I can imagine account managers for stock brokerages really have a lot of insight into this, especially over the past 2 years.
It’s always a hard decision as to what to get mad about and what not to. I know my 401k went in the tank, I lost money. Here is the civilized question we should ask ourselves. What was I going to accomplish by getting angry or scared or worried or distraught? Now, let’s give us all permission to react to that civilized question. And let’s use this response if someone asks us this. The answer is: I WASN’T TRYING TO ACCOMPLISH ANYTHING! I was just emoting, venting, expressing, feeling, hormoning, freaking out, whatever.
Ok, now that all those that think every expression has to have a purpose are set straight, let’s now go on to admit that since those emotional expressions don’t actually have a purpose and we eventually do have to have one of those (purposes, that is) we should indeed put those feelings aside and figure out how the hell to dig ourselves out. Ah, a nice contradictory resolution to it all, whew! I was worried there for a moment that I had to have it all make sense! But I realized that since the gaining and losing of money (and most other things) don’t have a lot of sense to them that I didn’t have to make perfect sense either (even though I did if you think enough about it). The end.
Drawing and commentary © Marty Coleman
“If you want to know what a man is really like, take notice how he acts when he loses money.” – Simone Weil, 1909-1943, French philosopher and activist