What’s your ‘enough’?

One of the side effects of working, and writing, in finance is that you see a new blog post in everything you read and watch, even when that has nothing to do with finance. This is one such post.

This post was born when I picked up the book Mythos: The Greek Myths Retold by the amazing Stephen Fry. It’s a fun read. If you’re interested in Greek mythology, it’s a very accessible introduction. And because people never really change, a lot of the book is surprisingly relevant to our lives today. Before I get to any of that, though, let me give you a quick Greek mythology lesson about the woman who accidentally ruined the whole world: Pandora.

All mythologies feature huge foundational wars. Greek mythology is no different. Their foundational war is ‘Titanomachy’ — the War of the Titans. This was a ten-year long war between the Titans, or the old Gods, led by Kronos, and the Olympians, or the new Gods, led by Zeus. The war marked the changing of the guard from the old to the new.

(If you’re wondering what the hell this has to do with finance, I say: hold on — good things come to those who wait. Anyway, back to the story.)

Fast forward ten years: Zeus and the new Gods have won the war. There’s peace and prosperity everywhere. It’s supposed to be a happy moment. But despite thrashing the Titans and becoming the King of the Gods, Zeus is bored and lonely, because whenever he looks down, he sees that he has nothing to rule over.

His is a beautiful world, filled with majestic mountains, seas, birds, mythical beasts, lush forests, and more. But all the gods and other divine creatures under his rule simply try to suck up to him. He can’t bear to imagine an eternity of this. Zeus confesses his sadness to his buddy, Prometheus, during what might be the world’s first therapy session. True story. #MentalHealth

Prometheus is a Titan. The Titans were the mortal enemies of the Olympians. But Prometheus — whose very name means “forethought” — had been too smart to side with his fellow Titans during the war. He could see that the Olympians were destined to win, and so, he switched over to the other side, dragging his brother Epimetheus along.  

Anyway, Zeus now has a divine idea to overcome his boredom: he decides to create a new race of beings who look just like the gods, and could worship, play with, and amuse the gods. Zeus asks Prometheus to create these beings since he had a knack for such things. In other words, he tasks Prometheus with creating humans.

Zeus has one condition, though: after the creation, humans are never to have fire. He’s worried that with fire, the humans might eventually rise to challenge the gods.

On Zeus’ request, Prometheus designs humans in the image of the gods. It’s just dudes at first — Zeus is a notorious playboy, and his wife is sick of his dalliances. Gods — they’re just like us, huh? So, to reduce temptation and avoid pissing his wife off, he tells Prometheus: dudes only. 

Prometheus follows through. He takes some mud and shapes it into the first dudes. The Olympians breathe life and wisdom into them all. They begin life as a happy bunch. There’s no poverty, no famine, and no conflict. Earth’s a paradise, and humanity flourishes. As their chief designer, Prometheus grows to love his happy little dudes, and spends increasing amounts of time with them, teaching them everything — from farming, to crafts, to medicine and writing. What a gem of a guy!

As humanity flourishes, Prometheus sees great promise in this happy bunch of dudes. But something’s gnawing at him. He’s sad that he’s only allowed to create dudes. It’s kinda made humanity one-dimensional. He’s also sad that his dudes can’t access fire. The answer slowly comes to him: for men to achieve their God-like destiny, they need a spark. And so, after much thought, Prometheus decides to steal fire from the Gods, despite the fact that this would mean certain death for him. This is how humanity finally gets fire and truly begins to flourish. 

Zeus is angry at Prometheus’ betrayal — and I mean really angry, like an anger that requires eternal and divine therapy.

Not only is he pissed at Prometheus, he’s also angry at the arrogance of all those puny dudes. Who did they think they were, using fire? His first instinct is to blow Prometheus to pieces, but he restrains himself. Prometheus would have to wait. Instead, he turns his attention to the humans and decides to punish them first. And for this, he comes up with a rather cruel and unusual punishment. 

Zeus orders his son, Hephaestus, to create the first woman. She’s endowed with various gifts from the gods, including the arts, beauty and love, but also, cunning. She’s named Pandora, or the ‘all-gifted’.

Once she’s brought to life, Zeus gives Pandora a jar. He tells her that the jar is decorative, and that she can never, ever open it, no matter what. Pandora then is presented to Epimetheus, Prometheus’s brother, as a gift (Yeahhh, I know, the ancients were pretty icky). Epimetheus is a fool. His very name means “one who thinks after.” This quality of his will soon come to bite humanity in the hind part of their collective lower torso. 

Prometheus knew that Zeus would seek revenge, and had warned his brother not to accept any gift from the Gods. But when Epimetheus sees Pandora, he instantly falls for her. True to form, he only thinks afterwards. 

