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The Scandal of Financial Nihilism

98 points by vitabenes 4y ago

glutamate 4y ago
Low-cost, globally diversified index tracker.
anonymousDan 4y ago
I love the Nintendo story. Would be hilarious if you could find the list. As someone with young kids I almost feel guilt tripped when I read articles about how once you say no to your child you have to stick with it or else your child will own you forever more and inevitably turn into a crackhead. Sometimes you just have to give in!
- kvirani 4y ago
  You have my attention re crackhead kids. Source?
- fidrelity 4y ago
  Changing your mind is okay. When I as a parent do, I give them an explanation why I did. Often children's requests aren't all that unreasonable. It also teaches them that people can be reasonable and are not just NPCs.
  - SuoDuanDao 4y ago
    I'd say it's good when a child sees their parent change their mind. As a child, I knew if I disagreed with a decision my parents made I had an opportunity to argue my case and possibly elicit a change in policy. I didn't always succeed, but I was motivated to be honest with them when I disagreed rather than go behind their backs. That was a pretty useful lesson, looking back.
roenxi 4y ago
This is a blog post that is trying to organise a thought and not quite managing it. There are too many threads and they aren't woven into something orderly or poetic. There is an unfortunately high tolerance of obvious mistruths in politics and finance that could easily be mistaken for nihilism. But it isn't, it is usual lies by people who are powerful. Nothing new. Always been there. Now that the internet exists it is easier to see behind the curtain.
- andrewclunn 4y ago
  I think it's confusing cause and effect. Monetary policy that leads to cheap debt for the connected and inflation for the masses is driving this.
  - meowfly 4y ago
    I think you are right. The WSB crowd mocks r/investing because a 50 year timeline optimally turns 10k into 220k (not enough to be rich). With options you can do half that overnight. However, options lose in most cases. With options pretty much everyone who uses them will have the experience of a loss even though their theory is confirmed. For example Tesla misses sales and the stock price goes up. The fact that the miss was priced in, makes it feel like retail investing is simply there to be shaken down in the same way a casino has a house edge. "Don't fight the fed" has been a better slogan than "Diversify in stocks with dividends and good fundamentals"
    - WJW 4y ago
      With a lottery ticket you can also do that overnight, and more. Most people are savvy enough to know that playing the lottery has unfavorable odds though, while not as many understand market structure. Short term trading (as opposed to long term investing) is an activity that has extremely smart, experienced and well-funded people going up against each other. They are studying the markets at least full time and many work for employers (HFTs, investment banks, etc) that regularly invest hundreds of millions in infrastructure in order to gain an edge. Going up against all that as an amateur individual is like signing up for a serious poker tournament as a casual player. You could still win, but it's by luck alone and the odds are heavily against you. Long term investing has much less of this, because in the long run markets are weighing machines instead of voting machines and they measure the long term trends of economic development. Index funds are a brilliant invention for retail investors, because they maximize the exposure to the long term economic trends while minimizing the chances of getting into a trade that does not favor you. Of course, the excitement of getting into bets and even winning every now and then is very addictive and this is what most of WSB seems to be chasing.
  - 4y ago
davedx 4y ago
This entire blog post seems to be an exercise in self-projection, dressed up as philosophy? Assuming all retail investors are financial nihilists is absurdly reductionist. I'm sorry you feel bad you tricked your dad into buying a NES.
psychoslave 4y ago
>My friend Demetri Kofinas has referred to financial nihilism as “a philosophy that treats the objects of speculation as though they were intrinsically worthless.” It is a philosophy that fully embraces the view that reality is completely subjective. My point of view is that no one know if they are any meaning to the universe, let alone one that is grabbable by human limited cognitive abilities. So from this premises, "absolute" intrinsic value of any object is not accessible to us. Actually, we don’t even know with absolute certitude if the object of some speculation relate to anything denotable. I do have faith that there is an absolute reality encompassing me, and that the few fallible representation I can build about it, can only be constructed through subjective experiences. To my mind, finance is all about human conventions. They are far more strongly shaped by more or less common cultural phantasmagorias than by any intrinsic constrain of reality.
csomar 4y ago
The WallStreet Bets, NFT and Crypto ecosystem is very niche. It's also very self-reinforcing because the internet made these people find their counterpart. The reality for most people is still very much different. I'd say zero-interest rates and negative interest rates had more of an effect on people than crypto or risky stock bets. The system was kinda getting by until western politicians went over-board during the Pandemic and started printing money like crazy because MMT and also the elite convinced them that they had enough productive capacity; so the money will not trigger inflation but trigger this productive capacity... We know how that turned out, and now the Fed/Politicians are turning to the reality of inflation. Inflation is real, and inflation is consequence to your actions. Financial nihilism (at large) is very short-lived. Reality will catch up to you. It doesn't mean it doesn't exist (elsewhere). Many nihilistic countries are having their currencies blow up even before the pandemic and more so now.
