Joy

The wrong question to ask is:

“What makes you happy?”

The right question to ask is:

“What brings you joy?”

Joy is the antidote to anxiety, depression, addiction, and compulsive behavior. Boredom is the antithesis of joy. Boredom leads to incomprehensible demoralization.

I would suggest that you make a list of things that bring you joy. I will include a short list of my own here:

-       Writing

-       Trading

-       Playing music

-       The cats

-       My house

-       Helping people

-       Traveling (when the flights don’t get screwed up)

If I am doing things that bring me joy, then I’m not sitting around feeling sorry for myself. You know what’s strange? Sometimes I don’t want to do things that bring me joy, even if I know they will bring me joy. There is this inertia, this resistance,  that prevents me from doing them. I would rather be bored, or feeling sorry for myself.

You probably have a different list of things that bring you joy. Like your kids. Sorry, not a kids guy, can’t relate, but you probably can’t relate to my cats. I see pictures of my friends with their kids on Facebook, and I’m like, does not compute, but they probably say the same thing about my cat pictures. Anyway, the point is, it doesn’t matter what brings you joy. Walks in the woods or walks on the beach bring people joy. Doesn’t make my list. But if a walk on the beach brings you joy, then—why not go for a walk on the beach? Maybe every weekend? Maybe as much as you can?

I try to spend as much time in a state of joy as I can. Here’s the thing: if your work doesn’t bring you joy, you are going to have a tough time of it. Because we spend a lot of time working, and if you hate it, that’s not a recipe for happiness. So, step number one in seeking joy is doing something that you love. Here we run into problems, because there are a lot of people who get paid very good money to do a thing, and they would rather be doing some other thing, and would have to give up the money. I am not going to sit here and tell you that you should quit your high-paying job so you can ride ponies. That is something your fifth-grade teacher would tell you, and she probably hates her job. Don’t ‘give up a $300,000 salary to make $40,000 riding ponies. I mean, you can do that, if you’ve worked that job for a number of years and you have a few million saved up, which brings me to the very obvious personal finance advice that saving is very good. When you’ve saved enough money, you can say blow me and ride ponies. If you’re living in deprivation in pursuit of joy, you won’t be experiencing much in the way of joy. So do it when you’re financially ready to do it, and not before.

You may be led to believe that drinking or doing drugs or surfing porn brings you joy. I assure you that they do not. I’m going to dive into conservative philosophy for a bit, and say that when you use a thing to change the way you feel, it is a shortcut to true joy, and joy is a matter of the spirit, not the body. We have all treated our bodies like an amusement park at some point in our lives, and achieved a high that we thought could never be replicated by a real-life experience. But it can. The real-life experiences are fuller and more meaningful, and bring you closer to God, while cocaine and hookers are a fake experience that take you away from God. You become spiritually bankrupt. But where I part ways from the conservatives is that they think you shouldn’t be allowed to do the cocaine and hookers—it should be prohibited by law, and enforced by the coercive state. Fuck, let people try it, and come to their own conclusions. Some of the best spiritual experiences around are when people give up the cocaine and hookers, and instead pursue real, honest-to-goodness joy. The liberals (and the libertarians) think that joy comes from treating your body like an amusement park. I have been there, and it is a spiritual dead end, with nothing but shame and regret.

I used to derive a lot of joy from working out and staying in shape, or so I thought. It was all driven by vanity. I was a gym rat, a real lunkhead, and spent many years picking things up and putting them down. Then I’d stare at myself in the mirror, and go around strutting like a peacock. In 2013, I had a horrific knee injury, with surgery and seven months of physical therapy, and that was pretty much the end of the working out. These days, I don’t care much what I look like, to a point. I spend good money on clothes, but that is about the extent of it. I eat whatever I want, I weigh 240 pounds, I’m not so fat that I can’t fit in an airplane seat, and it’s not like I need to run a six-minute mile to do my job. I’m happy with who I am and what I look like. With the benefit of hindsight, all the working out and watching my diet was an obsession, driven by pride. I’m ok with the dad bod. Some women like dad bod. I found that my trying to maintain my physical appearance was taking a huge amount of mental exertion. Going to the gym, working out in the gym, coming home from the gym, taking supplements, drinking gallons of water, weighing chicken—I can say this for sure, when I stopped obsessing over my body, I started making a lot more fucking money. And there was almost a perfect correlation. So if you’re one of these workout fanatics, ask yourself why you’re doing it. Are you doing it to feel healthy, or for some other reason? About the only thing I do these days is to walk on the treadmill for 30 minutes a day with a sauna shirt on. Get a sweat going, get the endorphins going, and burn a modicum of calories. I do it for my mental health than anything. But it does not bring me joy—it is simply maintenance.

I mentioned that the antithesis of joy is boredom. Being unproductive. I have difficulty explaining the first-world human desire to check out, zone out, grab a beer and sit on the couch and passively watch America’s Got Talent. I mean, TV and entertainment has been around for 75 years, and at various times in those 75 years, people have said that TV is responsible for all sorts of ills. It’s a passe-temps. Something to pass the time. I would be remiss if I did not mention social media. If I have free time, which I rarely do, I don’t want to spend it passively watching TV or social media. I want to spend that time on something that brings me joy, which is usually writing. The good news is that I can write and watch TV at the same time. I can work on my laptop and look up when Gleyber Torres makes another boneheaded baserunning error and yell at the TV. Then I go back to writing. I have a lot of writing projects backed up—another book of essays, another finance book, a novel, and we’ll see what comes after that. I like to say that when your avocation is your vocation, you tend to be pretty happy. I was this way at Lehman Brothers, too—I’d head up to my office in my house, fire up Bloomberg, and pull charts all night. I was happy being a military officer, I was happy being a trader, and I’m happy being a writer.

Maybe I’m just…happy? Maybe happiness is a choice?

It is. And if there is one thing that you could possibly learn from this collection of essays, is that happiness is an inside job. We choose to be happy or not be happy. It is not a matter of exogenous events, random good or bad things that fall on your head. I want to be happy, so I do things that make me happy, I spend time with people who make me happy, and I end up happy. That’s not to say that everything is perfect. Life is always a struggle. But if it wasn’t hard, it wouldn’t be worth doing.

There is an old saying in trading—do more of what works and less of what doesn’t. Frequently, people do the opposite! They do less of the things that bring them joy and more of the things that don’t. And they’re stumped—totally baffled—as to why they’re unhappy. So make that list, that list of things that bring you joy. And make an effort to do a little of it each day. Life is fucking short, man. I’m sure I’ll regret some things at the end, but I sure don’t want to regret not having done the things that made me happy. I want to leave it all out on the field.