An Existentialist's Guide to Investing
J. Aaron Simmons, Ph.D.
Philosopher, Public Speaker, Author, Mtn Biker, Trout Fisherman
We all probably know the general best practices for investing: strive for diversification in holdings, regional exposure, and risk profiles; start early; be consistent; stick to your strategy; etc.
This is all obvious, right?
Well, today, just for fun, let's ask the following: What might an existentialist tell us about how to approach investment strategy?
Perhaps if we asked the following existentialists, they might say something like this . . .
S?ren Kierkegaard: Make sure to realize that whatever investments you choose, you must do so with passion. Be fully present in what you think is worth doing and go for it with all you have. Risk is inescapable, so rather than trying to manage risk, embrace it as part of what makes investing worthwhile. But, keep faith that the risk is worth it.
Simone de Beauvoir: Don't forget that no matter how much research you do, investing is ambiguous. You will never have certainty. So, do the best you can, but don't fail to buy trying to wait until everything lines up perfectly. Investing doesn't admit of clarity.
Albert Camus: The ultimate question is whether or not to sell. Do we hang on to what we have or seek better returns elsewhere? This choice is up to you. In the end, there is only your self-narrative in relation to the benign indifference of the markets.
Jean-Paul Sartre: Don't think that God is going to help things work out for you. You are alone and so must not live in bad faith that somehow it is all going to work out. Your portfolio is only going to grow because of your action. Embrace your freedom and buy in order to support the companies that you think make the world the way it should be. Your portfolio is nothing more than what you have made of it.
Paul Tillich: Have the courage to buy. Remember it is all about the stock above the stock (find the parent company and invest there). Move toward the "ground" of the market and stop getting distracted in the changing tides of penny stock excitement.
Martin Heidegger: It is all about one's own being-in-the-market. Try to attend carefully to the history of the market and the trends that have made possible where now find ourselves. Invest authentically and avoid buying or selling simply because "they" are.
Martin Buber: Corporations are NOT people too. We do not stand in an I-Thou relationship with them and so don't over romanticize the humanity of the market. Care about people and invest in order to facilitate such care.
Fodor Dostoevsky: Don't buy out of spite! It rarely works out well.
*** In the comments, I would love to hear what you think other philosophers might say.
Other Recent Articles:
What Moves You?: On Direction, Orientation, and Being Without Limit
Finding Pauses in the Music of Life
Senior Associate at Mercer
5 年It would certainly be intriguing to juxtapose three particular thinkers--Aristotle, Spinoza, and Bacon--against one another, focusing specifically upon their usage, prioritization, and ordering of modal operators (or lack thereof) within their logical systems--i.e. how we might define causality and predication via deductive/syllogistic/axiomatic reasoning vs. a unique Monistic mysticism (how open or closed is it?!?) vs. speculative, though progressively-oriented (in a correspondent/metaphysical sense), induction. Perhaps we could throw Leibniz, Berkeley and Hume in the mix as well--though, somewhat paradigmatically speaking, their logics may lend themselves a little too well to conventional models of speculative risk. This, I suspect, would certainly be the case for the two anglophiles, as their thought was brought up in line with the emergence of what we might now call modern economic markets and early capitalist thought (Hume, from what I understand, was a friend of Adam Smith).? It would, however, be interesting to trace (though not entirely reduce) the genealogy through which economic conditions set the boundaries under which each philosopher's social epistemology came to shape his or her modal and speculative logic--though that that project might be more suited for the American Philosophical Society and less for LinkedIn (would definitely be fun to see how the LinkedIn crowd reacted to that though)! On a side note--this was a great way for me to spend my last 5 minutes at work!