Why I don't like the stock market

andrewtsao  •  29 Jan 2022   •    
Screenshot

I feel like this is a controversial statement because I know there are a lot of people around me that place a lot of trust, assets, and just daily attention on it. Don’t get me wrong, I think the basis of the investment is important. The concept of thinking about wealth as something fluid, where you put intention to diversify, to grow, and to empower individuals or companies is powerful and it’s important when thinking about our wealth in the long term. I also think it’s great that more people are starting young and understand the importance of investment at a younger age, but sometimes I feel like it’s becoming just a channel of contributing to another stimulant-driven life. The basis of cryptocurrency and bitcoin is incredibly cool, but more and more it feels like gambling and people taking advantage of playing money games, which we know will always be zero-sum.

Today my very first coaching client called me to tell me that she’s feeling a lot of anxiety due to the dip in the stock market. I never knew this about her but to support her entrepreneur journey, it sounded like she invested a lot of her saving or remaining capital in stocks in order to use trading as a way to support her journey. With the recent dip, she told me that she felt like she lost at least 7 months of runway and now is getting worried and even thinking about finding a full-time job. How that affected our relationship is that she also decide to change our daily coaching calls to weekly and we adjusted the pricing from $1000 to $300.

For me, the biggest loss isn’t just the $700 monthly income I can get from my coaching business, it’s also how I felt a drastic difference in her attitude in just one day. We went from being optimistic about using our newly built no-code automation to get her on track on her sales process to reach our goals to now thinking about potentially giving it all up.

If there’s one large thing I learned in my meditation is just how damn difficult it is to learn to be less reactive— to our daily frustrations, to the ebb and flows of the world around us, and especially to the nefarious things and obstacles that will come along. When one invests so much of their wealth and attention in stocks, I can’t believe how that can be possible, especially when money is so closely tied to thinking about our daily realities and is often the number 1 contributor of stress. It took me a very long time to untangle daily anxieties around no longer having a steady and larger paycheck.

At the end of the day, I’m still incredibly grateful and she still decides to keep me on and I know how much value I have been adding to her. It just sucks how something so completely out of our control can throw a wrench in both our games.

Onward!

Comments


Discover more

Sourced from other writers across Lifelog

Ooops we couldn't find any related post...