- Sholmesy 4y ago
  > The WallStreet Bets, NFT and Crypto ecosystem is very niche /r/wallstreetbets has 13.5 million subscribers.
  - tristor 4y ago
    That's true, but I think watching it and acting on it are very different things, just as in the case with other social media. For example, I subscribe to WSB, but I also don't do risky trades except with small amounts of "fun money", I have triple digit thousands invested in index funds. Being a subscriber is not the same as being an active participant in the underlying behavior. I watch it mostly out of schadenfreude (which might mean I'm not a very nice person, but there it is).
jwmoz 4y ago
I enjoyed the read. What if your kids gave you a 100 item list whey they should be allowed to use tiktok!?
Xcelerate 4y ago
The fact that money and wealth (and apparently housing) are a “game” is rather depressing, but to some extent it’s always been that way. At least it seems like we are (maybe?) moving in the direction of addressing the problem via political efforts to reduce financial volatility and wealth inequality. As the article mentions, money nihilism quickly gives way to other forms of nihilism when that other thing is less abstract than a number in a database. I permanently injured the cartilage in both knees at age 20 and a disc in my lower back in my mid 20s. Not enough to be crippling, but sufficiently so that I’m unable to run anymore and constantly have a sort of low-grade chronic background pain that I know is never going away short of some miracle in the glacial state of cartilage research. Well, I was watching one of those videos about billionaire excess on YouTube, and there is a section of the video where the camera pans over the massive and luxurious deck of the yacht. The very first thought that popped into my head was “That deck chair looks like it would make my back extremely uncomfortable. I’d have to angle the way I sit on that chair.” Then it dawned on me that my upside to happiness in life is totally capped, and not even being a billionaire would make much difference at all in my day-to-day contentedness because I would still have just as much knee and back pain as I currently do. So I guess the takeaway is that as I watch my investments go up or down by 30-50% from one year to the next, it doesn’t make much of a difference to me when I know that my quality of life has a definite, unfavorably low upper bound, no matter how high my “wealth” becomes.
- short_sells_poo 4y ago
  I don't know you, and know nothing of your plight with back and knee pain. Please don't take this as trying to trivialize what must be a very difficult condition. That being said, it's really amazing what can be done with your body that minimizes stress on the parts that are injured. You might be able to do yoga and strengthen your stomach and back muscles to take loading off your spine. Running will always be difficult if you have injured your knees, but cycling might still be an option. Will this fix the core issue and make the pain go away? Not at all. Particularly the knees; there's no getting around them when trying to walk. However, they might allow you to build strength in muscles that might compensate a little for the issues you have.
- darkerside 4y ago
LatteLazy 4y ago
[flagged]
- SuoDuanDao 4y ago
  something something meaninglessness of value-discovery among human herd behavior.
  - LatteLazy 4y ago
    I wish they'd put the WSB logo at the top, it would have saved me 10minutes of "Half of this is obvious, and the other half is just opinions without any insight."
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
TheFattestNinja 4y ago
The post is kind of all over the place, more like an internal reflection than a normal message to others, but it does resonate with me on one point specifically: I am an "official" millennial, born 1989. One thing I have noticed (in an anectodical, personal and subjective way) is that my age bracket, especially those I would consider higher on an intelligence/success curve, appear to be so much more closet-nihilist than everyone else around. What I mean by that is that, while of course we don't really want to see the world burn, we are secretly hoping, in the dark, when no one is watching, for things to always go tits up a bit. Like there is a subconscious fascination to the aesthetics of Nero playing the lire while Rome burns. And upon deep self-reflection that's always a bit unsettling. I don't know if it's related to the generational trend, or maybe it's just selection bias over the people around me, but I think it's mostly the former rather than the second. Probably stems from the fact that we saw our beloved parents struggle in old age with health and finance, while we live in a more priviliged regime (remember that I mentioned this applies mostly to financially successfully peoples) where money seems more immaterial. So I guess the author might be onto something about this whole financial nihilism thing.
- themitigating 4y ago
  Perhaps it's anxiety caused by people who want power. "Vote for us because things are getting worse"
  - TheFattestNinja 4y ago
