I Wrote a Column Instead of Venting
One feeling became a column. The same feeling can become a drawer full of unopened mail.
I wrote an op-ed column that was published in a newspaper because I was irritated after a conversation with a friend.
A friend had bought a stock on a rumor. He had read nothing about the company. He heard a name at dinner and bought it the next morning. The tip had travelled the usual way. Someone heard it in a group chat, passed it along, and by the time it reached him it sounded like knowledge.
The loss that came later was not the part that bothered me. It was his comment that the financial markets are against retail investors. He also said investing was too risky. But he was not investing. He was trading on a rumor.
I did not vent to others about it or sit around thinking about it. I used the energy to write the article.
A bad feeling about money is not the problem. It carries energy. What happens next depends on where that energy goes.
Often it moves somewhere quieter. It makes people look away.
My friend Daniel (a pseudonym) made a few investments three years ago. One fund dropped about 50 percent. He stopped opening the statements. The envelopes went in a drawer. The login went unused. He would look when things settled, he told himself. Things settled. He still did not look. Nothing about the loss required this. The market had already done its damage. Avoiding the decision was itself a decision, made after the first. By the time he looked again, the choices were harder than they had been at the start. The easy decision was gone. Only the hard one was left.
The market set the loss. Refusing to decide what came next was a separate cost, and it was the one within reach.
Martin Seligman, a psychologist, ran an experiment in 1967 with dogs that could not escape a shock. Later, even when escape became possible, they did not try. He called it learned helplessness. They had learned that nothing they did changed the outcome, and that belief followed them even after the situation changed.
Daniel’s drawer has something in common with this, and so does the rumor-buying friend, though the surrender came at different points. Daniel withdrew from the decision after the loss. The friend outsourced the decision before he made it. Neither lacked agency. Both handed it away.
The avoidance shows up beyond one drawer. George Loewenstein, a behavioral economist at Carnegie Mellon, and Duane Seppi, a finance professor at the same university, worked with Niklas Karlsson to study brokerage account data from Swedish and US investors. They named the pattern the ostrich effect. Investors check their portfolios far more often when markets rise than when markets fall. Nothing about the information changes. Only the willingness to look at it changes.
Sometimes bad news makes us not want to see it.
Looking away has a cost too. It is a quiet one, with no single day to blame it on. A bad decision has a date on it and a name to blame. Doing nothing leaves no such mark, so the mind treats it as smaller than it is.
The hard part is that the feeling and the right response point in opposite directions. The loss makes a person want to hide. The situation needs them to look. The emotion gives no help telling the two apart.
The feeling itself is not the enemy. It carries energy, but no direction of its own. When the feeling is painful, the easiest direction is often avoidance. Pointed elsewhere, the same energy can force a decision that has been waiting months. It should not choose the response.
Another friend, Mel (a pseudonym), had a bad year. Her portfolio was down close to 15 percent. She felt the same pull to look away that Daniel did. But she opened the statement anyway. When she ran the numbers, she saw a concentration that had built up over two years without a decision behind it. She made a deliberate decision about it. Daniel never opened his.
Being careful with money is a virtue, so a frozen portfolio can look like discipline. The person avoiding a decision and the person waiting on purpose look the same from the outside. Only one of them has a reason.
The first step is small and unpleasant. Find the one money decision that has been sitting untouched because looking at it feels bad. The avoidance is the signal. It points straight at the thing that needs a decision. For Daniel that was one login. For the friend who invested based on a rumour, the next decision starts with one question: which company is this, and what does it earn.
Then do one thing with the feeling. Open the statement. Run the number. Make the call. The first action does not have to solve the problem. It only has to bring the problem back into view. I could have done nothing with my own irritation. Instead I used the energy to write. It moved me from irritated to working, and the work took its own direction after that.
The loss had already happened. The decision to do something about it had not.
This article is for educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice.