The Scandal of Financial Nihilism
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I am an "official" millennial, born 1989. One thing I have noticed (in an anectodical, personal and subjective way) is that my age bracket, especially those I would consider higher on an intelligence/success curve, appear to be so much more closet-nihilist than everyone else around.
What I mean by that is that, while of course we don't really want to see the world burn, we are secretly hoping, in the dark, when no one is watching, for things to always go tits up a bit. Like there is a subconscious fascination to the aesthetics of Nero playing the lire while Rome burns. And upon deep self-reflection that's always a bit unsettling.
I don't know if it's related to the generational trend, or maybe it's just selection bias over the people around me, but I think it's mostly the former rather than the second. Probably stems from the fact that we saw our beloved parents struggle in old age with health and finance, while we live in a more priviliged regime (remember that I mentioned this applies mostly to financially successfully peoples) where money seems more immaterial.
So I guess the author might be onto something about this whole financial nihilism thing.
At the beginning of the race we see the incessant vain jockeying of a group trying to socially manipulate constantly and fit in, and on the other end (the actual end of the race), you see a group constantly trying to justify and protect what scraps the race allowed them to keep.
And in the middle you run as fast as you can, hoping you escaped the beginning of the race, hoping you make it to the end with some scraps you can call treasure. You run away from the beginning of race, disgusted at what you once were, and disgusted at what you need to become to survive until the end.
It’s in that moment of realization you wish the universe imploded. All that running kills the soul.
I’d say the people in the beginning and end have a tangible resentment, and not necessarily an existential crisis. In other words, GenZ would be resentful of having to start fresh against the barbarian Millenial/Boomer horde, and Boomers would be resentful of any attempt at reformation where their scraps from the race would be worth less.
It’s only Millenials who would neither resent GenZ or Boomers because they were already GenZ once upon a time, and know they have to become Boomers to survive.
That would be my best argument for why Millennials are in some deep psychological shit.
Millennials already tried, found it didn't work, found it was for nothing, found it will never work because the systems of humanity don't allow for it.
GenZ believes in people. When they give up, they won’t give up on the system, they will give up on people. I’d keep a watchful eye on that development.
speak for yourself. I'm changing the world, one kind gesture at a time ^_^
The comment starting this thread had:
I am an "official" millennial, born 1989. One thing I have noticed (in an anectodical, personal and subjective way) is that my age bracket, especially those I would consider higher on an intelligence/success curve, appear to be so much more closet-nihilist than everyone else around.
https://themreport.com/news/data/02-02-2021/pressing-housing...
I argue it can be automated. I have learned more from ML MOOCs than from my Romanian college.
The intuition is that grants and loans make education more affordable, but in the medium to long term they just inflate the cost of tuition for everyone.
Similarly for healthcare and housing.
Feel like we either need to socialize these sectors of the economy, or go full free market. But a system half way in between doesn't work.
(My personal preference would be to largely socialize healthcare and education, while pushing for more free market reforms for housing, to encourage new development and increase the housing supply.)
Your analysis does not explain away decades of mediocre wage growth in the face of inflation in healthcare, education and housing costs.
I mean, you could, either in the form of apartments (which are essentially smaller houses) or houses in less desirable areas (shittier houses).
> Your analysis does not explain away decades of mediocre wage growth in the face of inflation in healthcare, education and housing costs.
Wages are typically computed per household. In the late 1960, a tsunami of divorces and single-parent households started occuring (something that wasn't widely culturally accepted before then), which makes comparisons of household wages before and after an apples to oranges comparison. It's basically bad stats.
Re: rising costs of (higher) education and healthcare. It's partially similar to the housing situation. The standard of service people get (and expect to get) today is dramatically higher than in 1960s. In 1960s, we didn't even have MRIs... Nowadays medicine is packed with expensive technology and drugs - that has to inflate the price. Similarly, today's university environment is a combination of an university of the past with a high-class resort (the student facilities are basically on the level of good hotels in many cases) - that's gotta inflate the price too. Add extractionary practices of the medicine insurance companies cartel and university administrators on top of that, and that pretty much explains current prices.