    Maybe, but is that new? I suppose the tone of political discourse has been going down over time. Not sure how that would cause this though: anxiety is kind of the opposite of "I want to see the world burn".
- hgomersall 4y ago
  I have a different take on why we want to see the world burn: we can see the world on fire, but seemingly lots of people don't (at least, not enough to do anything about it). We hope that if the burn increases a little bit now, people will notice before it starts burn uncontrollably in a few years, so start working to stop the fire.
eole666 4y ago
Our heavily capitalist society couldn't work without a certain amount of financial nihilism. How could you be a billionaire without being a financial nihilist ? What are the reasons for wanting to accumulate so much wealth, and keeping it for yourself while so many people suffer from poverty ? On the other hand, if billionaire's stopped wanting to earn more and more money, the economy would likely crash...
- guerrilla 4y ago
  > On the other hand, if billionaire's stopped wanting to earn more and more money, the economy would likely crash... No, this is incorrect. It doesn't matter who owns the stock as long as someone does. It's irrelevant if one person owns the stock or it's distributed equally among workers (or something in between.) The incentives are the same. In fact, distributing stock more widely could lead to better decision making by crowdsourcing wisdom.
  - eole666 4y ago
    Well I do agree and hope that this will happen some day. And it will be nice that once the stock is distributed more equally, we get other goals than economic growth, like preserving the planet, eradicating poverty, stop producing useless things and creating bullshit jobs to lower the unemployment rate. But for now the stocks are mostly owned by rich people who want to get richer not matter what and it seems to me that the whole market is so used to that, that it would take a radical system change to make it happen without the economy as we know it crashing hard.
    - guerrilla 4y ago
      > But for now the stocks are mostly owned by rich people who want to get richer not matter what and it seems to me that the whole market is so used to that, that it would take a radical system change to make it happen without the economy as we know it crashing hard. I don't know that it needs to be an instantaneous change. Something gradual could work, at least in theory. On the other hand, I think we need to do something not just for reasons of justice but rather we need to internalize a lot of these externalities just for survival, which wider ownership would naturally do.
oneoff786 4y ago
The flip side of this is sitting on a pretty good stable income, not playing high risk investment games, and needing to accept that your social class and wealth is more or less locked in for at least 20 years. Linear gains don’t move the needle. Savings do nothing once you have a house. It’s not a bad place to be, but it is a static one. If you have the ability to appreciate your circumstances it’s even a good one. But amidst a world of games and progression systems it sure does feel like a failure in some regards.
- annyeonghada 4y ago
  I wish we had the stability you talk about. Here, not in the US but in a kafkaesque hellhole, our political class decided that the job market should be flexible: that meant that finding a stable employment contract is a farce: instead of having a probationary period you have contracts for 6 months of fulltime work written of as internship and payed as such, and you can be sure the contract will not be renovated so you change job every six month because it is illegal to renovate an internship contract, you offer fulltime or you fire. Meanwhile this "companies" keep churning people using them like almost-slaves because people are desperate: 8 hours a day? No, no: 10 is the minimum otherwise there's something more desperate that will take your "internship". And you end up 40 years old, living with your parents, unable to afford anything other than distraction and then you listen to the TV about the "brain-drain" and start saving money for the plane ticket.
  - oneoff786 4y ago
    Unable to afford anything other than distractions is a rather moving quote.
bulgur 4y ago
[dead]
- xyzelement 4y ago
  Comrade, I strongly encourage you to speak to people who grew up outside of capitalism (like me, born in the USSR, in 1981) if you want to talk about intolerable lives. Capitalism gives you a chance. It is your perverse defeated attitude that prevents you from even trying. So you complain about outcomes.
  - hotpotamus 4y ago
    You would then find this Nihilistic attitude acceptable in a non-capitalistic country?
    - xyzelement 4y ago
      No because it still doesn't serve you. Some people still strived for better lives, just with much lower return on investment. And then get the fuck out to the West when you can.
      - hotpotamus 4y ago
        And how did you measure who had the best life in such a system?
        xyzelement 4y ago
        Easy comparison: Level 1: dead from alcoholism before 40. Level 2: share a "communal apartment" with 3 other families. Level 3: work your way into being able to bribe someone to expedite your own apartment to only a 20 year wait. Still suffer shortages of food and basics, no hot water. Level 4: emigrate to the West and exceed all that within 5 years, even though you started from zero Very easily measurement
        4y ago
Devasta 4y ago
Not discussing climate change seems to me to be a big omission. I sometimes wonder if I will have enough to retire on; a teenager today won't have those concerns, as the best they can hope for is that they don't become climate refugees. Why plan long term in such a scenario?
