My brief foray into the stock market

So a few weeks ago I had a burning desire to understand the stock market, namely in the buying and selling of options. Like most people, I could sense there was going to be a huge downturn ahead due to panic over COVID. Since I know very little about puts and calls (short-term ways to bet on whether stocks would rise or fall), I tried out a simulator on Investopedia.com in order to educate myself. The Investopedia simulator follows the ACTUAL stock market, so whatever you invest with your fake dollars will reflect what you would have earned or lost in real time.

Within three days I made $20,000 off of my $3000 simulated investment. Full of bravado at this point, I debated whether I should start investing with actual dollars.

After a lot of hemming and hawing, I decided against it.

Why?

• OBSESSIVENESS. Because during those 3 intense days of day trading, I found myself checking the DOW every 5-10 minutes. I had no life outside of this. While I was working, eating, or in the bathroom I'd check the market. I'd check it after walking the dogs a mile, before I walked them back.
• EGO. I would start yelling every time my trades showed profit and scream "I'M A GENIUS!!!" at my husband in the other room. Mostly joking, but not really. I could feel my ego growing in sync with my Investopedia account. Who cares how insufferable I've become!? After all, I could be a bonafide financial guru!
• DETERIORATING RELATIONSHIPS. My husband actually banned me from discussing the stock market with him after the first day. It was all I talked about. I don't think he's fully recovered yet.

If I was already this wound up after 3 days of pretend money, what was I going to be like playing with real money? For the sake of my sanity (and perhaps my marriage), I decided to drop the whole endeavor, and just stick to my regularly scheduled program of long-term retirement contributions.

I don't even know why I got so obsessed. I'm fortunate enough not to need the money desperately right now. Any money I would have made wouldn't have really changed our lives at all, since I would have never have bet huge amounts of money in the first place. But the bigger issue is: I just can't seem to play the market without becoming, in essence, a crazy person.

Maybe one day I'll be able to play stocks with detachment. As for now, I'm watching the day-to-day volatility with interest but staying far away.

Do You Ever Feel Like You Have Too Many Interests, and Other Ramblings

Note: this is long and rambly due to having typed this up in the middle of the night

THE DILETTANTE

Do you ever feel like you have too many interests? Right now I'm interested in:

• meditation
• trying the sport of paddleball
• playing the ukulele
• learning more about the stock market
• physics
• using the digital drawing tools for my iPad
• programming in Python

I'm finding I want to do everything, learn everything, but don't seem to have the time to do it.

It's a fun problem to have, I think. In the past, there were periods when I was uninterested in anything, when I was most likely depressed. 

Things are very good these days.  It's not about the outside, but what's going on within. I am learning everything will change, transform, and disappear eventually. What am I saying...it's happening now, as I type this.  

I know it's odd to say "I am learning" this very obvious fact of life, but I don't think it really "registered" with me in a way that was real until recently. I'm a late bloomer.

So yes, things change. May I be able to roll with the punches when they do.

***

THE TERRIBLE FORTIES

Incidentally, I'm near the age that is supposedly the UNHAPPIEST age according to some survey. What age, you ask? Forty-seven.

Of course, I don't REALLY believe 47 is the most miserable age. Well, I do and I don't. I do because this is when a lot of women can get perimenopausal/menopausal. The hormones shift and no small percentage of women report they are often feeling intensely sad, exhausted, overwhelmed, depressed, angry, paranoid, anxious, etc. "I don't remember feeling this crazy since I was a teen", is what I'll hear. This is on top of all the physical changes of wrinkling, greying, hot flashes, insomnia, bathroom issues, weight gain, etc. etc. 

As for myself, I think this shift began for me 2-3 years ago (still going through it now). I credit meditation (and a patient husband) for helping me through the rollercoaster thus far. It's why I started and stuck with it to begin with. Yay for suffering? The great motivator?

So I can definitely believe that 47--around the time of "the shift", can be a very trying period (pun unintended!) 

And a lot of men are unhappy around this time as well. My belief is that it might also have to do with THEIR changing hormonal levels; namely the decline in testosterone.

And usually this is all under the challenging specter of the mid-life/existential crisis. And a time when our parents begin having health issues as well. Fun stuff.

I'm not going to expect things will get necessarily get "better" after 47 though, despite what the survey says. Nobody knows what will happen. To this body. To family. To friends. To this society. To this world. The only thing I can hope for is cultivating the right attitude and state of mind to deal with whatever comes my way, good or bad. That's the most important goal I foresee...at least it seems to me...right now. Will this goal change tomorrow? In a year? I don't know.

***

ADVENTURES IN SITTING

I was trying Shikantaza meditation the other day, on my husband's recommendation. That's a type of meditation where the object is to sit. Yep, that's all there is to it. Just sitting. It's actually harder to do than it sounds.

