Now, I gotta warn you, this post has pretty much nothing to do with stocks and everything to do with sadness. I made $4k and those results are at the bottom along with a nice, comprehensive video I made explaining every thing.
Submitted for the approval of the midnight society, I call this story …
Lust for Ruin
Every so often I go through periods of, what I can best describe as, melancholy. Nothing superficial has changed, but something underneath is quietly coming undone. There’s a slow bubbling turmoil that has weight to it, and it feels as if it has nestled itself in me. My outlook turns nihilistic and every thing I do becomes pointless.
So anyways there I was again, a bump on a log, and as we are wont to do, upon noticing something is “off” or that I’m not “happy”, I set out to try and fix it or numb it. As if contentment or undeserved bliss are some states that are to be fully realized at all times. That line of thinking could lead me to believe that my main goal is to strive for a life of comfort and reach some sort of finish line where I’m finally happy, if I’m not careful.
So in my search for a way out of the abyss, for some words of hope, I was surprised to find that people haven’t always felt this way about melancholy and perhaps I was going about this the wrong way.
People actually once sought out this experience, believing it could unlock creativity, sharpen the intellect, and deepen their spirituality. It was seen as the necessary yin to the yang. A crucial step in your evolution to remembering who you are.
The Germans had a word for it; Ruinenlust. To lust for ruin. I said the title! I love when they do that in movies. People would even go so far as to place artificial ruins in their gardens wanting to conjure feelings of decay, hoping to slip into deep contemplation. They believed that there was something to be learned and extracted in this state of mind.
Melancholy gets its name from the ancient Greek words melas (“black”) and chole (“bile”). Black bile was one of the 4 liquid humors people believed needed to be balanced in the body. An excess of it led to depression, irritability, persistent sadness, and emotional distress; some of my most resilient qualities! It is the substance dealt with in the first of three stages in the alchemical process.
Alchemy is the art and science of transmuting base materials, like lead, into gold and was the precursor to modern chemistry. The alchemist believed that it also required the simultaneous purification of their own mind, soul, and character in order for the process to work. You cannot transform the outer material without altering the inner vessel. As within, so without.
In Nigredo, the initial and necessary stage of alchemical and psychological transformation, raw ingredients are broken down, burned, or left to rot until they rest as a uniform mound of black matter at the bottom of the vessel. You are stripping away all the impurities and preparing the material for its eventual rebirth in the next stage of fermentation.
“When you see your matter going black, rejoice, you are at the beginning of the work.” – Rosarium Philosophorum
It is the Dark Night of the Soul. It is panic, isolation, existential dread, dissolution, and chaos. A descent into darkness. A destruction of structures, false beliefs, and impurities that must dissolve so that the underlying essence can be freed. It is the unconscious suddenly becoming conscious. Rejoice!
This long, drawn-out depressive process obviously blows chunks so the alchemist eagerly looks into the milky liquid that forms on the black matter in his vessel for any signs of color or new life. The blessed signal that putrefaction is over is known as the Peacock’s Tail, a rainbow display of brilliant colors that appears to float on the surface of the decaying matter like a peacock spreading its tail.
This is the long-awaited indication that the next process of fermentation has begun. It represents the moment when hidden parts of yourself begin to awaken. Like a seed buried in soil, it is the required incubation period for new life to rise up and spring forth.
“Nobody can fall so low unless he has a great depth. If such a thing can happen to a man, it challenges his best and highest on the other side; that is to say, this depth corresponds to a potential height, and the blackest darkness to a hidden light.” — C.G. Jung
What am I to learn from all this?
Does melancholy leads us by the hand into some emotional state revealing that everything beautiful is temporary so that we can see all the wonderful things that were always there but have now been sharpened by sadness?
Am I, of all people, taking this whole thing too seriously? Must I become like a child again to enter the kingdom of heaven? Is melancholy even a problem to solve or is it just an inevitable process? Boy, I sure do wanna stop it and get back to my regularly scheduled programming. It feels like my heart is somberly watching it rain through the windows of my eyes.
Is melancholy’s point to give life texture? Why does it feel pointless when you’re going through the thick of it? Why does it take effort to realize that it’s not pointless and what happens if you never do?
I frequently come across people who seem doomed to repeat the same trials over and over because they won’t let a part of their selves die and be transformed by the process. They never level up. You ever talk to a 70 year old that’s never dealt with their anger issues? In my line of work that’s quite common to come across.
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate” – Jung boi again
I will freely admit that one of my biggest pet peeves is for someone to act unconsciously, unaware of how they are affecting their surroundings. But I think, deep down, it’s a state of consciousness that I secretly long for sometimes. Ignorance is bliss, after all. I think it’s a big reason why I was drinking myself into oblivion everyday all those years ago.
When I’m feeling down usually the last thing I want to hear is someone giving me advice. I feel like that’s pretty common. But if I’m prepared with the advice beforehand, it will arise from within when it’s needed most and I won’t have an immediate resistance to it. It’s a great idea because I thought of it! Like a lyric suddenly taking on a profound meaning in a song you’ve heard a thousand times because you’ve just now shared in the experience it was touching on.
So I’ve come to learn that I have to be prepared for another visit because I know it will come knocking at my door again and again. These alchemical processes happen repeatedly throughout our life. You simply level up and start over with more complex issues but equipped with a higher understanding. So I have to try my best to greet each visitation as an old friend with something new and exciting to teach me if I’m brave enough to be quiet, sit still, and listen to what it has to say.
I don’t have the answers to any of these questions I’ve asked here and that’s not my goal for this site. My goal is to show that things are worth figuring out. Drawdowns are part of the process in life and trading. But don’t let that keep you from prospering anyway.
Maybe it’s not so bad staring out the window and thinking things through when I need to. Maybe there are other things I could shift my perspective on and turn a little bit of lead into gold with some effort.
Tomorrow marks five years since I’ve quit drinking. I wrote about it here in case you missed it. Feeling deeply is better than feeling nothing. It’s a slow process learning to embrace the cyclical nature of all things without needing to numb it.
Monthly Roundup
Here are my trades for the last 3 months. $4,088 in total profits.
July – $980
August – $938 in a quarter of the trades compared to July thanks to HOOD’s price recovering and the premium returning to their options!
September – $2,170 – A huge chunk of profits came from selling shares that I had whittled down to $100 each through covered calls. By selling covered calls I was able to drop my price down from an average of $114/share to $100 by this point (a $1,400 discount). I then agreed to sell them at $110/share and received $270 for doing it. So that one trade was $1,270 in profits.
Here’s a video I made showing my results from running The Wheel strategy on HOOD for one year. You’ll see exactly how I pulled these trades off and I get a chance to explain my thinking and process behind all this.
Bye now,
Chris
If you’d like to give trading on Robinhood a try, you can click my referral link HERE and we’ll both get some free stock.
This is not financial advice.