- brutusborn 4y ago
  It’s because people have wide beliefs of how climate change will affect them. I doubt rich countries will notice much difference until the end of the century. Like most issues, the poor of the world are the ones who will suffer the soonest and the greatest.
  - kiliantics 4y ago
    people in rich countries depend an awful lot on people in poor countries making stuff for them and keeping them rich
    - brutusborn 4y ago
      It’s not a true dependency because they could do it themselves - it’s just a bit more expensive. Remember we are comparing catastrophes here; while Bangladesh might starve and lose most of its land, at the same time the US will probably just need to spend a bit more on food and make their own clothes. Both are affected, but orders of magnitude difference in the affects. Rich will still be rich, just a bit less.
      - kiliantics 4y ago
        Resources are not homogeneously distributed either though. Coltan for your smartphone has to be mined by children in the Congo before being shipped to fabs in China, etc. Most supply chains are just so global and complex. Reorganising to have local production in well off nations will be very extreme, not just "a bit more expensive"
        4y ago
xyzelement 4y ago
The funny/sad thing about this nihilism is that it's self fulfilling. You don't try and you don't get good outcomes. Meanwhile - life is working very well for people who don't think this way. Like, every house that comes up on the market is immediately snatched up by some 30/40 year old who is buying a home for his growing family. Somehow these guys figured out how to get consistently paid. Meanwhile you can be crying that it's impossible because what you do doesn't matter - and of course you'll end up proving it to yourself. We have a choice of what operating systems run in our heads. Nihilism OS is popular but it's guaranteed to make you poor and miserable. Why would you run it?
- glogla 4y ago
  This is such an evil thing to say. You got lucky. Telling people who were not that its their own fault for not trying is just such horrible thing to say. How can people have so little empathy, I will never understand.
  - xyzelement 4y ago
    If you tried and failed, I have respect. If you didn't bother "because it's impossible" (nihilism) then I have zero sympathy.
    - glogla 4y ago
      I succeeded - I have a condo, summer house and drive a damned Jaguar. I just have empathy with people who don't, because they weren't lucky, like me. I'm not going to go tell people "do it! go buy more lottery tickets! don't give up! you will get there eventually" because I won the lottery.
      - xyzelement 4y ago
        Would you tell people "acquire valuable skills, seek to sell them to quality employers or start your own business delivering tangible value"?
college_physics 4y ago
Financial nihilism is a subset and derives from economic nihilism. The latter is basically the entirely agnostic stance of classical economic thinking that aims to decouple from the troublesome subjectivity of morality. Infamously, a lethal war adds to economic activity as people are busy building and selling weapons of destruction, thereby adding to GDP. But financial nihilism is far more potent than its parent because it reflects not only slow moving "real economic activity" but the rapid dynamics of systems such as the monetary system and traded markets. Both of these have very strong "make-believe" character that are prone to create rapid collective "low-effort" bubbles. To make the difference clear, it is much easier to speculate on e.g., on solarcoin, or solar power generation stocks than actually manufacture and install a solar panel. Ultimately economic nihilism itself is a subset and derives from moral nihilism, discounting the notion that society is held together by moral values and unspoken contracts. The transactional, dog-eats-dog Hobbesian world does not burden us with having to sort out conflicting views of what constitutes "Good society". Enjoy it.
- karatinversion 4y ago
  > Infamously, a lethal war adds to economic activity as people are busy building and selling weapons of destruction, thereby adding to GDP. Economic statistics for Russia and Ukraine would like a word.
- ajmurmann 4y ago
  "Ultimately economic nihilism itself is a subset and derives from moral nihilism, discounting the notion that society is held together by moral values and unspoken contracts." Is this what moral nihilism says? I was under the impression that moral nihilism states that there are no objective or inherent moral values and rules which doesn't imply that society might need agreement on a subset of (made up) moral values to function.
  - college_physics 4y ago
    > there are no objective or inherent moral values and rules as a philosophical system this might be so (and I fully agree moral values are made up and fairly arbitrary) but like so many philosophical debates this is to some extend counting angels on a pin's tip. the moral nihilism I am refering to is the practical lived experience / choices of many individuals which are actually not completely devoid of any morality, just discounting some historically prevalent patterns, in particular those that might constrain an individual's actions going back to logical coherence, I would think already the term "society" implies some agreement? Practical moral nihilists get out of this loop by arguing that "There is no such thing as society" :-)
commandlinefan 4y ago
No matter what possessions you have, they can be taken away from you. What can't be taken away from you are your skills and knowledge - I've spent my life focusing on those, and it's served me well.