After I sat with some difficulty for 45 minutes, I asked, "so what's the point of all this? What is this supposed to do?" 

My husband replied, "To make you stop asking those kinds of questions."

The Holy Man and the Waterfall

Recently I've felt this tremendous pressure between my eyes while meditating. Apparently it's a common issue but the advice on alleviating it ranges from "learn to accept it and continue your practice" to "stop immediately and do something else." Ah, the endless and contradictory wisdom of the internet.

So I've taken a break, just to be safe. My sis said that area between the eyes is a "chakra point." I asked her what that meant and what I can do about it, and she said she has no idea. Haha, oh well!

In any case, until I find a teacher who knows what's up, I'm continuing to read through my Ram Dass book and explore other types of meditation practices.

Dass's book "Journey of Awakening", which provides instructions on many different styles of meditation, is also peppered with stories and bits of wisdom from sources ranging far and wide, including the Christian, Hindu, Taoist, Sufi, Buddhist.

I particularly loved this excerpt, a passage from The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna. It shows, among other things, that meditation doesn't have to be limited to the act of sitting down and focusing on your breath: (parentheses added for clarity)

There is a sadhu (holy man) in Hrishikesh who gets up early in the morning and stands near a great waterfall. He looks at it the whole day and says to God: "Ah, You have done well! Well done! How amazing!" He doesn't practice any other form of japa (mantra) or austerity. At night he returns to his hut.

How simple. Some would call the above a silly and wasted day, but I can't imagine a day more beautiful or lovely.

Ranting about Alcohol

One of my goals this year is to be more accepting of people. As if on cue, within a few weeks I realized pretty quickly where I draw a hard line...

I can't stand drunks.

The only way I can tolerate drunkenness is if I get drunk myself. And I've acquired a distaste for alcohol so that's not gonna happen any time soon.

I think about somebody like Christ, looking out at all his followers. Loving the prostitutes and lepers and outcasts of society. For some reason this seems significantly easier to me than accepting and loving drunks. Maybe Jesus loved them, but from afar. Like arm's length.

By "drunks", I don't necessarily mean alcoholics. Alcoholics are people who are struggling with a difficult issue.

I mean people, alcoholic or not, who are actually drunk in the moment. In a way, I feel like "they" (the drunk person) doesn't even exist, and I'm wasting time interacting with them. Because I'm actually interacting with a bottle of vodka, not an actual person.

I've worked in the hospitality industry and have had to deal with a lot of drunkenness. This is partly where my bias comes from. I've also dealt with a lot of people who were high from weed.

I tell ya, I LOVED people who were high. At least they didn't start fights, usually tipped well and weren't aggressive. They were also respectful.  In contrast, I really, REALLY did not like serving people who were wasted.

Documentary: Quark Science

Started watching a BBC series on Quark Science. The first episode ("Everything and Nothing") was amazing. It goes over how various people through the ages discovered, among many, many other things, the immense size of the universe and how the Big Bang theory came about.

It really highlights how our universe is such a gargantuan, strange, bewildering, and often times surreal place, on the level of a Dali painting. And how intensely clever and diligent the scientists were who discovered the knowledge we have today. And I don't know what's more fascinating--the actual discoveries or how the discoveries were made.

I learned so much from this episode, and am looking forward to watching the rest.

Some of it's available on youtube. The entire series is available through Amazon Prime.

 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07CTFML98

Ram Dass: Journey of Awakening

Just finished this book from Ram Dass. Compared to the sometimes maddeningly esoteric "Be Here Now"--the book for which he is most famous, "Journey of Awakening: A Meditator's Guidebook" is surprisingly straightforward and wonderfully easy to read. I've been trying to meditate seriously for almost a year now, and while books like "The Mind Illuminated" and going on a Vipassana retreat were transformative,  Ram Dass brings "everything together" in a way I haven't seen in other books that cover meditation.

It's the single best introductory book on meditation I've ever encountered. Ram Dass very succinctly covers the reasons for meditating, how meditating fits in the broader context of life, and provides instructions for different practices.

Thank you Ram Dass for writing this fantastic book! I'm reading my library copy twice, just to make sure I didn't miss anything. I may have to purchase it to keep as a reference.

Moving Forward

So it took me 2 weeks to (mostly) recover from the flu. Hurrah!

I haven't been meditating like I regularly did last year. For the past few weeks, I've noticed the difference. I've been starting to feel stressed out. My mind has been running with all sorts of anxious thoughts.

So I decided to start my regular sits again. I did a 45 minute sit yesterday and the effect was almost immediate. It was as if the problems I thought I had vanished into thin air.

Again, it's not that meditating "fixed" any of those problems. It's more like after 45 minutes of focusing on my breath, I stepped away feeling the things I thought were problems weren't actually problems at all.

For a worrier like me, this is a pretty neat trick.