I’m getting old. So is the Slope of Hope. It seems hard to believe, but in just a few months Slope will begin its 20th year. That fact is on my mind because every time I do one of these end-of-year round-ups, I ask myself: how much longer are you going to do this? Sometimes I wonder if I’ll be clicking a Publish button when I’m on my death bed (which is, as Norm told us years ago, a piece of furniture you should never buy).
My mood at the end of 2023 is vastly different than it was at the end of 2022. In fact, looking at some of my posts that year, I am dumbstruck and embarrassed at how arrogant some of those posts were. Let’s just say 2023 has cured me of that illness, at least for the foreseeable future. Having mentioned the sin of arrogance, however, I will now immediately say one or two things that will sound decidedly in that category.
A couple of weeks ago, I saw a clip from a Bob Dylan interview in which, looking back on his songs from the early and mid 1960s, he could not claim to having written them. I forget exactly how he phrased it, but he essentially said that they were gifts from angels, and all he did was write them down. He declared he could never write anything that beautiful again, nor would he, and that it was a miracle that those early songs even came to be.
By no means am I suggesting an equivalency to Bob Dylan, but I completely understand what he’s talking about. Whenever I go through the literally thousands of posts in a given year and extract the fifty or so of them that I think are really good, I’m kind of amazed that I even wrote them. I’m amazed not only that I was so prolific but, to be honest, that they are so good. Like Dylan, I simply can’t believe I was anything more than a typist for some of these thoughts, as opposed to the person who actually conjured them up.
The other thought I always have, of course, is that I’m totally out of ideas and have nothing left to say. YOU try creating 35,000 posts over NINETEEN years and see if you feel emptied or not. Almost no one could have done this, at least for this long. And yet, somehow, I always come up with more.
Of course, this is vastly easier when I’m excited about the market, whereas these days, I am decidedly not. I’m not sure if I’ve ever despised the stock market as much as I do right now, which is not a great look for a person whose livelihood is, umm, analyzing and writing about the stock market. But, if nothing else, I try to be honest with you, and I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I view this market with little more than cynicism, skepticism, and a staggering amount of resentment. Not a healthy mindset, eh?
What this probably means, of course, is that the market is going to be destroyed. Why? Two reasons. One, my confidence is so low, that I’ve got virtually no skin in the game, and two, even if things genuinely start falling apart, I still won’t put any more risk on. Thus, I’ll watch the collapse I’ve been dreaming about happen with very little participation on my part, except inasmuch as I’ll be cheering on everyone else here. I actually know precisely what that feels like. I felt like that all through 2001 and 2002.
Well, Mr. Genius Who Can’t Believe He Wrote Such Great Things is mindlessly rambling now, so I’ll simply offer up three links to some “best of” posts, with a pledge that the next 40 will be tumbling out in the days to come.
- 9/11 and the Fourth Turning – A book to help guide us through the looming madness
- Easy Target – On the sea-change that has taken place, replacing beautiful models with ugly ones
- Bumbling Toward Bankruptcy – A vicious take-down of the Bumble app
