Friends,
This letter crossed 13,000 subscribers this week (it averages over 9k views, or similar to the attendance of recently invigorated WNBA games).
I’ve opened and will continue to open the conversation with the greeting “Friends,”. As a pedantic matter, this is offensive to vocabulary. But I don’t scrub into a sterile environment to write this thing. I respond to everyone who emails me so the greeting is inspired by possibility as much as it is a tradition from the sandlot days.
The Sunday letters in particular feel like the stretch of road when you need a break from the radio and figure we may as well chat as if this is not on the test (the test of course being the judgment, no matter how subconscious, that your thoughts are received with).
Today’s confession — there is no “meaning” of life.
It sounds harsh.
But you know what would be even more harsh? Believing that there is one and not knowing what it was. Like you were born into an escape room with a single key to the exit. The clock starts when they cut the cord. You can ask for hints but none of the people who respond through the intercom know anything. You wouldn’t know that based on their confidence of course.
If “why” is so important, I think the best we can do is make our own meaning. Even this feels like alms to a story-hungry mental apparatus adapted for mundane survival needs but is easily hijacked by cosmic inquiry.
You’ve heard of American exceptionalism. Maybe I’m just underwhelmed by human exceptionalism. It would be easy to blame the cosplay of our current political hour but that’s a Budweiser commercial in the longest-running show in history — ‘the cruelty of man’.
I watched Blackfish last month. With only enough emphasis to set the scene, falling far short of its profundity, the narrator described orcas’ communications as indicative of a distributed but coherent consciousness amongst members of a pod. Like a Vulcan mind-meld. Even if this is just a possibility, I cannot shake the sense that humans, rather than occupying a “mandate of heaven” (brb gagging myself with a notebook spiral) are just a parallel timeline written daily through nature’s trial-and-error.
If you’re religious or a “I don’t practice but have faith” or however you self-identify this is not a challenge to you. I wouldn’t dare. I have nothing to add in the face of all the brilliant, earnest, skin-in-the-game individuals or groups who have argued for or against any particular paradigm for our relationship with the unseen. If you feel a certain way you have your reasons. Maybe rooted in logic. Maybe a sensation. They are inviting as matters of discussion not prescription (whether this is a convenient cop-out or pragmatic maturity is left to the reader’s prism).
But to not be called in the direction of such meaning, also rests on reasons. I haven’t felt or seen what you feel or see. And if I’m supposed to seek until I am “found” and thus imbued with meaning, the spirit of such a requirement sounds like an overly specific morning routine. Neither cold plunge nor cathedral holds the key.
Similar to the mysticism of believers, my sensation of “no singular meaning” is mostly a matter of faith not logic.
[There was a phase in my life where I tried to reason to beliefs (as opposed to our default mode where we believe then post-rationalize — an impulse I believe is only resistible in the context narrow, instrumental inquiry). Depending on what you think information is good for, you might agree that being wrong a lot has the useful property of limiting your confidence on edifices built of logic. This is an elementary insight. After all, logic derives from assumptions so there’s always garbage-in, garbage-out risk. It’s easy to understand that on the cerebral level but internalizing that lesson takes practice. Incidentally, a discretionary trading career is one that constantly assaults your epistemology. You think your logical but the chance that you get every link in the chain from idea to trade expression is small (risk management is about unloading intolerable consequences from the inevitable chain failure). Trading hurts. Pain is a useful teacher.]
I say that because I don’t truly understand how I landed on my outlook. I think I’m just unsatisfied with any answer to the meta-question, “how could it have a single meaning?” Or maybe I just haven’t heard enough answers to that question.
I also wonder how other people land on theirs. It would make for a fascinating interview series to ask people what they believe the meaning of life is, or their life specifically…but the most intriguing part would be the answer to “how did you arrive at that belief”?
(If the answer to the “meaning of life” is the biological retort “to procreate” that’s a dead-end in the same way that the answer to “why do you practice freethrows?” leads to “ok fine but [follow-up why]”)
With the personal musing out of the way, here’s an essay that resonated for obvious reasons
The Meaning Of Life Is Absurd (11 min read)
Lawrence Yeo
Excerpts (emphasis mine):
Ironically, knowing that life doesn’t come with a grander meaning allows us to access the things that really do make life meaningful. This truth helps us realize that the big existential questions of life are not where the answers are; instead, this very moment in our small corner of the world is all we really have….
The questions of “What does it all mean?” and “What is my purpose?” are things we ask when we’re not plugged into this very moment. When we’re paying close attention to the project we’re working on, the book we’re enjoying, or the time we’re spending with our loved ones, then we’re not searching for meaning; we already have it….
In this futile pursuit of escaping the absurd, nothing will ever be good enough because we are always chasing an elusive grand narrative, our overarching meaning of life. We will forever be chasing our own tails, wondering when the hell the universe will answer our individual calls for purpose.
From the creator of Rick and Morty, Dan Harmon:
We have this fleeting chance to participate in an illusion called ‘I love my girlfriend’ [and] ‘I love my dog.’ How is that not better?
