Slope of Hope Blog Posts

Slope initially began as a blog, so this is where most of the website’s content resides. Here we have tens of thousands of posts dating back over a decade. These are listed in reverse chronological order. Click on any category icon below to see posts tagged with that particular subject, or click on a word in the category cloud on the right side of the screen for more specific choices.

Suffer!

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Our Sunday sermon is going to be about something I think about quite a lot, which is the nature of suffering. Let us begin our examination of this topic with some notable precepts from various world faiths.

Buddhism
The First Noble Truth (Dukkha) describes suffering as a fundamental reality to be understood and overcome: “Birth is suffering; ageing is suffering; sickness is suffering; death is suffering; sorrow and lamentation, pain, grief, and despair are suffering; association with the unpleasant is suffering; dissociation from the pleasant is suffering; not to get what one wants is suffering…in brief, the five aggregates of attachment are suffering.”

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The Worst Good Feeling

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On this momentous morning, which could either be one of the most important inflection points in market history or another Taco-driven bore-fest, I’d like to discuss an important phenomenon that I’ve experienced more than once in my life. It is best described in steps:

  1. I uncover a spectacular opportunity by way of my charts
  2. I write about it and position myself in that investment
  3. I am expecting it to “behave” perfectly, but it moves against me to a small degree
  4. I become disillusioned and frustrated that it is not doing what it “should” do
  5. I dump it at a loss out of exasperation
  6. It moves against for me a little while longer, making me feel good I’ve made the right choice
  7. It then proceeds to make precisely the kind of magnificent move I predicted the entire time
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