Sadness from Mismatch of Desired Circumstances
Why are we sad sometimes? Why do we have regrets? Is there a fool proof way to minimize sadness from becoming? Is it really true that self awareness is really the answer? I'm always interested on how "Sadness" come into becoming, the "mechanics" of it, the patterns that appear itself. The rhethorical example would be to remember the "unreliability" of some people or rather the hopes that we laid out to ourselves that doesn't materialize, materializes into disappoinment or rather the essence of sadness itself. Another example when you fail to get the job you want despite having spent months searching for a job applications. Or rather if you feel stuck at a job that you hate and wish that you have taken a different route as you've just found out the things you like more but feel stuck as you now have responsibilities and bills that are not going to pay itself.
I come back to "trading financial instruments" again, after a while long hiatus. I remember this is one of the most "mentally challenging" activities as a lot of statistics say that quoting from Swastika Investmart Ltd, Why Do Almost 90% People Lost Their Money in Trading, 2023, Techround.co.uk, 90% of traders fail within 90 days: How to avoid becoming one of them, 2021 , and Brokersview, Reasons 90% of traders lose money, 2023. From the title of those articles, it's safe to say the majority knows that trading is very difficult. Yet, they dedicate writing articles about it, as if it's going to change the statistics. We can walk through dissecting "groups" of traders based on their net worth, and usually it's divided between there's the retail traders and institutional traders. The funniest running gag is that it is potrayed that institutional traders are always taking money from retail traders. I mean, it's true to some certain fact the reason why Robinhood is comission free, is because they sell retail trader "activities" to institutional traders. At least for the customers that are in the US. As I quote an article title from Blockworks, 2020, Robinhood Sells Your Data, but Does That Matter?.
Data resemblances behavior, behavior is the very essence of the act of buying and selling of those assets. The shift of perception for the newcomers is that "Why the fuck institutional traders care about the behavior of retail traders? This is where I would say: most retail traders don't take trading very seriously. Surplus that becomes profit is practically just a net between sell price and bought price (for "long" position). In which institutional traders are looking at peak volume activity where to buy the lowest, how to make price goes down as a mean to create selling pressure that retail traders are forced to sell / liquidated and when is it most profitable to sell the highest. They form opinion that later becomes fact.
The transition between opinion to fact is realization. When data is served after the act has happened, one's opinion has turned to fact and one is rewarded with surplus of "profit". Trading is simple as, turning opinion in hope that it becomes fact.
But how come there's this phenomena?:
Failure to Take Responsibility
Trading can be characterized as a pure, unencumbered personal choice with an immediate outcome. Remember, nothing happens until we decide to start; it lasts as long as we want; and it doesn't end until we decide to stop. All of these beginnings, middles, and endings are the result of our interpretation of the information available and how we choose to act on our interpretation. Now, we may want the freedom to make choices, but that doesn't mean we are ready and willing to accept the responsibility for the outcomes. Traders who are not ready to accept responsibility for the outcomes of their interpretations and actions will find themselves in a dilemma: How does one participate in an activity that allows complete freedom of choice, and at the same time avoid taking responsibility if the outcome of one's choices are unexpected and not to one's liking?
It's from a book that i read Trading in the Zone, Mark Doughlas, 2001. From how I see it, it resemblances more to life, but the actions, implications, and consequenes are more straight forward than seeing life comes to materialize after 60 years of living. As I quote myself from I Am My Art
The human life is nothing less and nothing more than a series of experiences utilizing the sensory perceptions, emotions and thought. The self is nothing less and nothing more than the sum of it's self awareness.
Imagine if you just turn blind tomorrow, your "life" will now feel less of a "life" when its "naturally" compared to the days that you have an eye.
If self awareness is defined as one's ability to be aware of itself and through it, one can make plans and make best assumptions of what one wants to make of itself. Then, the lack of self awareness just defines that one does not make the best assumptions of what one wants to make of itself. While the other end, high self awareness is just one is holding the best assumption of what one wants to make of itself.
