A little while ago, I got an interesting email from a reader. With his permission, I am reprinting it here:
Dear Tim,
I’m curious about the state of mind in the permabear.When I was young i lived in a rather secluded environment, literally deep in the woods of northern california. I didn’t have many social interactions outside of my very small school until high school and college when I went to rather large institutions. My parents were simple pot farmers living off the land and far from the law. I was taught to respect the earth, compost, drink water from a spring and eat food from as close to your garden as possible. As I grew older and lived in somewhat more densely populated areas i realized i began to form a rather deep resentment for civilization.
The Natural world is such a pure and beautiful place, it seems the moment humans set foot anywhere they manage to sh*t on mother nature in one form or another. To my mind there is nothing better than a good economic collapse to reduce energy consumption, pollution, plastic production and the myriad of other ills that economic growth precipitates.
I wonder if moments in your adolescence have prelude to your bearish bias in the markets.
Well, I’m not sure how deeply I want to get into this answer, because Lord knows over the 10+ years I’ve been writing this blog, I’ve done staggering amounts of navel-gazing about why I’m a bear. (And it isn’t because my parents were pot farmers, which they weren’t, in case you didn’t figure that out already).
The “connection” with nature to which the author alludes is certainly something which resonates with me, and perhaps that is a cousin to the kind of gentle misanthropy that lingers in my soul. (Slope’s patron saint, George Carlin, spoke eloquently on this subject).
I think, for me, the very essence of what chews at me is this: I cannot stand fake. I can’t stomach the phony, the fraudulent, the pretentious, or the counterfeit. When I look out on the world and see the Caitlyns, the Kardashians, the billion-dollar unicorns, the Marissa Mayers, the faux entrepreneurs, and the clumsy, embarrassing fumblings to pretend that such-and-so is the next Steve Jobs, it turns my stomach.
So when I see the market begin to fall to pieces, like it’s doing right now, that, for me, is the shining beacon of reality beginning to crack through the facade, and its warm beams illuminate my face and warm my heart.
Here comes the sun.