98 points by vitabenes 4y ago

Low-cost, globally diversified index tracker.

I love the Nintendo story. Would be hilarious if you could find the list. As someone with young kids I almost feel guilt tripped when I read articles about how once you say no to your child you have to stick with it or else your child will own you forever more and inevitably turn into a crackhead. Sometimes you just have to give in!

kvirani 4y ago
You have my attention re crackhead kids. Source?
fidrelity 4y ago
Changing your mind is okay. When I as a parent do, I give them an explanation why I did. Often children's requests aren't all that unreasonable. It also teaches them that people can be reasonable and are not just NPCs.
- SuoDuanDao 4y ago
  I'd say it's good when a child sees their parent change their mind. As a child, I knew if I disagreed with a decision my parents made I had an opportunity to argue my case and possibly elicit a change in policy. I didn't always succeed, but I was motivated to be honest with them when I disagreed rather than go behind their backs. That was a pretty useful lesson, looking back.

roenxi 4y ago

This is a blog post that is trying to organise a thought and not quite managing it. There are too many threads and they aren't woven into something orderly or poetic. There is an unfortunately high tolerance of obvious mistruths in politics and finance that could easily be mistaken for nihilism. But it isn't, it is usual lies by people who are powerful. Nothing new. Always been there. Now that the internet exists it is easier to see behind the curtain.

andrewclunn 4y ago
I think it's confusing cause and effect. Monetary policy that leads to cheap debt for the connected and inflation for the masses is driving this.
- meowfly 4y ago
  I think you are right. The WSB crowd mocks r/investing because a 50 year timeline optimally turns 10k into 220k (not enough to be rich). With options you can do half that overnight. However, options lose in most cases. With options pretty much everyone who uses them will have the experience of a loss even though their theory is confirmed. For example Tesla misses sales and the stock price goes up. The fact that the miss was priced in, makes it feel like retail investing is simply there to be shaken down in the same way a casino has a house edge. "Don't fight the fed" has been a better slogan than "Diversify in stocks with dividends and good fundamentals"
  - WJW 4y ago
    With a lottery ticket you can also do that overnight, and more. Most people are savvy enough to know that playing the lottery has unfavorable odds though, while not as many understand market structure. Short term trading (as opposed to long term investing) is an activity that has extremely smart, experienced and well-funded people going up against each other. They are studying the markets at least full time and many work for employers (HFTs, investment banks, etc) that regularly invest hundreds of millions in infrastructure in order to gain an edge. Going up against all that as an amateur individual is like signing up for a serious poker tournament as a casual player. You could still win, but it's by luck alone and the odds are heavily against you. Long term investing has much less of this, because in the long run markets are weighing machines instead of voting machines and they measure the long term trends of economic development. Index funds are a brilliant invention for retail investors, because they maximize the exposure to the long term economic trends while minimizing the chances of getting into a trade that does not favor you. Of course, the excitement of getting into bets and even winning every now and then is very addictive and this is what most of WSB seems to be chasing.
- 4y ago

davedx 4y ago

This entire blog post seems to be an exercise in self-projection, dressed up as philosophy? Assuming all retail investors are financial nihilists is absurdly reductionist. I'm sorry you feel bad you tricked your dad into buying a NES.

psychoslave 4y ago

>My friend Demetri Kofinas has referred to financial nihilism as “a philosophy that treats the objects of speculation as though they were intrinsically worthless.” It is a philosophy that fully embraces the view that reality is completely subjective. My point of view is that no one know if they are any meaning to the universe, let alone one that is grabbable by human limited cognitive abilities. So from this premises, "absolute" intrinsic value of any object is not accessible to us. Actually, we don’t even know with absolute certitude if the object of some speculation relate to anything denotable. I do have faith that there is an absolute reality encompassing me, and that the few fallible representation I can build about it, can only be constructed through subjective experiences. To my mind, finance is all about human conventions. They are far more strongly shaped by more or less common cultural phantasmagorias than by any intrinsic constrain of reality.

csomar 4y ago

The WallStreet Bets, NFT and Crypto ecosystem is very niche. It's also very self-reinforcing because the internet made these people find their counterpart. The reality for most people is still very much different. I'd say zero-interest rates and negative interest rates had more of an effect on people than crypto or risky stock bets. The system was kinda getting by until western politicians went over-board during the Pandemic and started printing money like crazy because MMT and also the elite convinced them that they had enough productive capacity; so the money will not trigger inflation but trigger this productive capacity... We know how that turned out, and now the Fed/Politicians are turning to the reality of inflation. Inflation is real, and inflation is consequence to your actions. Financial nihilism (at large) is very short-lived. Reality will catch up to you. It doesn't mean it doesn't exist (elsewhere). Many nihilistic countries are having their currencies blow up even before the pandemic and more so now.

Sholmesy 4y ago
> The WallStreet Bets, NFT and Crypto ecosystem is very niche /r/wallstreetbets has 13.5 million subscribers.
- tristor 4y ago
  That's true, but I think watching it and acting on it are very different things, just as in the case with other social media. For example, I subscribe to WSB, but I also don't do risky trades except with small amounts of "fun money", I have triple digit thousands invested in index funds. Being a subscriber is not the same as being an active participant in the underlying behavior. I watch it mostly out of schadenfreude (which might mean I'm not a very nice person, but there it is).

jwmoz 4y ago

I enjoyed the read. What if your kids gave you a 100 item list whey they should be allowed to use tiktok!?

Xcelerate 4y ago

The fact that money and wealth (and apparently housing) are a “game” is rather depressing, but to some extent it’s always been that way. At least it seems like we are (maybe?) moving in the direction of addressing the problem via political efforts to reduce financial volatility and wealth inequality. As the article mentions, money nihilism quickly gives way to other forms of nihilism when that other thing is less abstract than a number in a database. I permanently injured the cartilage in both knees at age 20 and a disc in my lower back in my mid 20s. Not enough to be crippling, but sufficiently so that I’m unable to run anymore and constantly have a sort of low-grade chronic background pain that I know is never going away short of some miracle in the glacial state of cartilage research. Well, I was watching one of those videos about billionaire excess on YouTube, and there is a section of the video where the camera pans over the massive and luxurious deck of the yacht. The very first thought that popped into my head was “That deck chair looks like it would make my back extremely uncomfortable. I’d have to angle the way I sit on that chair.” Then it dawned on me that my upside to happiness in life is totally capped, and not even being a billionaire would make much difference at all in my day-to-day contentedness because I would still have just as much knee and back pain as I currently do. So I guess the takeaway is that as I watch my investments go up or down by 30-50% from one year to the next, it doesn’t make much of a difference to me when I know that my quality of life has a definite, unfavorably low upper bound, no matter how high my “wealth” becomes.

short_sells_poo 4y ago
I don't know you, and know nothing of your plight with back and knee pain. Please don't take this as trying to trivialize what must be a very difficult condition. That being said, it's really amazing what can be done with your body that minimizes stress on the parts that are injured. You might be able to do yoga and strengthen your stomach and back muscles to take loading off your spine. Running will always be difficult if you have injured your knees, but cycling might still be an option. Will this fix the core issue and make the pain go away? Not at all. Particularly the knees; there's no getting around them when trying to walk. However, they might allow you to build strength in muscles that might compensate a little for the issues you have.
darkerside 4y ago

LatteLazy 4y ago

[flagged]

SuoDuanDao 4y ago
something something meaninglessness of value-discovery among human herd behavior.
- LatteLazy 4y ago
  I wish they'd put the WSB logo at the top, it would have saved me 10minutes of "Half of this is obvious, and the other half is just opinions without any insight."

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

TheFattestNinja 4y ago

The post is kind of all over the place, more like an internal reflection than a normal message to others, but it does resonate with me on one point specifically: I am an "official" millennial, born 1989. One thing I have noticed (in an anectodical, personal and subjective way) is that my age bracket, especially those I would consider higher on an intelligence/success curve, appear to be so much more closet-nihilist than everyone else around. What I mean by that is that, while of course we don't really want to see the world burn, we are secretly hoping, in the dark, when no one is watching, for things to always go tits up a bit. Like there is a subconscious fascination to the aesthetics of Nero playing the lire while Rome burns. And upon deep self-reflection that's always a bit unsettling. I don't know if it's related to the generational trend, or maybe it's just selection bias over the people around me, but I think it's mostly the former rather than the second. Probably stems from the fact that we saw our beloved parents struggle in old age with health and finance, while we live in a more priviliged regime (remember that I mentioned this applies mostly to financially successfully peoples) where money seems more immaterial. So I guess the author might be onto something about this whole financial nihilism thing.