Knowing the truth, which is that nothing matters, can actually save you in those moments. Once you get through that terrifying threshold of accepting that, then every place is the center of the universe, and every moment is the most important moment, and every thing is the meaning of life.
The theme of “the present” has shown up in the last couple Sunday writings (and while they were just tangential to the main themes they were the lines I noticed were most shared. I don’t know if it’s a sign of our distracted times or an evergreen battle but people are thinking about it.
From The Gasoline of The Internet:
The whole “what you need” discourse is a distraction from the plain truth — there is an “arrival” fallacy at play. It’s very well documented across the board. Win the championship, celebrate one night, then feel letdown. Living in the future (or past) sucks. Never overdose on hope or nostalgia.
I don’t think about a “number” because if you hit it you still have to contend with what you’d do with your time. You should stop pretending that is a problem you acquire when you “arrive”. You have that problem right now.
From Status Symbols:
I’ll tell you what impresses me broadly.
People who look forward to Mondays. People who struggle to sleep because they are so stoked to be awake. This is a person who excels at something they enjoy and has the opportunity to do it. It doesn’t mean their life is free of things they don’t want to do. But their energy is directed towards activities that adequately solve their earthly needs for food and shelter and well-being needs for self-expression & autonomy.
This is messy.
Nobody is “arrived”. You’re always en route.
But it’s the most liberating thought if you let yourself take it seriously.
I love McConaughey’s advice to never look at the scoreboard. That’s how you choke. You just run through. Through the endzone. Into the tunnel. Let’em tell you you scored when you’re gone.
Impatience
I’ll end this section with another personal bit. When I got married we wrote some of the sections of the officiant’s talk. I quoted Louis CK’s “you’re sitting on a chair in the sky” bit from this appearance on Conan in 2009. You cannot outrun the happiness treadmill which manifests as impatience with everything. We thought this message might be a nice one to share with witnesses to 2 people making a life-long commitment to one another.
And this more recent clip of comedian Pete Holmes on the Adam Corolla Show…my god, straight into my veins.
It starts with the Waze app. I actually thought it was gonna go in a different direction because my reaction to Waze is also “eat shit” but for different reasons. (I find the app wants me to look at and engage with it while driving far more than I should considering I’m in the most likely situation to destroy mine and others’ lives. You’re asking me whether the speed trap is still there. GFY.)
Your reaction to this video would be a good litmus test for if we’d get along.
Money Angle
For today I offer something to read and an open question.
To read
Stocks and Flows (8 min read)
Byrne Hobart
I like this essay because it takes a mor nuanced view of the general admonition against comparing stocks to flows. For example, you shouldn’t compare debt (a stock) to GDP (a flow). But as Byrne says:
They Can’t Be Compared Directly, Except That We Make This Comparison All the Time
Instead of just smacking our hands with a ruler, he goes into why it’s blurrier than a discrete sorting of stock vs flow pretends.
While not central to the essay, I thought the framing in this line (bold) was a nice reminder about how investing works.
Whether capital appreciation is better thought of as reassessing a stock or accumulating a flow is a tough question, which probably comes down to whether the activity that leads to that capital appreciation is repeatable and human-limited, or is not-necessarily-repeatable and capital-limited. For example, making a market is closer to a job than an investment, but buying a passive portfolio is very much an investment—you’re getting paid to deal with volatility and the passage of time, not for any special effort it took you to click the “buy” button.
By the way, that essay is part of Byrne’s free Wednesday series called Capital Gains. I never miss these because they teach evergreen business or investing concepts concisely, but beyond the first level Investopedia treatment.
If you subscribe with this link I could get a mug.
Open questions
This question will probably reveal just how ignorant I am but I’d like to understand.
When I see Stripe being “private for longer”, I wonder are they choosing a higher cost of capital in exchange for control of their investors? If so, what conditions tip the decision towards an IPO?
But, also do I have an incorrect understanding of private vs public? Are private markets so fully priced that there is no risk premia for opacity, accountability, liquidity and Stripe is getting the cheapest capital AND retaining control?
If you know about this stuff let me hear your take.
Money Angle For Masochists
I want to remind readers of the moontower.ai Investment Analysis resource. It’s free to everyone and I keep adding to it based on what I discover or recs from others. I don’t include everything that gets recommended so there’s an element of taste to this. And some of the listings are ones I’m not too familiar with but trust the recommender. YMMV.
I just added these 3 to the list because I personally think they’re good (they’re also all free).
- fintechie substack by David Harper
David is behind the the epic Bionic Turtle YouTube channel. For as long as I can remember he’s been teaching financial modeling.
I especially enjoyed the recent post: What’s the value of Elon Musk’s stock option pay package?
- CBOE’s Derivative Market Intelligence by Mandy Xu
I just subscribed to this because it’s by Mandy. She was part of our coverage when she was a sell-side vol strategist at CSFB. They would come to our office for an annual presentation and I always found Mandy to be very insightful.
- Picture Perfect Portfolios by Nomadic Samuel
Samuel does in-depth reviews of trend and “permanent portfolio” style ETFs. Super useful content if you are shopping asset allocation products.
Stay Groovy
☮️
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