Thank you @Boredfree -- i get where you are coming from, however there is a difference. Your freedom to choose from what you have related to us here is from eschewing certain obligations or perhaps dropping out. I was faced with economic totality events for character based decisions a few times in life, the later two after having taken on the significant obligations of family. None were due to my tenuous health and the early one was during formative career years. These events were due to living my morals and could have been avoided by "playing along". Here is the rub. The damage was far worse than what it would have been if COVID-BS had forced me to walk or get myself terminated under the same family obligation conditions. To me, this COVID-BS thing as a family man would have been nothing even if it was a close the doors event.
People had ample options and opportunity to pool resources with like minded family and even friends. I have a close personal friend who totally lost his legal career in mid-life, will never be able to get back into the profession, had children in university, mortgage on his home, etc. His children came back to live with him in his cramped city home, he sold everything he could, liquidated all of his few small investments, and after trading his nicer car (really nice) for a beat-up old Toyota sedan, worked food delivery nearly round the clock to not be homeless or not meet his mortgage obligations and start wrecking his credit by not paying bills. His wife, the high-end admin somewhere else afflicted with stupid, now works in a kitchen. They were close to going to live with his parents. This is just one example.
I disagree a little bit with Karl as to the suck leading to some good things later in this case or in general. Before he published this was going to write something in The Bar, but then deleted it as i was bored with the concept. Two reasons why i respectfully disagree.
The only way to deal with suck is to consider that suck just is, not a means to an end. My second point will find this concept useful. Suck can be life in general for a lot of people and situations, and one might never know anything but. However, there is a contentment if not joy. Just being here is also where one was meant to be. Perhaps in that suck one might help another on his journey even though at the moment it seems so trivial or not even apparent. We are here to do something, and perhaps it is just one small thing. Simply going about life in the everyday challenges might be what makes it all work. Every moment of consciousness is a gift, even if for but a moment. No matter where one is living or how, we can all appreciate the same beauty in the sky or anywhere else for that matter.
A lot of people who are free of this particular challenge and others past and to come really have no idea of what true misery and privation is in having to make hard decisions. These are things which i know from my youth. You have no idea what absolute desperation is and how you will be tested for your decisions. Try hunger and cold on for size, really hungry and cold, really. I already know what i am like, what i will not compromise no matter the pain as well as those close to me. Do you? Have you learned to control yourself while afraid?
Another part of the suck, the second point, is that suck often does not end. I do not see things turning around for this country in my lifetime as a possibility with reasonable probability. I get it; this was once a financial and investing blog. The core routines are still there buried in the system long after Karl converted the intelligence and analysis to a more activist intention. But, like birth sex, for a variety of reasons, not the least the membership, it is what it is.
People are thinking about the reasonable possibility that after some hardship and buying opportunities the shit will be flushed out of the system, and things might get productive again. It took us sixty years to get here. We gonna fix it in ten. I have my doubts. And, what about all of the people raised in the old system and still to be around in ten or twenty years? They gonna have a come to Jesus moment? Every person forty years old or less goes back to school to learn either trade work or academics at the same level of sixty years ago?
Sure you can purchase a business at the bottom where "some fool paid to outfit it and buy all of the equipment and fittings" where you get it for pennies on the dollar. Ok wildman, what happens if you have to sit on that fucking thing for ten or more years, lower than barely scraping by as the rest of the economy and then consumer trends will not drive your business the forty percent over the carrying costs. Oh, and BTW, you still have to eat. One of Whitehat's little rules for my firm's clients was that the person selling something already knows how little it is worth. Do you? I cannot begin to tell you how many things were purchased by clients and others who consulted with me where the market was never coming back, trends were changing, the time window for profit was grossly underestimated, and they would get to fight inflation during the carrying period. And BTW, people have to eat and live indoors during the carrying period. Where does that money come from? Now you want to fight deflation?
This second point is that outside of COVID-BS major changes were coming to our world and economic system, most not good. All that this crisis did was allow some to score easy cash, others to position themselves and justify a lot of things, and it amplified and accelerated the process of everything bad already going on, everything which includes non-monetary stuff.
I am not going to go into what i think fixes this aspect of the suck as it is too long and too far off topic. It is moral, ethical and within our system, just a commitment thing. There is a takeaway.
Look at how you are living and might even be this level needs to be cut back. This is the rest of your life, and probably those after you. Why not make it the best that it can be no matter how miserable? You might have great business maven skills or investoyuppie street cred, great. Can you live with never using these gifts and not become a bitter, angry and disappointed person? I know what it is like to have massive gifts and never get to develop or use them. Already been there, not better than you, merely a lot of paces farther down the path.
Can you take what you are and what little you might have and make peace with it?
Perhaps your gifts can in some way without you knowing it help another to get through the day. Start simply, because that might be all that there is left for you.
Be prepared for the possibility.
Happiness is not getting what you want. It is wanting what you get.
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Mission Complete
The truth is just too powerful to know. Those who hold the truth suffer more than those who believe the lie. -The Hall of Tears
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