themitigating 4y ago
Perhaps it's anxiety caused by people who want power. "Vote for us because things are getting worse"
- TheFattestNinja 4y ago
  Maybe, but is that new? I suppose the tone of political discourse has been going down over time. Not sure how that would cause this though: anxiety is kind of the opposite of "I want to see the world burn".
hgomersall 4y ago
I have a different take on why we want to see the world burn: we can see the world on fire, but seemingly lots of people don't (at least, not enough to do anything about it). We hope that if the burn increases a little bit now, people will notice before it starts burn uncontrollably in a few years, so start working to stop the fire.

eole666 4y ago

Our heavily capitalist society couldn't work without a certain amount of financial nihilism. How could you be a billionaire without being a financial nihilist ? What are the reasons for wanting to accumulate so much wealth, and keeping it for yourself while so many people suffer from poverty ? On the other hand, if billionaire's stopped wanting to earn more and more money, the economy would likely crash...

guerrilla 4y ago
> On the other hand, if billionaire's stopped wanting to earn more and more money, the economy would likely crash... No, this is incorrect. It doesn't matter who owns the stock as long as someone does. It's irrelevant if one person owns the stock or it's distributed equally among workers (or something in between.) The incentives are the same. In fact, distributing stock more widely could lead to better decision making by crowdsourcing wisdom.
- eole666 4y ago
  Well I do agree and hope that this will happen some day. And it will be nice that once the stock is distributed more equally, we get other goals than economic growth, like preserving the planet, eradicating poverty, stop producing useless things and creating bullshit jobs to lower the unemployment rate. But for now the stocks are mostly owned by rich people who want to get richer not matter what and it seems to me that the whole market is so used to that, that it would take a radical system change to make it happen without the economy as we know it crashing hard.
  - guerrilla 4y ago
    > But for now the stocks are mostly owned by rich people who want to get richer not matter what and it seems to me that the whole market is so used to that, that it would take a radical system change to make it happen without the economy as we know it crashing hard. I don't know that it needs to be an instantaneous change. Something gradual could work, at least in theory. On the other hand, I think we need to do something not just for reasons of justice but rather we need to internalize a lot of these externalities just for survival, which wider ownership would naturally do.

oneoff786 4y ago

The flip side of this is sitting on a pretty good stable income, not playing high risk investment games, and needing to accept that your social class and wealth is more or less locked in for at least 20 years. Linear gains don’t move the needle. Savings do nothing once you have a house. It’s not a bad place to be, but it is a static one. If you have the ability to appreciate your circumstances it’s even a good one. But amidst a world of games and progression systems it sure does feel like a failure in some regards.

annyeonghada 4y ago
I wish we had the stability you talk about. Here, not in the US but in a kafkaesque hellhole, our political class decided that the job market should be flexible: that meant that finding a stable employment contract is a farce: instead of having a probationary period you have contracts for 6 months of fulltime work written of as internship and payed as such, and you can be sure the contract will not be renovated so you change job every six month because it is illegal to renovate an internship contract, you offer fulltime or you fire. Meanwhile this "companies" keep churning people using them like almost-slaves because people are desperate: 8 hours a day? No, no: 10 is the minimum otherwise there's something more desperate that will take your "internship". And you end up 40 years old, living with your parents, unable to afford anything other than distraction and then you listen to the TV about the "brain-drain" and start saving money for the plane ticket.
- oneoff786 4y ago
  Unable to afford anything other than distractions is a rather moving quote.

bulgur 4y ago

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xyzelement 4y ago
Comrade, I strongly encourage you to speak to people who grew up outside of capitalism (like me, born in the USSR, in 1981) if you want to talk about intolerable lives. Capitalism gives you a chance. It is your perverse defeated attitude that prevents you from even trying. So you complain about outcomes.
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  You would then find this Nihilistic attitude acceptable in a non-capitalistic country?
  - xyzelement 4y ago
    No because it still doesn't serve you. Some people still strived for better lives, just with much lower return on investment. And then get the fuck out to the West when you can.
    - hotpotamus 4y ago
      And how did you measure who had the best life in such a system?
      - xyzelement 4y ago
        Easy comparison: Level 1: dead from alcoholism before 40. Level 2: share a "communal apartment" with 3 other families. Level 3: work your way into being able to bribe someone to expedite your own apartment to only a 20 year wait. Still suffer shortages of food and basics, no hot water. Level 4: emigrate to the West and exceed all that within 5 years, even though you started from zero Very easily measurement
        4y ago

Devasta 4y ago

Not discussing climate change seems to me to be a big omission. I sometimes wonder if I will have enough to retire on; a teenager today won't have those concerns, as the best they can hope for is that they don't become climate refugees. Why plan long term in such a scenario?

