Huh? Come again?

That head-scratcher of a sentence came verbatim from a recent conversation I had with some investment advisors at a Canadian Big Bank. The entire conversation, beyond the initial pleasantries, felt like that. At times, I genuinely had no idea what they were talking about.

Granted, I’m not an investment professional. But I spend a lot of time reading and thinking and writing about investing. So it was a strange feeling to sit there struggling to follow the conversation. I left feeling frustrated, but also a little bit… inadequate.

I went for a run afterward to clear my head and listened to an episode of Dave Chilton’s The Wealthy Barber Podcast.

It was exactly the antidote I needed.

Dave has spent decades trying to demystify finance for ordinary people. No posturing. No needless complexity. Just clear and relatable language.

I first read Dave’s seminal book The Wealthy Barber as a kid on my dad’s recommendation. I honestly don’t remember much of the book now, but I’m sure it helped nudge me down the path I eventually went down.

From there, I found the Canadian Couch Potato blog, then Rob Carrick’s stuff, then podcasts like Rational Reminder and BeyondMD and a long list of other people trying to make the investing/finance world feel a little less intimidating to ordinary people like myself.

I value people like that enormously.

Because investing is intimidating enough already.

Buddhism can be the same way.

A Foothold

The first time I dipped my toes into Buddhism, it felt impossibly foreign to me. Endless unfamiliar terms and concepts and schools and traditions: Dependent Origination, the Five Aggregates, non-self, emptiness, samsara, kalyanmitra.

I could easily have decided it just wasn’t for me.

But then late one night, over a bowl of cereal, I stumbled across Noah Rasheta’s Secular Buddhism Podcast. Noah explained Buddhist concepts in a way that suddenly felt practical and relatable to my everyday life.

Suddenly, I had a foothold.

That’s been making me think lately about the Buddhist idea of right speech. Right speech isn’t just about avoiding cruelty or lying or being pleasant all the time. At its core, I think it asks us to consider the effect our words have on another person. Are we helping them understand? Or are we leaving them feeling confused and diminished?

Right Speech

I don’t think those investment advisors were bad people. And maybe the jargon wasn’t intentional at all. Maybe they’ve simply spent so long immersed in that world that they no longer hear how opaque it sounds from the outside. Maybe they talk like that at the dinner table.

But the conversation stayed with me because it made me reflect on the ways I probably do the exact same thing in my own life.

I work in a field with plenty of its own jargon and shorthand. And when I’m talking to colleagues, the jargon flows freely. It is a remarkably efficient way to discuss ideas.

But to someone on the outside, it must seem like we’re talking Klingon.

Just like “capital-gains-oriented tax profile” sounded to me in that meeting.

Over the last few days, I’ve caught myself thinking more carefully about the words I use when talking to other people — the moments where I instinctively reach for technical language instead of just speaking plainly.

Sometimes that language probably does come from efficiency. But other times, if I’m being honest, it comes from wanting to sound knowledgeable.

Or even to make the other person feel less knowledgeable.

Our words can be weapons or bridges. Right speech encourages us to ask ourselves how we’re using them. Are we speaking to be heard? To help the other person? To hurt them?

And if you don’t know the answer to those questions, try asking the other person.

- The Buddh-ish Investor

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Take home points

• Jargon can make investing and Buddhism feel intimidating and exclusionary to outsiders.

• “Right speech” asks us to consider whether our words are helping others feel understood—or creating distance between us.

If you’re looking for more

• Check out this particularly insightful—and jargon-free—episode of The Wealthy Barber Podcast in which Dave talks to financial advisor Mark McGrath about his bold decision to put family before work:

Icky?

That’s how Cara Lai feels when she takes a look.

Cara, if you’re not familiar with her work, is a Buddhist teacher and creator of the “Meditate Your Face Off” Substack. She writes and teaches with a delightful blend of insight and irreverence. Highly recommended.

Anyway, her comments about saving and investing for retirement, in a recent podcast appearance, made me do a double-take:

“It just feels really, really icky to me. There’s just such a big part of me that wants to just be like, forget it.”

What’s Cara getting on about?

As an explanation, she said:

“I don’t like it because it feels like I have to participate in this misguided belief that there’s just going to be continuous growth in our market forever. Also, I have to put money towards things that don’t always feel in line with my values.”

I get that. As I’ve discussed in another post, I have my own qualms about fuelling the capitalism machine and owning the many despicable companies that form part of VGRO, the primary holding in my investment accounts.

I’ve made an awkward peace with that. I try to atone for the “sin” of participating in capitalism by using my money and time to improve the world around me—through charitable donations, and by trying to be more present with family and friends.

The Security of a Money Stash

What I have a harder time reconciling is what Cara said next:

“That money that I am investing, it’s money that’s not in the flow, and it could be out there doing things. And it would be so cool if I could just let that money flow in the ways that I want it to flow. And what if we all did that? What if we all started to trust and just give and not have this stash of money somewhere representing our sense of safety? And what if our safety was actually built on generosity?”

I derive a deep sense of security from my investment savings. The future feels less scary because of the stash of money in my TFSA, RRSP and other accounts.

I never really questioned this until hearing Cara’s words.

Now I also feel a little icky.

Here I am hoarding money while people in the world are living in abject poverty.

Why do I do it?

Is it greed? Maybe there’s some of that in there.

Mostly, though, I think it comes down to a lack of trust that the world will take care of me and mine.

My money stash is a salve against a deep lack of faith in humanity and the universe.

That’s a sad thought. A really sad one.

How did it get to this point? I have a good life—probably easier than 95% of the world’s population. I’ve faced little tragedy over the past 40-odd years of life. People are nice to me.

So why am I so distrustful? More importantly, what can I do about it?

A Middle Way

I think there’s something to Cara’s aspirational idea of letting the money flow.

At the same time, I don’t think the answer is to drain my retirement accounts and blindly trust the universe to provide. Cara ultimately lands here too. As much as she’d like to let the cash flow, she has kids to provide for and bills to pay. I have the same responsibilities in my life.

Buddhism often points toward a middle way rather than extremes. And maybe there’s a middle path here too: preparing responsibly for the future without turning money into my sole source of safety and reassurance.

I donate money to charity on a regular basis. I buy gifts for the people in my life. These acts of generosity only add up to a small percentage of my net worth. Probably less than 1%.

Giving more seems reckless to me—with bills to pay and a future to secure for myself and my family. But maybe I’m going about it all wrong.

Maybe the hoarding just reinforces the distrust. I think I’m building security, but I’m really just investing in insecurity.

Charitable Reps, Not Flexes

Perhaps it’s time for some radical generosity. Give more than I feel comfortable giving.

Not in some performative, billionaire-philanthropist “flex” kind of way—“Oh, look at me: I’m so rich, I can donate $1,000,000 to this charity.”

That’s one way to approach charity. Whatever the ulterior motive behind it, the money’s still flowing.

Another way to look at charitable acts is as “reps” toward building up one’s trust muscles. Not a flex, but a rep.

Enough to challenge the part of me that believes security can only come from accumulation.

The next question is: How much to give? Some folks, particularly those of the Effective Altruism persuasion, allocate a certain amount of their income—5, 10 or more percent—to charitable giving. That’s a potential starting point.

I don’t know if I’m quite ready to donate a non-trivial percentage of my income to charity. Or to be that precise about it.

I think it’s enough to push the limits of my comfort on giving. When I get the urge to be generous, just give without thinking too hard about it. And give a little more than whatever my first instinct is.

All this giving might mean that my retirement account doesn’t grow as much as I’m accustomed to.

But maybe I’ll feel a little less icky about it all. Maybe even a little richer.

- The Buddh-ish Investor

I’d love to hear from you! Email at Sangha@TheBuddhishInvestor.com or drop a comment below!

Listen to The Buddh-ish Investor Podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify

Follow me on Bluesky: @buddhishinvestor.bsky.social

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Take home points

• Retirement savings can provide a sense of security, but may also reflect an underlying lack of trust in the world.

• A middle path might involve saving responsibly while practicing greater generosity as a way of loosening fear and building trust.

If you’re looking for more

• A great guided meditation from Cara on reorienting your relationship with money:

  Meditate Your Face Off

  The Bottom Line

  The above is a guided meditation to help you move from scarcity mentality, to abundance mentality. Below is me reading the essay that follows…

  Listen now

  2 months ago · 37 likes · 13 comments · Cara Lai

• More on dealing with investing ickiness:
  

Last week was pretty typical for the market—lots of ups and downs:

And in life:

Life is an endless series of ups and downs. There’s no way to avoid volatility.

And we wouldn’t want to anyway. What would life be without joy and ecstasy? And the lows—how could we grow as humans if we didn’t have challenges to face and overcome?

It’s the same with investing—to quote Ben Carlson:

“One of the reasons the stock market gives you good returns is because it’s so volatile.”

In markets, volatility means uncertainty, and investors expect to be compensated for bearing that uncertainty. That compensation is long-term returns. But knowing this doesn’t make it any easier in the moment.

We still have to white-knuckle through the fluctuations of the markets and our lives. One moment you’re uneasy, the next relieved, always wondering what’s coming next. I’ve certainly felt it watching my portfolio over the past few months.

There’s another way to look at it. Not as something to get through, but as an opportunity.

Volatility, in markets and in life, gives us repeated chances to notice how we react and build a bit more resilience each time. Not by avoiding the swings, but by actually feeling them—the discomfort when a stock drops, the urge to do something, the relief when things bounce back. You don’t need to fix those feelings. Just notice them. That’s the practice.

In life, that might look like a quiet meditation, a journal entry, or simply pausing before reacting. In investing, it’s staying the course with your plan through the chaos—letting the ups and downs happen, and remembering that the volatility is the point.

But it’s one thing to understand this idea, and another to actually live it when the swings are happening in real time.

So rather than just write about it, I tried something a little different.

I recorded a short guided meditation you can use the next time the market (or life in general) is yanking you around—give it a listen:

Guided Meditation: Feeling the Market’s Volatility

Thanks for reading, and take care.

- The Buddh-ish Investor

I’d love to hear from you! Email at Sangha@TheBuddhishInvestor.com or drop a comment below!

Listen to The Buddh-ish Investor Podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify

Follow me on Bluesky: @buddhishinvestor.bsky.social

Take home points

• Volatility isn’t the obstacle to wealth—it’s the source.

• Growth in life and investing comes from experiencing the swings, not avoiding them.

If you’re looking for more

• A joyful, candid performance of John Prine’s ode to life’s ups and downs - “That’s the way that the world goes ‘round / You’re up one day, the next you’re down”

Buddha nature is the capacity for awakening that is inherent in us all. It’s not something that we acquire, but something already in us waiting to be revealed.

It may sound abstract, but it points to something surprisingly tangible.

Atoms make up everything in the known universe: you, me, the couch I’m sitting on, the air we breathe. And these atoms get passed around constantly.

With each breath, I exhale billions upon billions of molecules. Some of those will be inhaled by someone else, taken and incorporated into their body. Over time, the atoms that make up “me” are gradually replaced. We’re far less fixed than we think.

Atoms on the Move

As writer Bill Bryson puts it:

“Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you...a significant number of our atoms—up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested—probably once belonged to Shakespeare. A billion more each came from Buddha...and any other historical figure you care to name.”
- Bill Bryson (from A Short History of Nearly Everything)

Which means, in some sense, we really do carry a bit of the Buddha within us — not in a mystical way, but in a physical one.

And if that estimate holds, then each of us has swapped atoms with market visionaries like Warren Buffett and Jack Bogle. But also with scoundrels like Sam Bankman-Fried and Elizabeth Holmes.

The Same Pool

It’s a striking illustration of interdependence: we are all part of a vast, interconnected web. The same matter circulates endlessly, passing from one form to another, from one person to the next. We can’t separate ourselves from the world, no matter how hard we try.

