This morning I was going through my inbox for a not-used-so-much email account. I hadn't cleaned out this inbox for a month or two so. On this email account I'm subscribed to some newsletter things, so I was able to take a step back and view how the whole "COVID-19 pandemic" thing has unfolded, from a kind of third-person, detached historian's perspective.

The Unwritten Narrative

There is this saying that, "hindsight has 20-20 vision"—when looking at the past we can feel all clever and sharp minded ¹. It is easy to say to oneself, "ah yes, I was right about such-and-such" because we can pick and choose statements we have made and aggregate them into a 100% correctly guessing narrative. The hazier these statements are, the easier this task is because there will always be wiggle room to get out of falsification.

This is one danger of chilling out and just "analyzing". You can analyze all day; what makes your analysis valuable? Telling somebody else that they should have listened to you?

First, instruct yourself

To have "skin in the game" is to act on one's word. Saying words about stuff is OK, but as another saying goes—"actions speak louder than words". If we are so clever in our predictions, we should act on those predictions and reap the benefits of having seen what others could not. You don't have to worry about others recognizing that you were right about such-and-such if you reap material rewards for your predictions.

In this sense, I am enjoying wealth in that I had bought enough toilet paper—I heard news of trouble getting this stuff relatively early on from East Asia. Hooray! Glad I purchased that...

On the other hand, I haven't really profited financially much from all this COVID-19 action. As many stock prices plunged and crypto did what crypto does (be volatile), I decided that I didn't even wanna think/deal with this. I wanted some money on hand to pay for stuff too, so I didn't "buy the dip" ². Recalling how much of a pain in the butt to file taxes for 2019 I didn't wanna deal with all the capital gains stuff if I did indeed profit nicely. So I opted to not "play the stock market" and instead focus my time/attention on nerd stuff (technical learning for work) and self-improvement stuff.

I was quite lazy and not clever enough about the financial stuff in retrospect; I just withdrew and let the market (and the Federal Reserve and friends) do what they do. Now, I get my default rewards— magical money inflating prices despite slowed down economic activities, less complicated finances/taxes for the coming year... But you know... I could have made more...

I feel okay about the decisions I made with regards to stocks and stuff though because I got what I bargained for—freed attention to concern myself with other things, rather than watching lines to up and down ³.

Reject Economy, Embrace Gains

In contrast to my total under-achieving in terms of shuffling integers (trading stocks) during this Bat Pestillence, I've been able to extract "guaranteed returns" in some of my own projects.

Analyzing and making predictions about what other people do is often a risky game. On the other hand, working on your own understanding of stuff and developing your skills often is a pretty work hard and get paid type of setup.

Developing yourself makes you better prepared to enter riskier situations later; for example, if you are playing a sport, to maximize your chance of winning a competiton, you gotta train. Duh.

Lots of the media we consume is by people trying to establish themselves as experts on such-and-such, telling you why you should care about this-and-that, and so on and so forth. When do we regret keeping up with that sort of content?

Reading some old newsletters, I would say... it is fun to keep up with news to understand humor/memes/stuff people may share with each other. But to keep up with a bunch of random stuff that has no bearing on one's own life—I think that most often when I look over some stack of stuff I didn't read I don't wish I had consoomed more.

However, people rarely regret having studied a marketable skill, completing a workout routine, cultivating a network of friends/family... This is no new news.