One of the more provocative and memorable movies for me was the movie "Seven" directed by David Fincher, starring Kevin Spacey (had some seven deadly sins of his own in real life), Brad Pitt, and Morgan Freeman, with the plot revolving around the well known seven deadly sins (fun fact: not mentioned in the Bible, they are just Christian teachings). Pride, Greed, lust, envy, wrath, gluttony, and sloth. I'm certainly guilty of all of them from time to time to some degree. I was very proud of myself in high school and thought I was hot stuff, but college and then law school and then the real world was a series of ego-deflating experiences; I have had lust but that's tempered now that I've met my one and only; I am very envious of other people's successes and often wish I could have other people's beauty, brains, singing abilities, etc., but with some relative success I've been able to tone that down a bit (the best cure for envy is your own success), I'm the opposite of wrath in most situations except if you've angered me in dodgeball and then it's a personal battle, I've done my fair share of eating too much but I have a pretty fixed diet now that I don't stray from and try not to waste food, and sloth.....well, yes, if you consider sleeping and trying to get 8 hours every night sloth. Otherwise I'm pretty diligent.
The big one for me towering above all the others is greed. Something about my childhood, or my personality, or my decisionmaking makes me super greedy, especially about money. It's a cliche, but I just can't get enough of it, and the I hate parting with it, mainly because that means I'm doing the opposite of accumulating it. There is no upper limit, I am insatiable when it comes to money, to a fault, especially the stock market. No matter how many times I get the bitter lesson of a huge drop in the stock market, I can never learn from that lesson the next time stocks are at all-time highs and just sell some at the top, which I never do. I can say that I will do it next time, but when the time comes, I always just shrug it off and think that stocks will keep going higher.
I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with the pursuit of money as long as you're working hard and making wise investments, but it's when you're pursuing more money at the expense of protecting the downside that you run a lot risk, and that's often reflected in the stock market and (much more so) gambling. Whereas working overtime at a job doesn't have any downsides to money except I guess from a health standpoint of overworking yourself until you get sick, letting big gains in the stock market hang out there in hopes of making even more money can be hugely detrimental because it allows the stock to go back down and actually lose money; that's where a flood-stop (like the flood-stop in homes preventing pipes from letting off too much water) would be useful metaphorically to have to set limits to the downside. (They actually have this in the stock market called stop-loss, but I just never set them on the way up because my head is so high in the clouds I don't even consider that stocks will go down that far, plus the misinformed belief that as soon as I sell a stock, it'll bounce up a lot higher than where I sold it and I'll have sold for nothing). This is actually a valid reason in the last few years because most of the dips in the market have been followed up by a sharp spring back up, but this is a trap as once investors get accustomed to that feeling, they're vulnerable to that huge nosedive down and don't protect themselves against it. That's where we are in a month of heavy losses ever since the calendar flipped and the QQQ index hit 403 but dipped sharply especially this week to 351, the ever-reliable AMZN dipped from 3300+ to 2800+ below 52-week support levels, NFLX lost 20% in one day due to reporting OK earnings but terrible guidance on future subscriptions, pulling most everything down with it as the "pandemic" stocks are all getting hammered because, well, we're coming out of the pandemic soon. (Docusign, Peloton, Roku, Zoom, Teledoc, etc., etc.) This 2-year "bubble" of inflated tech stocks is being stamped out, the party's over but I'm still in the dance hall with the lights out by myself I guess......All by myself. (Great Celine Dion song).
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