One of the fun tidbits of Morgan Housel’s Same As Ever is that Sir Isaac Newton, the founder of modern physics, who most of us know best as the gravity guy, spent most of his life studying alchemy. This wouldn’t necessarily be odd to someone living in his time, but for us, it seems like a strange thing. Why was one of the most brilliant people who ever lived studying what we now deem to be a pseudoscience or a collective fiction, the stuff of great movie and book plots but not, as we see it, real?
Before I ever knew of financial and macroeconomic charts, I studied astrological charts. In the days before computers made birth chart calculations simple, I was a teenager with a list of tables carefully plotting out planet positions and drawing careful lines in pencil. I still have multiple tarot decks. I now view divination tools mostly as ways to access archetypes, but there is still that primal need to know the unknowable. Stock market watchers say the market hates uncertainty, but it’s not the market; it’s us. We want what is impossible, to know what comes next.
Housel’s second book is a little like The Black Swan, with its discussion of probabilities and math. The unusual happens all the time. Right now, nearly every media story on the current political climate uses the word unprecedented. Maybe. Or maybe we don’t remember the other times of chaos. As Housel puts it: “When eight billion people interact, the odds of a fraudster, a genius, a terrorist, an idiot, a savant, a jerk or a visionary moving the needle in a significant way on any given days is nearly guaranteed.” Depending on your political viewpoint, we may have had all of those in last week alone, and it has been exhausting.
It seems bad right now. I think a lot about the concept of reversion to the mean. That, as Howard Marks teaches us, we spend most of our time swinging between extremes, forever wobbling uncertainly forward and backward. That’s little comfort to people losing jobs, to nonprofits losing valuable funding, to whole sections of society who are being pushed into the shadows. It will ease, not without effort, and I don’t know when or how bad it will get, but it will ease.
Housel puts it another way: stability is destabilizing. Essentially, as much as we hate uncertainty, collectively, we move toward it. We never know when we have it good, and conversely, what feels bad in the present looks great in the rearview mirror of life. It’s only when we look back that we see what was there all along. To quote Billy Joel from Keeping The Faith: “The good old days weren't always good and tomorrow ain't as bad as it seems.”
That’s not much comfort for now when everything seems literally and figuratively on fire. What I know is that life finds a way. Housel’s book is less about what never changes and more about the fact that everything changes all the damn time. Sometimes the changes are awful, sometimes they are wondrous. Maybe you are loving this moment, maybe you are hating it; either way, it will pass. The best we can do, I believe, is to try and be kind. People are scared; it’s hard to see the then when the now is so awful.
I went to a Unitarian Universalist all-day retreat last weekend, and one of the sessions was on what it means to have a covenant. Each week in church, we light a chalice and speak words that reflect our covenant with the world. As I said in the retreat session, my covenant with the world is just to try not to be too much of a jackass to anyone. I fail at that sometimes, my social awkwardness has a spastic and random quality, but I keep going.
Scholars don’t quite know what to make of Newton’s interest in alchemy with its odd symbols, disturbing imagery, and its underlying associations. But maybe, he was like any of us; he looked at this bizarre improbable often maddening world, and he just wanted it to make sense.
I keep saying to anybody who will listen that it's physics: the pendulum swings back and forth because it has to. The current political pendulum has swung so far so fast it cannot and will not hold. It's hell in the meantime, unfortunately.
This is actually a very comforting post.
As a late baby boomer, it seems like I grew up during a time of exceptional stability in the United States because from after WWII until the early 1990's there was a kind of predictability due to the US being one of the major economic beneficiaries after the war. And we had the Soviet Union as our "big bad." After the demise of the Soviet Union it seems like Americans have been scrambling to find a new villain and unfortunately we've turned on each other. My mostly intuitive take. My main concern at the moment is that politics feel like a WWF clown show in which none of the players seem to be encountering negative consequences from their behavior. In fact, I'd argue most of the consequences: media attention and money have been positive. At some point something will "break" and will piss enough people off that things will have to change. Just hoping what breaks won't be catastrophic like, you know, a civil war or a small pox pandemic, or a serious economic collapse.