Ruminations on Investments, Retirement and Anxiety

Aweh, My Dearly Beloved Fellow Ruminants & Groupies,

On one hand, I’m a capitalist investor. I study market cycles, track returns, think about diversification, and invest, quite deliberately, in the stock market. I do this to build retirement capital. To sleep at night. To avoid becoming a financial burden on my boys before we step off into the great good night.

That alone, not needing their support, is a gift we can give our children. And if there’s any change left over? That too becomes a gift.

But on the other hand, and here’s where the contradiction kicks in, I’m also someone who knows that the current economic model, this endless exponential growth machine we’ve all signed up for, is simply not sustainable. I don’t just mean environmentally. I mean existentially. We are consuming the planet to generate returns. I know this.

And yet I keep investing in the very system I question. That’s the dissonance. That’s the hypocrisy.

I need the market to go up. I need global GDP to keep rising. I need companies to sell more things to more people using more energy and more resources, so that my portfolio grows.

But I also know that if everyone keeps doing this, we will blow past planetary boundaries, and physics and nature will teach us a harsh lesson. Exponential growth is a fairy tale with a tragic ending.

It’s not a comfortable position. But it’s the honest one.

I’m not offering a resolution. I’m not greenwashing it. I’m just naming it because we can’t think clearly about investing if we pretend it’s morally neutral. It’s not. It’s a choice. A compromise. A kind of Faustian bargain and, sometimes, a betrayal.

And yet… I still invest. Because despite the contradictions, I still want a future I can afford, and I still don’t want to be a burden on my boys.

So, with that discomfort acknowledged, let me return to the investment principles I’ve tried to live by, even as I carry this cognitive dissonance:

You can manage your money yourself if you have the right emotional makeup.

The most underrated skill in investing is temperament. Not intelligence, not knowledge, not luck, just the ability to sit still, avoid panic, ignore noise, and stay the course. You don’t need a financial adviser. What they need is the emotional capacity to be boring when the world gets loud. This is only for the few who have the right temperament.

2. Financial advisers? Often just termites in your cellar.

Yes, that’s harsh. But I’ve seen it. The fees, the complexity, the veneer of professionalism masking a lack of actual value-add. You don’t hand over your retirement plan lightly. Because once you let someone else in, they nibble at the margins and profit from your anxiety and your need for certainty. There is no certainty.

3. The stock market goes up over the long run. We assume that will continue.

This is the fundamental bet of investing: that over time, productivity rises, innovation happens, and companies grow earnings. That assumption may be fragile. But historically, it’s been resilient.

4. There’s a cacophony now about AI bubbles, irrational exuberance, and an imminent crash.

The noise is deafening. Everyone’s forecasting doom. Ironically, most of the loudest voices are the same people who were wrong last time. But markets are weird: sometimes the pessimists are right. The problem is you can’t know when.

5. Don’t try to time the market. You will fail and destroy value in the process.

The data is overwhelming: even missing just a handful of “up” days can wreck your long-term returns. Trying to jump in and out based on so-called gurus, tweets, or “signals” is not a strategy; it’s allowing your fear to get the best of you. This is not easy.

6. Crashes will come, but nobody knows when or how big.

The only certainty is uncertainty. And while forecasters love to make noise, the reality is:

“If you can’t forecast accurately, forecast often.”
So someone will always be “right” in hindsight. That means nothing.

7. Keep enough in near-cash to ride out a storm say, for 3 years.

This is what cushions you when markets crash. Not prediction. Not panic-selling. Just boring liquidity. Three years of living expenses in safe, liquid assets means you don’t have to sell into the panic. You wait it out. Because historically, markets always come back.

8. Existential anxiety? It’s part of the package.

When the crash comes, and it will, you will feel it. Deeply. Not just financially, but existentially. It will shake your belief in the system, in your planning, in your self-worth. That’s normal.

But remember, this is the cost of participating in the game. These moments, the bear markets, the drawdowns, the soul-wrenching declines, are the price you pay for the long-term returns. If you can sit through them, you have the temperament required.

So yes, I carry the hypocrisy: investing in a system I know is unsustainable.

But I also carry the clarity: this is the world we have, not the world I wish we had.

I don’t have answers. I have strategies. And doubts. And a long view. And cognitive dissonance.

So yes, I’m a hypocrite with a diversified portfolio. I want compound growth and planetary healing, retirement and moral clarity, peace of mind, and a functioning biosphere. I’d like my ETF to outperform and the Amazon rainforest to survive. I know I can’t have it all, but I’m still trying, dammit. Maybe that’s the final investment principle: accept the mess, own your contradictions, and keep your near-cash handy for both market crashes and existential crises.

Does this make sense? Probably not.

Until next week,

Bruce