When it comes to keeping my emotions in check, I’m a bit of a puzzle.
On the one hand, I can be quick to ire. I’ve been known to throw up my arms at everything from people who cut me off in traffic to people not returning calls or emails to business interests screwing workers to governments committing genocide. Whoa! Where’d that last one come from, blogger guy?! I mean, yeah, that’ll upset almost any rational human, but take it easy there, big fella!
On the other hand, maybe because I know this all too well, I generally make a conscious effort to keep said ire in check. Sometimes the best I can do in that regard is throwing up my arms a little more slowly than otherwise might have been the case. And not quite so high that I puncture the ceiling. Other times, unless you were in my head, you’d never have known that I was playing footsie with a frustration-induced aneurysm.
For better or worse (likely worse), I’ve for some time seldom been able to experience euphoria. So, keeping my emotions on this opposite side of the ledger in check therefore hasn’t been much of an issue.
Normal levels of regular ol’ happiness and sadness come and go. Sometimes they linger for a while. Other times, they pass like the wind. I’m also a world-class compartmentalizer. So, there’s that, too.
Even money
Luckily, money and fluctuations in various markets mostly never provoked a great emotional reaction in me. Market swings were all but invisible to me. Certainly, swings of the day-to-day sort were. In fact, other than when I’d get a quarterly statement for my 401(k) account that I had with my law firm employer, which wasn’t opened until I was in my 30s, I seldom even paid attention to, or thought about, any markets at all. Sure, I was aware of the dot-com bust stock market meltdown when it happened. And a few really bad days for the stock market here and there, too. But as I was desperately poor had almost no investments at the time, I watched those events much like a spectator at a horror movie. That is, it looked really bad, but as I wasn’t personally affected, it might as well have been an alternative universe.
Even the colossal financial crisis of 2008–2009 didn’t faze me much. Sure, we had far greater investments then than in the early 2000s. But as for the stock market specifically, I recall saying at the height of the meltdown in early-2009, that I desperately wished I had cash lying about so that I could shovel every last penny of it into the market as everyone else was desperately trying to flee it. All that worried me, and objectively so, was that we were trying to sell our condo and finding that a far more difficult exercise than it’d have been in the before times.
Market watch
As our investments grew from thereon out, I started paying a liiitttle more attention to the markets. Not so much that I was much phased by whatever ups or downs were happening. But more.
Maybe this closer attention I was paying resulted from my realizing what it would take for us to get to our FIRE number, that the pieces were in place, that it then was basically a math game, that we were then rapidly increasing our investments year after year, and that because it was a crazy bull market, we weren’t tiptoeing to FIRE, but rather galloping.
In the year or two leading up to my FIREing at the end of 2021, I looked at what the markets were doing, and at our investments, far more frequently than I ever had. As these years were—with the exception of a few months in early- to mid-2020—part of a massive bull run, what I saw was good more often than not. That made me happy. Days on which our investments took a hit were not awful, but depressed me more than they would have in the past. But, again, I knew that we’re running a marathon and closing in on our FIRE number.
Ups and downs
But here’s where the real rub comes in. The markets were choppy the last few months of 2021. Unlike almost ever, that started giving me a little bit of the jitters, notwithstanding the fact that the value of our investments exceeded our FIRE number by a not insignificant sum. I gamely hoped that things would improve either before or right after I FIREd.
Well, that didn’t happen.
What did happen was that until last week, 2022 saw our investments take a bit of a beating. As I explained in my last blog post, that annoyed me. Surely more than it would have at any previous point in my life. Frankly, I kinda longed for the time I wasn’t paying any attention to the markets (that is, as to my then ability to be oblivious to downturns, and definitely not as to my being desperately poor).
And then last week happened. The stock market, specifically, had its best week in a long time. As we have substantial investments in the stock market, that was good for us. And boy, was I happy. But even last week, I longed for the time I wasn’t paying any attention to the markets or our investments. My feeling good is happening only because I can also feel bad when things are going south. I’d just as soon like to just shrug each day, regardless of whether one day is good or bad for our investments. Or just be blessedly oblivious to it all, barring a catastrophe.
Luckily, I’m a buy-and-hold investor who has strong will power and knows that, based on history, the long-term prospects are far and away in our favor. So, there’s little risk of me doing anything rash and stupid that’d badly hurt us financially.
But these daily emotional lows and highs are a real drag.
And in the end . . .
Now having noticed this and recognizing that I have a problem I need to deal with, I plan to address it. Quite how, I’m not sure. But address these emotions I will.