To top it off, mortgage interest rates doubled and prices have not dropped.
As mentioned, this seems to be more prevalent in people who are, objectively, well-off in the financial department, so it's not like they "hate" the system per se and could afford degrees of financial independence that many others will never be allowed to.
There are financial constraints to being off the grid of the game.
Even if I wanted to run off into the woods and live in a cabin, I don’t know if I could live off the current amount I have.
So back to the grid, hence the resentment.
I don't know that there is much historical precedent for a "controlled burn". When things go tits up, there's generally a big increase in suffering that comes along with it, and still no guarantee things will get fundamentally better after that.
But otoh the only "real" traction we are getting for issues like, in this case, climate change seem to be relatively recent and caused by more and more catastrophic, tangible effects (80% of Pakistan under water, heatwaves, tropical storms becoming a regular occurrence in the coastal US, you name it)
These people are idiots who aren’t aware of the death and destruction this will cause and things will likely be much worse after.
I can easily imagine a revolution where people merely stop selling their time and instead start demanding to be included in the decision making processes and have an equal share of outcomes.
Unrelatedly, have you ever heard about the way pre-colonization Natives handled forest fires? [0] They, thanks to oral tradition, understood the necessity of allowing -- ensuring -- that smaller, controlled forest fires happened regularly. Not only to provide resources for their society, but also to ensure that the inevitability of a fire didn't bring outsize consequences. Our deployment of modern monetary theory, [1] I mean modern forestry management, isn't actually supported by the long view that the Natives took, but does make briefly-considered sense to the layperson. "Fire's bad, right? Everybody knows what a house looks like after it's been on fire, and that's bad, so we should stop all the fires." I don't think those people are idiots, but perhaps they should reconsider their position regarding fire's rejuvenation properties.
[0] https://www.ictinc.ca/blog/indigenous-fire-management-and-tr...
[1] Huh, I don't know why I typed that at all. After all, we're talking about forestry
You're mistaking redistribution for destruction...
Sure, things are technically more equal if everyone becomes homeless. But there wasn't really a redistribution...
Add to that how a lot of people have seen their societies become substantially worse of as a whole - yes, iPhones are awesome and modern cars are safer and so on, but instead of having a union job you pee in bottles in Amazon warehouse, and instead of buying a home you are forever renting a studio apartment.
The Simpsons titular family of one high school educated guy with house and three kids on single income went from "typical boring dude" to "impossible dream" over the course of one or two generations, after all.
No, you are. With respect, you should consider reading some history. Try reading about the conditions of the peasantry after the black plague, or postwar Europe, or even the various falls of the various iterations of Rome. Fire destroys the previous order, yes, but it also sows the seeds for growth.
But fire bad! Yes, yes, I know; but this forest isn't the only forest, nor is it the only possible forest. Fire bad, but fire is the only way to fix this situation, because of the way "we" have "managed" our "forests" for as long as I've been alive. Maybe I need to be a Boomer to properly "understand". If there's another solution, I'm all ears, but history suggests that fire is the only solution.
How long until the growth occurs, and how fast will it take to get back to the current state of things?
You're ignoring base effects.
Of course peasants are going to "prosper" (on paper) if agriculture goes from 1% of the economy to 100%.
And, again, this isn't a "wealth redistribution". You've taken out 99% of the economy and left the remaining 1% in tact. It didn't grow. But it did grow relative to the rest that was destroyed.
As recent years show, the central banks are willing to cause ecenomic downturns to promote long term health. See most central banks increasing rates in response to inflation. It is worth noting that, in (oversimplified) MMT, inflation is the downside of over supporting the economy, and the signal to pull back. This past cycle has been weird because inflation has stayed stubbornly low despite massive ammounts of fiscal stimulus, which was then taken as a sign that it was not yet time for a controlled burn.
There us definantly a problem here, but it is a more subtle issue of ouf understanding the economy. Even that flawed understanding knows the importance of the business cycle.
Maybe I'm an economic illiterate, but I think saying that "most central banks [have been] increasing rates in response to inflation" is something similar. It seems to me that, if the actual intent was to combat inflation, the rates' rise would have to be a little more aggressive than it's been.