Pandora and Epimetheus get married. They’re both madly in love. Life could not be any better. But even in the bliss of her new marriage, Pandora just can’t forget the jar. She keeps wondering what’s inside. One day, she almost gives in. Taken by the allure of the jar, she picks it up and thinks: if the jar had nothing of importance, why did Zeus ask her not to open it? She twists the lid of the jar, almost opening it. But at the very last moment, she remembers her promise to Zeus that she would never open it. She relents.

Pandora fights her temptation. For now. She goes to the backyard of her heavenly abode, digs a hole in her garden, and buries the jar deep in the ground. Phew! Crisis averted. Her divine promise remains unbroken. Now that the jar is out of sight, she returns to her blissful life. 

But while Pandora is happy for a while, she can’t push the jar completely out of her mind. One night, as she struggles to fall asleep, she feels like the jar is calling out to her. She tries pushing it out of her head, but can’t. The Greeks hadn’t discovered Yoga Nidra yet, I guess. 

Temptation claws at her. She can’t control herself. And so, she gives in. While Epimetheus sleeps like a baby beside her, she creeps out of bed and heads to the garden. Her heart beating furiously, she digs up the hole, lifts the jar from the ground, and lets her curiosity get the better of her. 

The jar contained all manners of calamity, evil, and troubles. The moment Pandora opens the jar, war, hunger, disease, greed, envy, deceit, pain, suffering and all sorts of other torments are unleashed onto the world. She cries out in horror. With great effort, she somehow managed to close the lid of the jar. But as fate would have it — or rather, as Zeus would have it — there’s just one last thing that’s left in the jar: hope, and it’s sealed away forever. 

The blissful existence of humanity is over. Death, disease, violence, and poverty became a part of all our lives.

Only then does Zeus turn his attention to Prometheus. He chains him to a rock for eternity. Every day, an eagle visits Prometheus each day to pluck out and eat his liver. Every night, his liver grows back.

Prometheus, mankind’s chief creator, advocate and friend, taught us, stole for us and sacrificed himself for us. We all possess our share of Promethean fire, without it we would not be human. It is right to pity and admire him but, unlike the jealous and selfish gods he would never ask to be worshipped, praised and adored.

Sigh.

The moment I read Pandora’s story — how she forced humanity to deal with all sorts of problems and spend their hard-earned money on health and life insurance — the very first thing I remembered was a Morgan Housel clip I saw on Twitter. The clip was from his appearance on The Knowledge Project podcast. Here’s what he said:

Shane Parish: That sounds academically correct but, in terms of temperament, it’s incredibly difficult. I see my friends getting rich off things like Bitcoin, and that makes me want to change my approach. I know how to build wealth over time: saving money, being patient, and letting it compound decade after decade. Eventually, you’ll wake up with substantial wealth and financial independence. But when I see my neighbor getting richer quicker, it makes me want to speed up my timeline, and my impatience affects the outcome.

Morgan Housel: Not having FOMO (fear of missing out) is the most important financial skill. It’s crucial for building wealth. If you are susceptible to FOMO, it’s hard to accumulate significant wealth over time. In today’s world, with social media and platforms like Reddit and Twitter, FOMO can be overwhelming. If you can’t ignore your neighbor getting richer faster, it will impact your financial success.

I don’t possess many financial skills—I couldn’t be a stock picker or a trader. But I’ve never been very susceptible to FOMO. It doesn’t bother me to see others getting rich. Our mutual friend Brent had a great quote: “I am perfectly happy watching you get very rich doing something I would never want to do.” That’s a great perspective. I don’t get jealous or anxious about others’ success. My investing strategy is to stick with index funds for as long as possible and to be average for an above-average period of time. I believe that approach will lead to excellent outcomes.

It struck me that Pandora was the world’s first victim of FOMO. (Well, she was tricked by literal Gods and couldn’t have not opened the jar, the point still stands.)

What Morgan Housel says is on-the-money. I’ve said this in some of my older posts: the ability to do nothing when the entire world is going mad is nothing short of a superpower. You may be smarter than Einstein, but if you don’t have the ability to behave well, you’ll always swing between the extremes of being completely broke and having just enough money to afford a pair of hole-ridden VIP underwear.

“Behaving” oneself is another way of saying “having impulse control”. Pandora is hardly the only person who ruined everything because of her poor impulse control. The inability to control one’s impulses has destroyed many a fortune.

Impulse control is all the more important in our maddening modern world, which is filled with endless distractions and enticements. We always have a choice to resist, of course, but sadly, the ability to do so is hard to come by. The fact that there’s a term called “mindless consumerism” is a tragic commentary on humanity. We live in an economic system that thrives on consuming “more.” Anyone that’s trying to sell you something will try to goad you into consuming more, but while that makes them richer, it isn’t good for you. 

What makes things even trickier is that, thanks to social media, the entire world is now a glass house. Social media has turned everything into a status game, and one of the easiest ways to get more status points is to advertise a fake reality, filled with exotic travels, chiseled bodies, and limited-edition designer goods. That all those things might be paid for with a credit card at 40% interest, and that all those shiny, happy people might become miserable as soon as the camera is switched off stays hidden, as the rest of the world gawks at their fakery.

