I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Friday Flash, I share an epiphany or aha moment from the past week.
I aspire to be a successful financial trader, not just of options, but of equities themselves (and ETFs), and eventually futures. Aspiration is a freighted term for me, recalling as it does Agnes Callard’s book of that name. I don’t use it casually but rather in the sense that Callard does, that I am seeking transformation that will change my values, my preferences, and the way I approach the world.
I am something like the subject in L.A. Paul’s vampire thought experiment, having been offered the chance to be someone different (someone with more equanimity and mental flexibility) but not really knowing what that will feel like or whether, once I get there, I’ll be happy that I chose it and didn’t just hand all my money over to my asset manager so as to pursue something different with my time and mental energy.
Already I’ve gained new equanimity, and a new eye for opportunity. When my positions are in the red, I’m learning to sit with it (if my trading guidelines say I should — I do have rules about cutting losses). I know that the average buy-and-hold investor already knows how to do that. But I never could before, emotionally, psychologically. I was not someone who could follow the advice “Don’t just do something, sit there!” I always wanted to do something!
Now, if all the indexes are red and my positions are too, I see that as opportunity, perhaps now or perhaps in the future. I maintain a large allocation to cash, given that the market is so incredibly expensive right now (though not all parts of it). An incoming correction or crash means, eventually, better trading setups.
I’m learning various ways to ensure good returns, some of which apply to buy-and-hold investing (e.g., diversification across factors) and some of which don’t (establishing guidelines about when to take profits and when to close at a loss).
This aspiration is leading to a broader transformation in my life. My trading practice has made me more willing to live in solitude without feeling like I’m missing out on something like a corporate job or a people-facing business like dog walking or turning my art into profit. It has made me feel far less anxious about my finances because it gives me a pretty reliable way to make money even if the U.S. stock market should go through a period like 1968 to 1982 in the future. At least more reliable than buy-and-hold broad market indexes.
In all, this is a welcome transformation of who I am and what I spend my time doing, and I’ve barely just started.
Transformation through grief
This might seem an abrupt and unexpected transition, to talk about grief and loss, and how it can drive personal transformation. But my arrival here, living alone, spending my days with four animals (one adopted dog, one foster dog, and two adopted cats), and figuring out trading was driven through loss and grief.
I am not the same person I was fifteen years ago, when this particular long-term transformation of my life began. I was married, living with three children at home, living with a financial abundance that two professionals shared. I was working in corporate data science, and I had just earned my PhD in Research Methods and Statistics. I lived in an affluent neighborhood with many friends nearby.
I didn’t know I was about to blow it all up, and that I was about to embark on a transformative journey of troubles and struggles for many, many years.
In her 2023 paper Transformative grief, philosopher Jelena Markovic writes that “grieving a profound loss is a transformative experience,” one which is unchosen. She argues that it transforms the self in multiple ways:
Grief transforms the self in the following four ways: (i) cognitively, by altering, or forcing a person to alter, a wide range of their beliefs and desires; (ii) phenomenologically, by disrupting the taken-for-granted background structure of a person’s experience; (iii) normatively, by being a loss of an object of practical identity investment, and thus requiring a person to review and/or revise their practical identity; and (iv) existentially, by forcing a practical acquaintance with a structuring condition of one’s life
Cognitively, through this transformation, I began to think that living as a single was something that was not only okay, it was desirable (for me, anyway). Phenomenologically, my experiences moved from shared and grounded in building a life with another towards independently and autonomously building a life on my own. Normatively, my identity became one that was not validated by society, since society prefers people to be coupled up, and in that way I gained both freedom and a sense of unreality and invalidation. And existentially, I entered midlife with both the privilege and the demands that come with living on your own, not with a partner.
Markovic proposes that profound grief brings about transformation in both active and passive ways: it “requires a sustained, active response from the agent” even as it changes the agent in ways she has no control over.
Why do I keep writing about divorce?
Every time I feel the urge to write about my divorce and how that, and its aftermath, changed me, and led to the person I am today, I try to quell that urge.
In her writing guide The Art of Memoir author Mary Karr writes, “Divorce writing may be the toughtest thing a memoirist can do other than covering a war.” And she also says “Nobody sounds good writing about your divorce, let’s face it.”
I don’t want to keep writing about divorce, and let’s be clear — I’m not trying to sound good when I write, I’m trying to process the events of my life into something valuable, not just for me, but I hope maybe for a few other people at least — the truth is, I cannot make sense of my life and my transformation without addressing it and returning to it again and again. This gets easier over time as I own up to what happened and as I move further away from it. It also gets easier as I turn into a new person, one who is no longer journeying towards transformation, but who has radically transformed.
Thinking about myself as a character
Fiction writing gurus will tell you when you craft a story to throw challenge after challenge at your protagonist. You want the reader to get more and more worried for the main character as things get progressively worse for her.
Thinking of a life as a work of art, as literature, as a grand narrative calls on you to not just accept the bad things that happen but to welcome them, because they make your life more interesting and give you a chance to grow and change in response.
There’s a part of me that wishes my life had gone much more smoothly — that I hadn’t had an affair and gotten a divorce, or maybe started out with a life partner that was better suited to me in the first place? that I had made generational wealth by working in tech instead of making just barely enough to retire now that my tech career is no more, that I owned a giant vacation home in Breck where we could celebrate Christmas with ski vacations every year, that I didn’t get a veneer on one of my front teeth because it had a very small chip off of it, that I didn’t fall last November skiing and damage my left eye, that I went into art instead of tech and became a celebrated artist, that when I started writing and commenting on tech in the 2000s I kept with it and became a bestselling author, ….
Some of these wished-for lives are incompatible with one another. They exist in the realm of fantasy only, and solipsistic fantasy at that. Philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch distinguishes between “fantasy” — making everything in life about yourself — and “imagination” — attending to the reality of the world outside you, especially other people. It’s only in a fantasy world that you could think of having a life where nothing went wrong. It’s in the world of reality where you meet everything that life is made of: loss, grief, happiness, joy, discomfort, terror, pain, equanimity, delight.
The best realization yet
Of all the concepts and frameworks I’ve come across in this almost year-long blogging project (and the one year I completed before that), I think the Nietzschean/Nehamasean idea of life as literature is the most powerful.
It is at once realistic and imaginary, allowing one to both affirm the reality of life and also imagine it as profound with meaning and import.