Investing, Gambling, & Greed Demons
Rambling & Vision Experience
Investing into the stock market is a game; a sort of gambling akin to betting on horse racing. The investor and gambler are much the same when they put their moneys into a company or horse, in hopes that their bet will return a higher sum than what they put in.
Naturally one does not do this without having some degree of insight as to the breed of horse, or, methods and practices a company is engaged in. It pays dividends (pun intended) to know the overall health and functionally of the creature or organization one is betting on. And of course one should go in with the proper knowledge of the jockey commanding the horse, much the same as one should be familiar with the CEO and board of directors.
The prima difference between these two methods of income is: if the gambler rigs his game, he is most often punished for it. The investor on the other hand seldom meets any sort of punitive fate. As a matter of fact, perhaps the most valuable tool in the investor’s arsenal is just that: Rigging the terms to some degree in their favor. Whether this be on the illegal side of things, such as insider trading, which is surprisingly commonplace, or on the legal side, such as short-selling.
Amongst the most necrotic elements of the investor game are when elected officials who decide on the very rules and legislation of the game are active participants. This is akin to if you imbued a basketball player with the authority of a referee in a match he was actively playing in.
So long as cheating is enabled, the game will remain corrupt and ultimately be destined to fail. The fickleness of the investor market-place has revealed itself for the second time in my adult life. Many of us can recall the previous time this happened, and how it was littered with the revelations of all sorts of thievery and unethical fuckery, which undoubtedly played a vital role in that era’s economic tower floundering atop a dry pit of sand.
Such is happening again, the lights have been turned on and the cockroaches are scattering.
Nietzsche appropriately describes the market-place in general as:
Where solitude ends, there begins the market-place; and where the market-place begins, there begins also the noise of the great actors, and the buzzing of the poison-flies. In the world even the best things are worthless without those who make a side-show of them: these showmen, the people call great men. - Fredrick Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra
A befitting description of wall-street, where the handshakes are firm, the jibs are finely-cut, and the grins gleam with the sort of eerie artifice that reduces every interaction down to the notions of opportunistic gain.
The nature of a person is altered when they allow themselves to hold court with poison-flies, for if they remain there long, they will themselves become transformed by the culture of their environment and succumb to the bottomless pits of greed. The thrill of gain for gain’s sake will become all they know, and a mutant of a degenerate milieu is what they will become, where profit ascends to godhood, and rapacity reigns over a society’s mind.
Visited by a Greed Demon
Around the start of the pandemic, circa April 2020, specific industries in the stock market began to a take a significant plunge, and I did as most Millennials and quickly downloaded the Robinhood app, and invested a bit of the meager sum of disposable income I’d saved up over the preceding years into a gaggle of stocks and cryptos that were popular amongst my friend group. And for nearly seven weeks I monitored my investments with the sort of zealous vehemence I apply to whatever projected goal I have in mind. It was the first thing I looked at when I awoke in the morning, and the last thing I saw before bed.
During this time period, I tried my hand at day-trading which only served to exacerbate my obsession. On the last evening of my engagement with the stock market, I had my first and thus only experience with sleep-paralysis:
I always sleep in the nearest to pitch black darkness as I can render in whatever dwelling I happen to call home. Which is rather funny considering that as I child I slept with the lights on well into my later teens. But even in the darkest of most rooms, (particularly ones I’m familiar with) there still lingers an outline of everything in the room; silhouettes of furniture and picture frames. So that even when I awake abruptly, I can still gather an inventory of the room.
From the dead of a dreamless sleep, I felt a hand aggressively grab onto my foot, which was exposed off the end of the bed. I jolted awake and at first the only thing I could move were my eyes, as if a force of gravity unknown to my physiology pinned me squarely to the bed. Standing at the foot of the bed was a slender dark silhouette of man who’s pencil thin facial hair I can still picture in mind. He was shirtless and had his head cocked to the side, expressing a terrifying sense of predation and malice.
My vision went blurry for a moment, and with a primal shrieking war cry that I cannot not reproduce on command, I lunged forward from my laying position with my hand stretched out to grasp the man’s throat. But as soon as the moment came that I should have felt flesh under my finger tips I felt nothing but air, and the man seemed to regress into the vanity mirror behind him, soon fading away, leaving only my own reflection staring back at me from behind the glass.
My wife, Scub, sat up extremely startled by the preceding screech to find her ogre of a husband nakedly standing in front of the mirror, one leg still behind me on the bed, my hand still stretched out towards the mirror grasping for a throat that wasn’t there.
The following morning, I cashed in all of my stocks, profiting a whapping $400, and never looked back. Of all of the psychological phenomena I’ve experienced before or since that evening, none have been of such a nature.
