be grateful for. Humanity has advanced exponentially in the last 100 years. The average age for someone on earth to live was 45 years old at the beginning of the 1900s. Today it’s over 70 across the world. That’s unbelievable.

Most of this is because so many kids used to die from diarrhoeal diseases and malnutrition. We also didn’t know as much about the human body in 1900 as we do now. We didn’t have medications. We didn’t have vaccines. But as soon as you eliminated all of those childhood diseases and had effective treatments, people were living and thriving.

The innovation just in the last decade, particularly around the Internet is wild to think about. Now we have some random person pick us up in a car and can order anything we could want from any part of the world to our house. The Internet has democratized everything.

Including information. The information arbitrage that used to happen between the haves and have nots used to be immense. Now people are allowed to be themselves online and use the information at their disposal to be whomever they want. If you get someone who loves learning and access to all the information in human history, over time they’ll eventually figure out more stuff than the rest of the world.

That advantage used to only exist for people who had means. Who were born into rich families that could afford to send them to schools with books that the teachers had gotten from the best people minds in history. If you were born in the middle of India 20 years ago, or even less, you didn’t have access to the Internet. Now more people are coming online more than ever. Look at what Elon is doing with Starlink.

What the Internet has done is democratize the world. This is why this retail trading phenomenon with Gamestop and Robinhood is so fascinating. A community came together online, all pretty much anonymously, to play the same game hedge funds have done for decades. The guys who coordinated it on Reddit had all the information and a voice to be heard online where people could see what they were doing.

DeepF*****Value wasn’t a hedge fund dude who went to the best schools in the world. He is a 33-year-old dude at home who got fired from his insurance job partly because he was giving bad investing advice. He did all this research, which was publicly available, to find out exactly what these hedge funds had done and realized there was a gap. He could effectively take them out if he coordinated enough people to follow him.

He did, extremely successfully until every retail investor crashed brokerages and brokers realized they couldn’t cover the amount of money these people were making. They completely reset the system. By coordinating enough people, wall street bets could decimate short sellers and particularly hedge funds.

Now hedge funds are doing everything in their power to break them up and not allow them to coordinate. But they’re market movers now, and more and more people are going to join. If you have a community like that blow up, a lot of people are going to hop on board. Especially when they don’t have money and the inequality gap is getting so big. There’s also the underlying sentiment of sticking it to the hedge funds and Wall Street who have indirectly ruined businesses for millions of people because of their financial trickery.

Reddit has the power if, Wall Street bets continues, and the company continues to allow them to exist, to change the way the market works forever. It’s likely you’ll have people start to pitch stock ideas where everyone can make money together so others can jump in on it. With stimulus checks coming in, there could be even more optimism in the market and more people getting involved.

Robinhood is definitely allowing people to get access to the financial markets like never before, but they make money based on people using their platform more often, not investing. Most of their revenue is not coming from people who buy 10 stocks and sit on it. It comes from people using options and margin and trading constantly between stocks. Because they sell that info on payment for order flow and their brokers give them money. They do not incentivize long term investing.

Because it’s now so much easier for kids to get involved with this, they’re taking even more risk. Saw this video today and it terrified me.

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This kid looks like he’s 16 and he’s trading that much money on margin. Eventually the price of stocks cannot maintain their ability to be at this level for much longer. The people who are buying in now to speculative stocks are going to lose tons of money when it all goes differently. The difference now is they have power as a collective in coordinating bets against wall street so there’s a chance to make some back. Only if they listen and are patient.

But kids aren’t patient. They don’t have the discipline to understand how to invest. Investing is about due diligence and understanding the value of the underlying business. Not just a number on a screen and a company you know about because you saw it in a meme. Those people are jumping into the market now when they don’t understand history and the macroeconomic conditions surrounding this market.

They don’t know the intricacies of quantitative easing, zero percent interest rates, money printing, new stimulus bills, inflation, asset prices, etc. History never repeats itself, but it does rhyme as Mark Twain has said, and this time has happened before in history. When people think all is great, money is cheap and people are making tons of money, something has to give. It doesn’t last forever. There are cycles. And we’re at the peak of the cycle.

So you don’t want to be putting money you can’t afford to lose, especially trading options and margin. It’s a recipe for a disaster. People don’t understand the ramifications when things turn south. That’s stuff that could stay with you and put you in a hole you may never get out of.

That’s another issue in North America. Crony Capitalism. The desire to be rich. We see it everywhere. Celebrities, Forbes lists, nice hotels, watches, clothes, etc. It’s all associated with status and portraying that you’re rich. People are chasing that over and over again. If they can make a quick buck instead of working like most people, they’ll take that opportunity.

They’re not happy with their circumstances so they want to get out. They want a way to not be in their current struggle. They don’t love their current struggle so they want to use money as a way to get out. What they don’t realize is money doesn’t change you as a person. Sure it’s great to have and will solve a lot of issues most people have, but once you solve your money issues, you’re still you. Money solves your money problems, but it doesn't solve your internal problems.

Still in the same head with the same family and same people around you. Sure you could radically change your circumstances, move halfway around the world and be someone completely new, but most people are scared of that. They're comfortable where they are.

I understand the opposite argument though fully. Like “oh you’ve always had money or been around money so it’s nice knowing you can go to school abroad and afford to go on all these vacations, so what do you know about what it’s like to not have it”. That’s absolutely valid. I only know my own experience. I can’t relate to not being able to eat meals and having your parents not be able to find a job, or not being able to be in your life or help you with your homework. I don’t have that experience.

But money can really screw you up. It can make you believe that you’re worth more than you are, which is dangerous. It makes you feel more important than other people. It gives you a sense of entitlement. At the end of the day, you’re a human just like everyone else. Your life is no more important than mine is no more important than someone in the middle of Africa. You just got fortunate to be in your circumstances and you made the most of it, but it doesn’t make you superior to anyone.

You see it all the time. The arrogance from people who have money. ‘I’m better than you because you have money.’ Nah, miss me with that. I don’t need people that believe that being rich is the only reason to live and it’ll solve all your problems. It’s not. It’s about living a fulfilled life with people you love doing things you enjoy doing.

It’s finding a struggle worth living for.