And your best should already be enough. We all make mistakes and your best assumption may or may not be true afterall. Beating yourself to the ground is totally unnecessary.
Though, through actions come consequences, either pleasant consequences or unpleasant. Consequences are binded to a sense of responsibility to the action. Even the act of doing "nothing" is still an action, you choose not to do anything. One can be an asshole either awarely or unawarely to do stuff that one fails to register to have consequences as one may unawarely hurt other people feelings.
Remember, nothing happens until we decide to start; it lasts as long as we want; and it doesn't end until we decide to stop. All of these beginnings, middles, and endings are the result of our interpretation of the information available and how we choose to act on our interpretation. Now, we may want the freedom to make choices, but that doesn't mean we are ready and willing to accept the responsibility for the outcomes.
The hard part about life that is different than trading is that sometimes there are decisions that were not made by us, rather phrased in a way that is "for us". Even if we make decisions by us, it is still undeniably important to see that even if the outcome is unfavorable, the decisions were made as a result of our interpretation of the information available to us and how we choose to act on our interpretation.
I've had stories of regret where my friend cursed her boyfriend a lot because she done so much including quitting the job she liked because she needs to move on with him on a different location far away from her job just to end up as a failed marriage. Even though the failed marriage come into fruition because she is not ready for marriage and would like to spend some years in a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship. I mean, she has done a lot for the fella and fella just ditched her as if she fails to understand that he wants to be married immediately. I'm obviously biased but through my reasoning I believe the fella is at fault because that is just an asshole move to pull. Though I still give her my honest advice that I think the problem of regret can be alleviated that she was making those decision based on her interpretation of the information available to her. There's no need to beat herself up to the ground.
Governing Rules as Strings to Walk
Most of the structure in our minds was given to us as a result of our social upbringing and based on choices made by other people. In other words, it was instilled in our minds, but did not originate in our minds. This is a very important distinction. In the process of instilling structure, many of our natural impulses to move, express, and learn about the nature of our existence through our own direct experience were denied. Many of these denied impulses were never reconciled and still exist inside of us as frustration, anger, disappointment, guilt, or even hatred. The accumulation of these negative feelings acts as a force inside our mental environment causing us to resist anything that denies us the freedom to do and be whatever we want, when we want.
Rules mean drawing a line between your acts and consequences. Creating rules means being honest with yourself. It is true that we are currently living in a world/situation that is quite different from our grandparents, but somehow the natural instincts that materializes as regret as still there. As now we are faced by the ABUNDANCE of choices, information flow that flood us like never before, heights of expectations triggers as easy as new information coming to us and through every of our wish and whims and the ever burdening economy that framed us that the odds are stacked against us. A peculiar time in all human history. First, I would like to quote very important passages from Market Mind Games by Denise Shull, in Market Mind Games, Denise combines her years of study in neuroscience with her extensive trading experience to explain the basics of neuroscience and how to rethink your thinking about market risk. The spectrum that includes confidence or conviction is a feeling or emotional spectrum. Making it more explicit leads to better results.
If you think about brain development, this is not so startling and of course makes sense. We build on the knowledge and experiences we have learned before, year after year after year, beginning logically at conception or shortly thereafter. This is a biological fact. Mother Nature meets the brain. Could it be any other way? The small pattern, the simple fractal, repeats itself because the memory traces laid down early on merge together to form the foundation of our temperaments, personalities, and character—or the multifractal design of human nature. Over the years, I have called what I now know to be a fractal element in the development of the human adult psyche by many other names, such as:
- Echoes
- Emotional architectures
- Emotional templates
Echoes referred to the idea that we all have an internal echo, originally developed in childhood, of what our self-worth is. We hear the criticisms, spoken or unspoken, of our teachers, siblings, fathers, and mothers. And even if they didn’t overtly criticize us, because children are narcissistic by nature (i.e., they think the world revolves around them), anything that happens that is bad (an argument, a divorce, an accident), they attribute to or blame themselves. Given the emotional import, the self-blame remains. The latter becomes an internally generated criticism and ends up influencing us in ways even more hurtful than an externally sourced one.
Initially, the characteristics of these special relationships interact with the substrates in our brain to create an emotional architecture, a style of being and reacting. Like architectures and templates, years later, our unconscious minds follow the rules of the architecture or template while often hearing the self-talk that remains as an echo of earlier explicit criticisms.
So apparently "impulse" is scalable and it affects us based on our prior experience, in which when we account the fact that every experience of the human life is unique, the scalability of the "impulses" are also vary from person to person, but how far can we categorize "emotions" and their effects and affect to to a spectrum that is categorizeable? Is it just one of those bad memes when gooners on twitter seek potential romantic partner with a tendency for ones that has a bad relationship with their parents so they would be more obsessive towards the fella?
Knowing this meta-condition gives us self-knowledge. Facing our deepest memory that gives rise to our present emotions, the reasons why we do the things we do, or even the feelings that we hate and wish to shut down, like an abhorrent fear when it's totally unnecessary to have when you're about to sleep but doubt yourself if you've lock the front door when you know you've checked it 3 times. Feelings and emotions have such a bad rep almost as if people despise being sad as it is deemed to make them feel unproductive, unpleasant or simply to be in a state that they wish to be otherwise. Regret also has a bad rep to some extent people wish to delete regret altogether, tingling feeling that affects the present self through some aura that one does not know where the feelings are "really" coming from.
This is where I propose that rules could be made to govern ourselves, like a string that weave the path towards the otherwise uncharted dark path of the future. Weaving the string means understanding the emotions implied as the fabric that the strings are made out of rational thought and the emotions that are binded to them. Walking the fabric of the rules that you've made means taking responsibility. You've woven your own strings, not other people, you created your own rules and regardless of the path that you've woven, you've always been weaving it with the materials of interpretation of the information available to you when you're weaving it. Cutting the string means you realized that there's a mismatch between the correlation between your previous act based on the information available to the "actual information available" as hindsight knowledge. You could always choose between continue weaving the strings you've made or to cut the string off and make another one. Regardless of what you do, you're unequivocally going to be better at weaving your strings. I think the worst condition is not weaving your strings or even let other people weave your strings for you. The uncomfortableness that rises that you're walking at an unstable strings that you are unfamiliar with the nature of the strings or rather how and why the strings were created with certainty.
Rule by definition is: control of or dominion over an area or people. In which Rule for oneself means control or dominion over oneself.
End
Note from 4 Jan 21.26:
I really like how this article gives a metaphor of what does it mean to have something higher than "Self Awareness", self awareness is one thing, but creating rules means respecting the self awareness. Self awareness mean knowing what you like and what you dislike, creating rules mean justifying the act and understanding the consequences implied either pleasurable and unpleasurable. I have instances when people wished to hang out with me and I politely deny them with a really uncanny remark that sounds as "I'm sorry, I really want to go but I can't, I need to write tonight." Some people would ask "Why can't that be done tomorrow?" In which I have many answers to this question, but first I'm aware that I am feeling a surge of creativity that I must respect, truly my own subjective experience but I explained on the article, The Surge:
There are instances in my life where I could only best describe “The Surge”. I would like to dedicate this article to better understand this phenomenon. The feeling is that there are just beautiful strings of words that keep flowing inside your head. Sometimes you immediately jump into writing but there are circumstances where that is just not possible. “The Surge” comes and goes pretty often now. It’s almost as if the brain is experiencing different states and one of them happens to be “The Surge”. Or maybe this is what artists would best describe as “The surge of creativity” where everything just feels like it flows ever so perfectly. On how word per word just flows ever so eloquently and when it is finished I can sit back and re-read and see how nicely written those strings of words are.
“The Surge” is pretty feeble, it needs to be replied to be further prolonged and make it surges even more. There are times when I feel like the string of words that appear in my head and choose to delay it just for me to not remember those strings of words. It’s no longer there. It’s not just about the words but the sensations that came along with it. The sensation that gives birth to those strings of words.