If one understands "modern forestry" to have been mostly about a reflexive, individualistic "fire bad", then the seemingly-irrational departure from the thoughtful Native controlled-burn-style management makes sense. If one understands "MMT", or maybe just "neoliberalism", as a fig-leaf to cover whatever economic activity and behaviour and model-making is most profitable to the players of the modern Great Game, then the ways and means of "governmental" "macroeconomic" activity make sense, too.
Put another way, from the perspective of an adherent of steady-state economics, the "business cycle" looks like the wobble of a wheel spinning out of true. What is a wheel for?
[0] https://www.propublica.org/article/they-know-how-to-prevent-...
No, I don't know why you typed that either, but you seem to have repeated a common trope that somehow MMT is responsible for something (inflation? general badness?). Given that no country is making policy decisions based on what MMT economics prescribes, that trope is of course complete nonsense, since responsibility would at least imply some level of influence.
Edit: FWIW, I actually get your point about revolutions generally precipitating improvements (eventually).
It's possibly a direct reaction to the global response to the banking crisis in 2008. We were told all these bailouts and austerity and artificially low interest rates were the way to solve things and while stock markets bounced back it never felt like a genuine recovery. The stock markets and bitcoin booming during the pandemic would've added fuel to the fire too. There'd be something somewhat comforting to see it all fall apart in a way that's undeniable and couldn't be patched over. Not a very rational response but it's understandable after the last 15 years (and the entirety of most their adult lives)
Watching the world go to shit, watch everyone be worse off than their parents, watching billionaires play games with peoples lives and seeing everything getting worse while the markets are soaring ... of course that would make you think all the markets and money are not real and the world should burn.
The COVID was a cherry on top, "we are in this all together," says the dude on his yacht, while you lost your job and place to live. Now the inflation will deepen inequality and poverty.
I think the next crisis of this type, at least for US (and UK which is kind of similar), is going to be when all the millennials get no inheritance, because the healthcare costs for their parents will basically eat everything. That might be another nail in the coffin of the world possibly getting better for them.
In the Easter Europe, where I am, meanwhile, people are more nihilistic than ever. They were rescued from the Soviet command economies that worked badly, and there was a huge jump in living standards - in the 90s and early 2000s. But by now, the non-freedom of Real Socialism was replaced by non-freedom of being precariat that will never own even the commieblock apartment that people made fun of in the 90s - while all the wonderful inventions of the West like healthcare on for the rich and student loans get imported here.
No wonder people are genuinely thinking watching the world burn in nuclear fire might be cool. The climate change that was the cost of luxury of previous generations will destroy humanity anyway, why not go out with a bang?
I wonder if this one will be even worse in the US. Much of the market going up and up is because index funds have become the default retirement vehicle. So every month billions flow into the market no matter what. What will happen when the largest generation stops contributing and instead starts withdrawing. If you are right and many elderly will deplete their funds entirely, the value of everyone's retirement investments will drop dramatically in the process. How much of retirement nest eggs in places with terminal demographics like China, Germany and Japan are in international stocks as well? IMO demographics are gonna fuck over millennials yet again. I hope I'll be wrong.
I've seen it argued that millennials are under-saving compared to their parents, but I remember seeing some data recently that contradicted this assertion. I would not be surprised if it were less evenly-distributed across the economy than prior generations.
I don't think we are going to see net outflow from the stock market, maybe just a decrease in inflow.
However I do think "worker shortages" will continue to grow as older people retire from undesirable jobs and aren't replaced by younger people, pushing up wages outside of white-collar and tech jobs and thereby leading to more inflation. I think this is a good thing in the long term and a price adjustment that has been a long time coming, but it needs to be managed properly or things could get really ugly.
The problem is that the generationd after the boomers are smaller, especially in countries like Germany, China and Japan which have been economic power houses.
Sounds like a Ponzi scheme, just like Social Security and pensions.
It never made sense to me. As long as the number of people is relatively stable, there's nothing Ponzi on it. Even with the number of people changing, there are other important inputs into the equation - automation, efficiency, etc.
