Pain Puts Progress Into Overdrive

Within the last couple weeks, we’ve realized how quickly things can change. I feel like for many of us, the first major shockwave was learning that Rudy Gobert (Utah Jazz basketball player), Tom Hanks, and Rita Wilson had all tested positive for COVID-19. There’s something about attaching a face to a statistic that made it feel far more real.

None of us could have imagined a few short days later, that first shockwave was hardly the tip of the iceberg. Now, many of us are adjusting to working from home and self isolation in general. No one is sure how long this thing will last and it’s making us all nervous as hell, as it should.

The stock market and economy came to a screeching halt at an unfathomably quick speed. Many are out of work or will be in the coming weeks. Government and corporations alike will need to step up in a way that they have never been forced to before.

We have cruise liners and hotel chains willing to convert into a makeshift hospital should it be necessary. We have politicians reaching across the aisle to do what's best for the American people rather than a political party. We have people on Twitter who won't need their $1,000 check from the government proactively asking about the best organizations to donate it to.

Writing about the negative consequences this has brought, is bringing, and will bring in the future would be too damn easy. Finding negatives during a time like this is picking the low hanging fruit. I’m not here to be unreasonably positive, but rather point some things out to make us all feel better during a time of such immense uncertainty and worry.

Struggles bring about the best in American innovation, resilience, and problem solving.

Take the Great Depression as an example. See below from this article:

Economist Alexander Field writes that “the years 1929–1941 were, in the aggregate, the most technologically progressive of any comparable period in U.S. economic history.” Productivity growth was twice as fast in the 1930s as it was in the decade prior. The 1920s were the era of leisure because people could afford to relax. The 1930s were the era of frantic problem solving because people had no other choice. The Great Depression brought unimaginable financial pain. It also brought us supermarkets, microwaves, sunscreen, jets, rockets, electron microscopes, magnetic recording, nylon, photocopying, teflon, helicopters, color TV, plexiglass, commercial aviation, most forms of plastic, synthetic rubber, laundromats, and countless other discoveries. Same for World War II, which is responsible for both the most risk and the most rapid invention of any six-year period in history. The war began with troops on horseback. It ended by splitting an atom in half.

If you’re able to weather this storm as an investor without panicking, I’m confident you can weather any storm with your investments for the rest of your life.

As investors, we are having our worlds rocked beyond belief. The rug is being pulled out from us and then some. We went from being a Golden Retriever in an upper class family to a stray dog taking cover from the rain in a cardboard box. Some studies show that children who face adversity are more resilient. Many of you reading this (myself included) are still metaphorical “children” in the age span of our investing journey. This will make us all more resilient investors and stronger when this all ends.

Disasters do not make societies panic. They bring them together in calm solidarity.

War sociologists around the world have studied how tragedy affects the human mind. The theory goes that disasters thrust people back into a more ancient, organic way of relating. Disasters, he proposed, create a “community of sufferers” that allows individuals to experience an immensely reassuring connection to others. As people come together to face an existential threat, Fritz found, class differences are temporarily erased, income disparities become irrelevant, race is overlooked, and individuals are assessed simply by what they are willing to do for the group. It is a kind of fleeting social utopia that, Fritz felt, is enormously gratifying to the average person and downright therapeutic to people suffering from mental illness. (link to article)

Pessimism and negativity eventually go too far and in hindsight, we realize it wasn’t as bad as we thought it’d be.

Human nature is to underestimate something at first, have an “oh sh**” moment, then overcorrect and overreact. The trouble is on that continuum, we’re not exactly sure where we are at. Eventually, we will get to a point when the average person looks around and says, “My God, I can’t believe how bad this is,” and a year later they’ll look back and think, “I shouldn’t have believed it, because it never got that bad.” Maybe we’re at that point now, maybe it’ll take longer. But in hindsight we’ll realize we hit a point where pessimism went too far.

One thing I know for certain is that after this is all over, we'll all appreciate the outdoors much more. We'll all appreciate social gatherings with big groups of friends much more. We'll all appreciate healthcare workers much more. We'll all appreciate life in general much more.

Until then - do your part, stay safe, and we'll all get through this.