When I was twenty, I had no interest in the stock market. My heart was pure. I was not the diseased man I now am. I worked at the corporate offices of a shoe company. I knew our stock price was down, because my supervisor, Gene, a gruff but likeable man who raised cattle on the side, owned hundreds of depressed shares. At fifty-five, he knew what it was like to lose a bundle in the stock market. I didn’t care.
We were in a recession. Soon there would be a monumental spike in the price of gold. And yet, those were the days for me. I was ignorant and poor, unambitious and happy. When not working the phones to make sure raw materials got to our factories on schedule, I daydreamed about backpacking in Europe.
I squirreled away paychecks by living at home and denying myself a night life. I would eventually ask for a couple of months leave to travel. I began to track foreign exchange rates in the back pages of the Wall Street Journal. One of the bosses, a man named Steven Pate, seemed impressed when he saw me scanning the financial pages. For several months he tried to persuade me to become an investor. He was persistent. He was more interested in my future than I could possibly be. Now I understand why. He wanted to turn his own clock back twenty or thirty years in order to be a very young investor in a depressed stock market at the beginning of the computer age. Young and free of mortgage debt and insurance payments and family commitments, he could start over with a good chance of becoming fabulously rich. And that’s what might have happened to me, had I listened to him for two whole minutes.
I didn’t listen, and now that I’ve become a middle-aged man obsessed with the markets, I’m both sad and happy about that. The stock market is a deadly beast. As the market falls, I’m torn apart. I feel desperate when my 401K sheds half a year’s salary in two days, but I’m overcome by greed when I consider how cheap certain stocks have suddenly become. At the same time that I’m pulling for the markets to rebound, I want them to fall further. I’m obsessed with timing, in the short term and in the long term. When should I sell? When has the market climbed too high? When has it hit bottom? No one knows. Yet we have to make decisions or resign ourselves to lie awake at night, paralyzed, as the waves pass over us.
The whole value in youth lies in not knowing any of this. And the stock market is so much like the rest of life in the process of aging. I’d like to think that somewhere out there in the four-dimensional universe, my former youthful self still smiles up into the Florentine sun, unaware of the torturous years to come. Why couldn’t I have become obsessed with Italian opera, or stamp collecting, or straightforward gambling? Instead, I ride the beast that has swallowed America and the rest of the world with it, and there is no use for saddle and reins, because I ride in its belly. Only the very best of us don’t suffer from motion sickness. Are you here with me? I can’t see you in the darkness. It’s so crowded here, we’re all alone. And this is the horrifying thing: a part of me wishes the beast would crash, even though it would be the end of us. Most of us are far too old to climb out of such a mess and start over. We would rather start over by traveling back thirty years. But then we were young, and none of this mattered.