I align with neither Reagan or Thatcher, but I did pass my math classes.
If not, why is current workers paying future workers (now kids) education different from current workers paying past workers (now retirees) pensions?
Well for one thing, education scales with demographic shifts and pensions don't. If less people are being born, at a roughly similar cost/student (administrative bloat aside), educational costs go down as the population growth shrinks. Pensions on the other don't, they only go down on the other end (people dying) and reductions in the birth rate negatively impact the ability of successive generations to pay for prior generation's pensions. Education costs are also strictly bounded per person, as they aren't for life, only for K-12.
I'm not trying to be coy, but it's pretty shocking to me there's multiple respondents that don't seem to understand that the basic premise of public pensions/social security are literally ponzi schemes that are unsustainable with demographic shifts. They utterly rely on continued economic and population growth in order to have enough inflows to meet their outflow obligations, which I would suggest is nearly identically equivalent to a ponzi scheme, where you are paying old investors with new investors money...
Ponzi scheme isn't a scheme because you pay old people with new people's money, but because there is promise of exponential growth that is unsustainable and often literally impossible.
For this to be true of pensions, they would have to (inflation adjusted) grow, which they don't. Yes, if there's less productive people and more non-productive people, that changes the balance but it is a balance, not unlimited growth of a Ponzi scheme.
The only thing there that is arguably untrue about social security / public pensions is "investors". Depending on whether or not you consider contributions to social security / public pensions as an investment or not, it falls on one side or the other of the literal line of what a Ponzi scheme is. Even if you don't consider it an investment, in /every other aspect/ it is effectively the same as a Ponzi scheme.
That is not to say that public pensions are a bad thing. I'm merely pointing out that they carry a demographic risk that is unaccounted for, just as a Ponzi scheme carries significant investment risks that are unaccounted for due to faked returns.
There is no requirement that you promise exponential growth that is literally impossible for something to be a Ponzi scheme. The key element is that you use money from new participants to pay out "returns" to older participants, thus fraudulently claiming/faking said returns. That is it.
For German employees, the public pension system is their wealth, and that's not based on stocks etc, but on the next generations contribution + some tax subsidies. Millenials and Zoomers will have fun shouldering that.
As a result capital is going to contract and if you want a loan get it right now as fast as you can.
Maybe it's because I'm not in the US, but do people actually feel this way?
Sure, the GFC was a big deal at the time, but as a millennial, who grew up upper-middle-class and is now in his mid-thirties, I don't feel it has impacted me much at all.
> I don't feel it has impacted me much at all.
Your post exemplifies exactly the problem I am describing.
There were multiple countries with little to no impact from the GFC[1]. These countries include billions of people, and significant portions of the worlds GDP. Most western economies had recovered in 3-5 years[2].
Not everyone felt it and felt it hard, nor was this everywhere. I'm not arguing semantics, for billions of people it was effectively a non issue.
1. https://www.internationalaffairs.org.au/australianoutlook/go... 2. https://bigeconomics.org/the-countries-most-and-least-affect...
I personally don't think retirement as exists today will be a thing by the time I reach the same age. I haven't really looked much into the history so I could be way off base here. My impression is pensions, state provided and private, only really came into being post WW2. While the age distribution was able to support it there was something of a golden age for the older cohort of the boomer generation with final salary pension schemes, retirement at 50, etc. As the population pyramid continues to invert the pyramid scheme begins to collapse.
Whatever the answer to old age ends up being I don't think it will be particularly recognizable relative to schemes today. Certainly there seems to be no answer to what happens when the next generation of retirees has no housing security or wealth, thanks to the growth of real estate speculation worldwide and rentier capitalism draining younger generations of all wealth.
I often joke that my retirement plan is to rob a bank, either you get the money and run away to somewhere with no extradition, or you go to jail and get bed and board.
Come on, make zombies... Or something.
I don’t think your analysis is correct.
Plus my own experience as someone born in 1989 doesn’t really mesh with yours. Most of my friends are both what I would call more frugal and more down to earth than their parents were because they had to live through multiple economic crashes.