[...]
I remember when I look back at my 2022 substack drafts when there are neat titles such as “Between Finite and In-Finite” and “Money may have nothing to do with Happiness at All” just to find a blank page inside of it. It was just titles and yet words written in the form of the title already made me glad that I wrote something. I know now there may be more pressure to write even more and more beautiful thoughts but remember that don’t compare one article to another! Each article conveys a different message! There’s no distinctual objective measurement of meaning! If it’s meaningful to you, it’s meaningful to you and that’s the end of it!
If it makes you happy, it makes you happy! That’s the end of it!
I write because I love it and it makes me happy. Re-reading the articles that I've written also makes me happy. That's the end of it. Creating a rule to this is just my own recognition through my self awareness that writing gives the writer a perpetual cycle of positive feedback. This goes with any thing that you like, if you like doing a thing, the second time you do it, the third time you do it, it creates craving in the brain. The same theory that I propose that maybe, the reason why great artists consecutively create good arts after the other, because that's just how much they love creating the arts that they've made, simple as. You get better at the things you like to do repeatedly.
Creating a rule means understanding then obeying the rule. The governing strings that one chooses to walk and deny other decision that doesn't fit with the rule that one has made itself.
The cravings toward writing is just the same as many other cravings. It can be accepted by doing the act or be subsidized by doing other things while hoping that the craving wears off eventually. I just choose to write because I feel what I wanted to write is important to me and I would like to appreciate the feelings that I have when I write.
Though there are times when I want to write but I simply can't, for example when I am at work and my boss is sitting beside me. There's a surge of creative thoughts yet I must disobey the rule, disobeying the rules mean you acknolwedge the rule and the consequences implied with it. The sensation as emotions that drive you to write what you feel needs writing wears off eventually and you may not have the same perfect line of thoughts the same way it is apparent to you as the sensations were stronger than when it has been delayed hours later. It's okay, the rules are the ones you make anyway, it's flexible and you could change it anytime, but it's much better than not weaving anything at all and walk on an uncharted plane of the future without a string as a carved path to look back into. I mean, I work also because of my decision, I worked at a consulting company because of many reasons and acknowledging it or even comitting to it (That i haven't done), means leaving other possible path that I could've take, like for example, to be a machine learning engineer, or a front end engineer, or a high frequency algorithm trader, or even trying to pursue a full time writer as the articles that I've written so little of them have been turned into a video. I could've pursued it full time anytime I want to yet I just don't think it NEEDS to be pursued full time.
If you really want to know the full reason (future-self), it's because first, the huge difference between writing and turning it into a video, there's not really any new information that comes when you convert your articles into a video yet it took so much time. Writing, as weird as it sounds (to the audience), there's actually a new information coming it. Writing is not 100% I know the whole canvas of I want to write then I write it. Rather, how I explained on the article, The Mental State:
I just recently realized that I feel my brain feels totally in a very different state when I'm writing. I put a mission everytime I want to write in which the mission is very simple, Usually The (Word), in which I know what I have in mind what I want to talk about. While some I already have only: 1. The Topic 2. The Conclusion. In between the start of the very first word of the article, most of the time, I let my mind wander around in how the topic is going to be delivered. Hoping that my memory is good enough to retrieve past experiences that will be brought up to the article. I let my emotions do the writing, if that makes sense. I don't do a lot of active thinking in my writing per se. Well, by the nature of the language of "emotion" is derived from a latin word 'emovere' meaning to move. In which most of my writings are just my feelings distilled.
I have at least 50% (never 100%) the intention of the idea I wanted to immortalize before I jump into my laptop and started to write. The very act of writing itself, takes over the creative brain and sometimes it simultaneously wires other thoughts and pulling stuff from memory and the books that I've read, some passages of it resurfaces in my brain and helped myself to create a coherent and strikingly powerful ideas. Meshing my own thoughts and cite things that have been vouched by other writers.