holding zero

Like a lot of other dum dums, I participated in the whole AMC GME stock craze. Not a crazy amount, but enough to be excited to watch it go up and down. I was late to the game so I bought a couple shares of AMC, and then like clockwork, it immediately went directly into the toilet. LOL, jokes on me. And before you say its on its way up, cool bro. I waited for it to go up enough that I wouldn’t be mad, sold it, then bought bitcoin instead. Whew. All is well that ends well, or well”ish”.

One of the most uncomfortable feelings I felt during this, is the constant need to research the probability of it going back up. Incessant youtube streams and articles, all built around this singular hope that my little idiot misadventure wouldnt be a waste.

This gave me a lot to think about, and rang a whole string of bells.

When I was religious, I believed in the power of prayer with a capital “P”.

I believed people could be healed and things in life could change if you asked in the right way and often enough. That sounds positive, until you watch a couple desperate prayers go unanswered.

I rememver working in the church in Denmark. There was a woman on staff, and she was kind. Then a terrible day came and she found out that she had cancer. I remember one morning the daily staff prayer was going to be dedicated to praying for her healing.

We gathered in the chapel. She sat on a chair in the middle and we all gently laid our hands on her and took turns praying for God to touch her.

For a reversal of the inevitable, for intervention. Then we said amen, and went to the kitchen area. I was filled with the strangest feeling melancholy. I had fervently prayed, and yet when we concluded, I could feel that it had not happened. If you are reading this as a non Christian you would say of course, but to me at that time it was not so obvious.

That morning, instead of the typical boot black coffee and dry cookies, we had a nice spread of hipster bakery croissants and bread and cheese. Everyone was in high spirits like we had just accomplished something and I just could not understand how they couldn’t hear what I was hearing, which was silence.

Maybe this was the beginning of me feeling the inescapable gravity of the real world. The death of magic. But It wasn’t long before we all gathered again, the same people and many others to attend her funeral.

This was my first Danish funeral. Your first of anything new in a different country will always stand out. The longer you live somewhere, you keep thinking you have plumbed the bottom of the differences but you never do.

We had the service, then we went to the church yard and I saw her headstone, and it was literally a stone, with one side polished flat, with her name and dates carved in. People I knew crying openly.

Later on in life as I fell out of God, one of the biggest reliefs was to not have to believe in things I couldn’t influence or control. One sure route to anxiety and obsession is to try to influence the un-influencable.

But what makes someone hold on? To a shitty stock, or a religious practice that can’t work, or anything?

I think part of the psychology is the sunk cost fallacy.

I heard it explained best by my buddy Jeremy. Say you bought a $100 ticket for a band you were excited to see. Day of the concert, you get invited to a day trip with your favorite friend. Which do you choose? The natural fear is to think “well I don’t want to waste that $100 bucks”.

But the truth is, that $100 dollars is gone. It can never come back, and it doesn’t exist anymore. You have a much simpler choice, go to a free concert, or go on a trip.

When we tease apart the time we have invested in something, it makes it a lot easier to evaluate its true worth.

I see people make this mistake all the time. They are bound to things that are working at cross purposes to their happiness.

I call it holding zero.

And when you are holding zero, its hard to recognize that all your energy, all the things you learned, all the media you consumed, all the prayers you said, all your wishes, were wasted, or at least not fruitful in the way you hoped.

The human instinct is to see that waste and want to redeem it somehow. But somehow the way you redeem something is you let it go. You let it’s loss be the light to a new gain.

Whoever you are, reading this, I hope that whatever zero’s you are holding, whether they be relationships that need to end, thought patterns, or even ill informed money choices, whatever is working against you, I hope you stop trying to save it and build a new thing for yourself. Love y’all.