There is little nihilism but people are disillusioned with the system because they feel it’s setup to favour an older age bracket at their expense and failing to address the most pressing issues like climate change.
nailed it. born '88, this summarizes my current world view so much, it's almost scary.
I turned to solarpunk and try to decide every day decisions in a way that make this future more possible. I may not succeed, it may never happen, but after lots of reflection, this is the only future setting we can achieve and allows our (esp.: my) children to be better off than we are.
Other ways simply lead to more pain/suffering/destruction/... no matter if they are philosophical more just or whatever. If you are leaning towards socialism, liberalism or are conservative, it all ultimately doesn't matter - green/sustainability is the only way to not destroy our planet too much in the next decades.
That’s simply extremely untrue. You can delude yourself if it helps you sleep but this is factually false.
People born in the 60s were the beneficiaries of policies which just don’t exist anymore. They grew in a context of full employment at any qualification level and with career paths towards higher pay which simply don’t exist anymore. Education costs and especially habitation costs both outpaced inflation widely. Tech jobs are such a niche it’s barely worth mentioning.
The situation is even worse where I’m from in Europe with social systems having been utterly mismanaged for decades and a total refusal to equitably address the situation nowadays.
And let’s not talk about the brain dead decisions taken by this generation when it comes to sustainability which millennials and gen z will now have to solve.
Is it because they had to live through multiple economic crashes, or because their own prospects are worse than those of their parents and they know it?
I'm officially on the cusp of Gen X and Millennial and feel the same thing, even with two young kids that will have to grow up and, as young adults, navigate the ashes of this imagined world.
The charitable view I take of this (for myself) is the idea of creative destruction. Yes there will be great pain for very many people, perhaps including myself and those close to me, but there's little I can do to stop the runaway freight train, so I can only hope that out of all the pain and destruction something new and better can emerge from the void it leaves.
So the result is this strange combination of extreme worldlyness and also naivete.
Older folk believe more deeply in the legitimacy of financial abstractions because they were adults before the cracks started to show. They have a stake in continuing the fiction that hard work == rewards.
Younger folk see the abstractions as a farce that we don't really believe but that we bring out whenever we feel the need to justify an injustice that we're participating in--particularly injustices that give young people the short end of the stick.
Poorer folk are too desperate to entertain the notion that the system is fundamentally unsound. They need status in that system badly enough that anything else is just a distraction.
But if you're in the middle, you see the power that comes with a shared belief in the system and you want to live in that again, but you also see that it will never be legitimate until certain critical bugs in its design are fixed.
Then you look around and see that the people in positions to fix those bugs are exploiting them instead.
You want to build something meaningful on the ashes, to fix the critical bugs and have a just system that everyone can believe in, but it's not ashes. It's just kind of carrying on... on fire.
And you realize that you might be quite old before fixing those bugs becomes a priority. That is, unless something happens to it first. So at least for me, nihilism is a compromise. I say that it's meaningless because that's easier than explaining that it's an enemy.
Nobody who is counting the days until they retire wants to hear me explain why I want to show up at the grocery store with a dollar and have the kid tell me:
> Sorry sir, we're not doing that anymore
So I back off on the rooting-for-the apocalypse mindset and let people think that it's just nihilism.
I'd love to take a moral view of the situation, but people dismiss those. Everybody speaks threat. And having acknowledged a threat isn't exactly a high bar.
We can worry about being too self congratulatory once we've done anything about it.
But financial nihilism is far more potent than its parent because it reflects not only slow moving "real economic activity" but the rapid dynamics of systems such as the monetary system and traded markets. Both of these have very strong "make-believe" character that are prone to create rapid collective "low-effort" bubbles. To make the difference clear, it is much easier to speculate on e.g., on solarcoin, or solar power generation stocks than actually manufacture and install a solar panel.
Ultimately economic nihilism itself is a subset and derives from moral nihilism, discounting the notion that society is held together by moral values and unspoken contracts. The transactional, dog-eats-dog Hobbesian world does not burden us with having to sort out conflicting views of what constitutes "Good society". Enjoy it.