These fake realities are insidious. They short-circuit our common sense, instead appealing directly to our greed, anxieties, fears, hopes, dreams, and insecurities. Like idiots, we forget that these are all projected realities, and instead consciously or unconsciously chase the same fake lifestyles. Instead of addressing our demons, we hop on the hedonic treadmill and run until we’re burnt out and broken.

If your perception of other people’s realities becomes your benchmark, the only outcome that’s guaranteed is pure, unadulterated misery. It’s not easy to be content, but unless we find contentment, it’s impossible to have a meaningful life. 

Put differently, you need to know your “enough.” 

In response to something similar I had published on my personal blog, a reader commented with this wonderful story:

True story, Word of Honor:

Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer now dead,

and I were at a party given by a billionaire

on Shelter Island.

I said, “Joe, how does it make you feel

to know that our host only yesterday

may have made more money

than your novel ‘Catch-22’

has earned in its entire history?”

And Joe said, “I’ve got something he can never have.”

And I said, “What on earth could that be, Joe?”

And Joe said, “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.”

Not bad! Rest in peace!”

― Kurt Vonnegut

This idea of “enough” reminded me of an interview of Stephen Fry with the legendary John Cleese. I’ve shared the relevant transcript snippet from the video, and I would urge you to read it in full, but at the bare minimum, if you just read one thing, let it be the bit in bold:

John Cleese: You used the keyword “enough.” So these very rich people have no sense of enough. Can you understand it? I mean, it’s an illness isn’t it?

Stephen Fry: It is an illness.

Stephen Fry: I was born in the same year as Sugar Puffs, the cereal, right? So I… I should never forget. Yeah, I was of a generation for whom television advertising was first directed towards me when I was young, to eat Sugar Puffs and Rice Krispies and Frosties and sugary things. And I went to a school which had a Tuck Shop, you know, a little boarding school, and there were things like sherbet fountains with sherbet in it, white powder that you… you sucked in through a licorice straw. And they even extraordinarily had Spanish gallant rolling tobacco, which was coconut shreds, but it was done exactly like a rolling tobacco packet that you’d see grown-ups using, and you would have a pipe made of licorice, uh, and you would have cigarettes with red tips on the end, which were candy cigarettes. Do you remember all these sweets?

Well, you’re probably a generation older. You were being prepared for cocaine and tobacco, essentially. You were given white powder and tobacco, and I never could eat enough of that, and I would break out of school bans, go to the village shop, and buy all the fruit salads and Black Jacks and foamy shrimps and little rice paper flying saucers, and I stuffed myself. I couldn’t eat them. I… I got teeth missing here because of it.

So I had this empty hole in me, this vast empty hole that said, “Feed me. I need this sugar. I need it.” And then when it wasn’t sugar, it became tobacco, and I smoked. And then in my 20s, it became cocaine. I just… And I couldn’t sit still without going, you know, and it’s that addictive impulse that many people, many people watching will know what I mean. And many people won’t because this is the important thing to remember. I said, “Not everybody has this.” And it’s a kind of addictive gene. And I guess the money people have it for money. There’s this hole in them they have to acquire and they have to own.

John Cleese: They don’t know how to fill it, no. And they think if I had another 500 million, I’d be happier.

Stephen Fry: One of the things that always maddened me about self-help books and books on there is the ones that start off with “Goal orientation, set yourself goals.” And I think it’s the most dangerous and despicable, inimical thing imaginable because I don’t know a human being who, when they reach a goal they’ve set themselves, isn’t dissatisfied. Absolutely always an anticlimax.

Now, you’re probably thinking: “How do I find my enough?”. Sadly, there’s no one answer. Your “enough” will never be the same as the next person’s. You alone can figure it out. Your ability to be content in life stems from your unique life circumstances, struggles, and triumphs. 

A little bit of adversity early on in life, though, can be a wonderful teacher. This is why, in my limited experience, middle-class Indians tend to be a little better with their money than the affluent class. I’m not saying all middle-class Indians are geniuses, but on balance, people who’ve struggled early on tend to have better attitudes towards money. Of course, even that isn’t universally good. There’s a dark side to a life of struggle, beyond the struggle itself — your struggles warp your risk perceptions and make you conservative. But then, life is full of trade-offs.

The company you keep also matters. In my experience, being around people with diverse life experiences can do a lot of good in shaping your attitudes. Some motivational speaker once said: “you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with”. As much as I despise motivational speakers, there’s perhaps some truth to this.

And finally, I think reading — especially a little history — helps. The best thing about reading is not that it makes you smart — it doesn’t. What it does, though, is give you some perspective and change the way you think.

We are arrogant creatures. We like to think our problems are unique. But humanity has been around for over 200,000–300,000 years; none of our problems and challenges are unique. The ancient Greeks faced the same challenges as modern investors, even if their circumstances were very different. We all would do well to look into the past and learn a little.