brutusborn 4y ago
It’s because people have wide beliefs of how climate change will affect them. I doubt rich countries will notice much difference until the end of the century. Like most issues, the poor of the world are the ones who will suffer the soonest and the greatest.
- kiliantics 4y ago
  people in rich countries depend an awful lot on people in poor countries making stuff for them and keeping them rich
  - brutusborn 4y ago
    It’s not a true dependency because they could do it themselves - it’s just a bit more expensive. Remember we are comparing catastrophes here; while Bangladesh might starve and lose most of its land, at the same time the US will probably just need to spend a bit more on food and make their own clothes. Both are affected, but orders of magnitude difference in the affects. Rich will still be rich, just a bit less.
    - kiliantics 4y ago
      Resources are not homogeneously distributed either though. Coltan for your smartphone has to be mined by children in the Congo before being shipped to fabs in China, etc. Most supply chains are just so global and complex. Reorganising to have local production in well off nations will be very extreme, not just "a bit more expensive"
      - 4y ago

xyzelement 4y ago

The funny/sad thing about this nihilism is that it's self fulfilling. You don't try and you don't get good outcomes. Meanwhile - life is working very well for people who don't think this way. Like, every house that comes up on the market is immediately snatched up by some 30/40 year old who is buying a home for his growing family. Somehow these guys figured out how to get consistently paid. Meanwhile you can be crying that it's impossible because what you do doesn't matter - and of course you'll end up proving it to yourself. We have a choice of what operating systems run in our heads. Nihilism OS is popular but it's guaranteed to make you poor and miserable. Why would you run it?

glogla 4y ago
This is such an evil thing to say. You got lucky. Telling people who were not that its their own fault for not trying is just such horrible thing to say. How can people have so little empathy, I will never understand.
- xyzelement 4y ago
  If you tried and failed, I have respect. If you didn't bother "because it's impossible" (nihilism) then I have zero sympathy.
  - glogla 4y ago
    I succeeded - I have a condo, summer house and drive a damned Jaguar. I just have empathy with people who don't, because they weren't lucky, like me. I'm not going to go tell people "do it! go buy more lottery tickets! don't give up! you will get there eventually" because I won the lottery.
    - xyzelement 4y ago
      Would you tell people "acquire valuable skills, seek to sell them to quality employers or start your own business delivering tangible value"?

college_physics 4y ago

Financial nihilism is a subset and derives from economic nihilism. The latter is basically the entirely agnostic stance of classical economic thinking that aims to decouple from the troublesome subjectivity of morality. Infamously, a lethal war adds to economic activity as people are busy building and selling weapons of destruction, thereby adding to GDP. But financial nihilism is far more potent than its parent because it reflects not only slow moving "real economic activity" but the rapid dynamics of systems such as the monetary system and traded markets. Both of these have very strong "make-believe" character that are prone to create rapid collective "low-effort" bubbles. To make the difference clear, it is much easier to speculate on e.g., on solarcoin, or solar power generation stocks than actually manufacture and install a solar panel. Ultimately economic nihilism itself is a subset and derives from moral nihilism, discounting the notion that society is held together by moral values and unspoken contracts. The transactional, dog-eats-dog Hobbesian world does not burden us with having to sort out conflicting views of what constitutes "Good society". Enjoy it.

karatinversion 4y ago
> Infamously, a lethal war adds to economic activity as people are busy building and selling weapons of destruction, thereby adding to GDP. Economic statistics for Russia and Ukraine would like a word.
ajmurmann 4y ago
"Ultimately economic nihilism itself is a subset and derives from moral nihilism, discounting the notion that society is held together by moral values and unspoken contracts." Is this what moral nihilism says? I was under the impression that moral nihilism states that there are no objective or inherent moral values and rules which doesn't imply that society might need agreement on a subset of (made up) moral values to function.
- college_physics 4y ago
  > there are no objective or inherent moral values and rules as a philosophical system this might be so (and I fully agree moral values are made up and fairly arbitrary) but like so many philosophical debates this is to some extend counting angels on a pin's tip. the moral nihilism I am refering to is the practical lived experience / choices of many individuals which are actually not completely devoid of any morality, just discounting some historically prevalent patterns, in particular those that might constrain an individual's actions going back to logical coherence, I would think already the term "society" implies some agreement? Practical moral nihilists get out of this loop by arguing that "There is no such thing as society" :-)

commandlinefan 4y ago

No matter what possessions you have, they can be taken away from you. What can't be taken away from you are your skills and knowledge - I've spent my life focusing on those, and it's served me well.