Is this what moral nihilism says? I was under the impression that moral nihilism states that there are no objective or inherent moral values and rules which doesn't imply that society might need agreement on a subset of (made up) moral values to function.
as a philosophical system this might be so (and I fully agree moral values are made up and fairly arbitrary) but like so many philosophical debates this is to some extend counting angels on a pin's tip.
the moral nihilism I am refering to is the practical lived experience / choices of many individuals which are actually not completely devoid of any morality, just discounting some historically prevalent patterns, in particular those that might constrain an individual's actions
going back to logical coherence, I would think already the term "society" implies some agreement? Practical moral nihilists get out of this loop by arguing that "There is no such thing as society" :-)
I don't think it's a given that a lethal war adds real value when you incorporate the opportunity cost of not having the war. It's been argued that WWII is what ended the Great Depression, but I think that's partly due to the somewhat unique economic circumstances at the time, and due the enormous reallocations of resources and scientific discoveries that occurred.
I'd be deeply, deeply skeptical of any argument that any major wars before or since have been net-positive in creating real economic value for humanity. I think even (and perhaps especially) the most dogged Austrian-school free-market economists would agree with this position.
The issue with economic nihilism is that it would indeed count these +/- beans as fungible quantities.
In the Econ 101 model of the world, there are no beans to be gained in war. Changing what you produce does not increase what you produce. There are only beans to be lost, by producing weapons of war instead of producing what markets actually need and want.
This is called the "broken window fallacy". See e.g. https://mises.org/library/broken-window-fallacy.
I have many disagreements with the author of that article, e.g. I think his model of the economy is not realistic enough to be useful. But I think perhaps his model is exactly the kind of model that people have in mind when they think of economic nihilism: an infinite number of perfectly-fungible cyborgs all trading perfectly-fungible goods and services in an idealized frictionless free market. But it is in exactly this model that the broken window fallacy is the most obviously fallacious!
Economic statistics for Russia and Ukraine would like a word.
As the article mentions, money nihilism quickly gives way to other forms of nihilism when that other thing is less abstract than a number in a database. I permanently injured the cartilage in both knees at age 20 and a disc in my lower back in my mid 20s. Not enough to be crippling, but sufficiently so that I’m unable to run anymore and constantly have a sort of low-grade chronic background pain that I know is never going away short of some miracle in the glacial state of cartilage research.
Well, I was watching one of those videos about billionaire excess on YouTube, and there is a section of the video where the camera pans over the massive and luxurious deck of the yacht. The very first thought that popped into my head was “That deck chair looks like it would make my back extremely uncomfortable. I’d have to angle the way I sit on that chair.” Then it dawned on me that my upside to happiness in life is totally capped, and not even being a billionaire would make much difference at all in my day-to-day contentedness because I would still have just as much knee and back pain as I currently do.
So I guess the takeaway is that as I watch my investments go up or down by 30-50% from one year to the next, it doesn’t make much of a difference to me when I know that my quality of life has a definite, unfavorably low upper bound, no matter how high my “wealth” becomes.
That being said, it's really amazing what can be done with your body that minimizes stress on the parts that are injured. You might be able to do yoga and strengthen your stomach and back muscles to take loading off your spine. Running will always be difficult if you have injured your knees, but cycling might still be an option.
Will this fix the core issue and make the pain go away? Not at all. Particularly the knees; there's no getting around them when trying to walk. However, they might allow you to build strength in muscles that might compensate a little for the issues you have.
There is an unfortunately high tolerance of obvious mistruths in politics and finance that could easily be mistaken for nihilism. But it isn't, it is usual lies by people who are powerful. Nothing new. Always been there. Now that the internet exists it is easier to see behind the curtain.
The WSB crowd mocks r/investing because a 50 year timeline optimally turns 10k into 220k (not enough to be rich). With options you can do half that overnight.
However, options lose in most cases. With options pretty much everyone who uses them will have the experience of a loss even though their theory is confirmed. For example Tesla misses sales and the stock price goes up. The fact that the miss was priced in, makes it feel like retail investing is simply there to be shaken down in the same way a casino has a house edge.
"Don't fight the fed" has been a better slogan than "Diversify in stocks with dividends and good fundamentals"
Short term trading (as opposed to long term investing) is an activity that has extremely smart, experienced and well-funded people going up against each other. They are studying the markets at least full time and many work for employers (HFTs, investment banks, etc) that regularly invest hundreds of millions in infrastructure in order to gain an edge. Going up against all that as an amateur individual is like signing up for a serious poker tournament as a casual player. You could still win, but it's by luck alone and the odds are heavily against you. Long term investing has much less of this, because in the long run markets are weighing machines instead of voting machines and they measure the long term trends of economic development.
Index funds are a brilliant invention for retail investors, because they maximize the exposure to the long term economic trends while minimizing the chances of getting into a trade that does not favor you. Of course, the excitement of getting into bets and even winning every now and then is very addictive and this is what most of WSB seems to be chasing.
The reality for most people is still very much different. I'd say zero-interest rates and negative interest rates had more of an effect on people than crypto or risky stock bets. The system was kinda getting by until western politicians went over-board during the Pandemic and started printing money like crazy because MMT and also the elite convinced them that they had enough productive capacity; so the money will not trigger inflation but trigger this productive capacity...
We know how that turned out, and now the Fed/Politicians are turning to the reality of inflation. Inflation is real, and inflation is consequence to your actions. Financial nihilism (at large) is very short-lived. Reality will catch up to you. It doesn't mean it doesn't exist (elsewhere). Many nihilistic countries are having their currencies blow up even before the pandemic and more so now.
/r/wallstreetbets has 13.5 million subscribers.
Being a subscriber is not the same as being an active participant in the underlying behavior. I watch it mostly out of schadenfreude (which might mean I'm not a very nice person, but there it is).
Meanwhile - life is working very well for people who don't think this way. Like, every house that comes up on the market is immediately snatched up by some 30/40 year old who is buying a home for his growing family.
Somehow these guys figured out how to get consistently paid. Meanwhile you can be crying that it's impossible because what you do doesn't matter - and of course you'll end up proving it to yourself.
We have a choice of what operating systems run in our heads. Nihilism OS is popular but it's guaranteed to make you poor and miserable. Why would you run it?
You got lucky. Telling people who were not that its their own fault for not trying is just such horrible thing to say. How can people have so little empathy, I will never understand.
I'm not going to go tell people "do it! go buy more lottery tickets! don't give up! you will get there eventually" because I won the lottery.
Value is not a given unless you get big enough to lobby for rent seeking.
For the rest of us it's a lottery.
However, it is true that having an optimistic mentality can help you get lucky.
But amidst a world of games and progression systems it sure does feel like a failure in some regards.
My point of view is that no one know if they are any meaning to the universe, let alone one that is grabbable by human limited cognitive abilities. So from this premises, "absolute" intrinsic value of any object is not accessible to us. Actually, we don’t even know with absolute certitude if the object of some speculation relate to anything denotable.
I do have faith that there is an absolute reality encompassing me, and that the few fallible representation I can build about it, can only be constructed through subjective experiences.
To my mind, finance is all about human conventions. They are far more strongly shaped by more or less common cultural phantasmagorias than by any intrinsic constrain of reality.
Why plan long term in such a scenario?
If you beleive the article, the only reason the majority world supplier of Coltan (Australia) stopped producing is because of cheap African labour. https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/the-conflict-mineral-colta...
I'm sorry you feel bad you tricked your dad into buying a NES.
No, this is incorrect. It doesn't matter who owns the stock as long as someone does. It's irrelevant if one person owns the stock or it's distributed equally among workers (or something in between.) The incentives are the same. In fact, distributing stock more widely could lead to better decision making by crowdsourcing wisdom.
But for now the stocks are mostly owned by rich people who want to get richer not matter what and it seems to me that the whole market is so used to that, that it would take a radical system change to make it happen without the economy as we know it crashing hard.
I don't know that it needs to be an instantaneous change. Something gradual could work, at least in theory. On the other hand, I think we need to do something not just for reasons of justice but rather we need to internalize a lot of these externalities just for survival, which wider ownership would naturally do.