And this same idea shows up in our financial lives. Index investing is built on owning small pieces of a very large, global market. My own broad-market ETF of choice, Vanguard Growth ETF Portfolio (VGRO), holds thousands of stocks and bonds. These very same securities are owned by millions of other people around the world.

We’re all dipping into the same pool.

When markets rise, they rise for all of us. When they fall, they fall together. Our fortunes aren’t nearly as independent as we might like to believe. We’re participating in the same system, just as we’re breathing the same air.

A Little More Kindness

There’s something quietly reassuring in that. Especially at a time when the world feels increasingly divided — wars, tensions, people pulling apart from one another. But we’re not as separate as it seems.

We’re all drawing from the same pool. Breathing the same air. Made of the same stuff.

And remembering that — even briefly — makes it a little harder to see other people as fundamentally different from us, and a little easier to be kind.

- The Buddh-ish Investor

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Take home points

• You’re not as separate as you think. At the most basic level — atoms, air, and even investments — we’re all deeply interconnected.

• Reminding ourselves of our interdependence can make it easier to be kind to those around us.

If you’re looking for more

• As only she can, Joni Mitchell meditating on our atomic interconnectivity - “We are stardust, billion year old carbon”

But have you ever seen the inside of one?

I was shocked the first time I opened an Apple laptop to change a battery. It wasn’t sleek at all. It was a dense, layered collection of chips, fans, and wires—nothing like the impeccably streamlined exterior I was used to.

And yet, that apparent mess is exactly what makes the whole thing function so seamlessly.

What’s Underneath

I had the same reaction when I looked at the holdings of Vanguard Growth ETF Portfolio (VGRO)—an “all-in-one” fund that makes up 100% of my investment portfolio. On the surface, it’s just a snappy four-letter ticker: VGRO. Something I can buy and sell as easily as a stock.

But under the surface, it holds more than thousands upon thousands of stocks and bonds spread across the globe. [If you do want to peak under VGRO’s hood, check out the interactive spreadsheet below.]

Seeing under the hood of both my MacBook and VGRO was initially a bit jarring. But it also gave me a new appreciation for them. They take overwhelming complexity and wrap it up in something neat, usable, and—importantly—something that just works.

When the Bubble Pops

I’ve had the chance to look under the hood of other things in my life too like my relationships, my family, my own psychology. And the experience was familiar: a bit of shock, a bit of disorientation.

In each case, I had been operating under the quiet assumption that I knew what I was dealing with—that things were more or less dialled in, that they weren’t going to surprise me, that they were, in some way, as polished as my MacBook.

They weren’t.

Even a quick look under the hood—often prompted by conflict or stress—revealed just how complicated, and how far beyond my control, these things really are.

This is something Pema Chödrön writes about. She suggests that we tend to live inside protective bubbles. We tell ourselves stories about how things are: that they’re stable, predictable, and understandable. And then, at some point, the bubble pops.

Sometimes it’s dramatic—illness, loss, betrayal. Sometimes it’s quieter—just something that doesn’t fit the story we’ve been telling ourselves. Either way, what once felt solid suddenly isn’t.

Pema calls this contact with “groundlessness.” Not in a bleak or nihilistic sense, but simply as the recognition that things are more open, more fluid, and more complex than we’d like them to be.

That recognition is not a comfortable one. When the bubble pops, the instinct is to patch it up as quickly as possible—to restore the polished surface.

But Pema suggests something different: that we practice staying with that feeling, even just a little bit. Not all at once, but gradually.

A Different Way to Look

One way to do that, I think, is to pay attention to the small moments of surprise in your day:

The bus shows up early…

The coffee shop is out of your favourite pastry…

Your partner doesn’t make the bed…

These are tiny things, but in each case, reality doesn’t match the story you had in your head. A small bubble pops.

In those moments, instead of immediately smoothing things over, you can pause. Notice what that feels like—the brief disorientation, the subtle tightening—and remind yourself that this is actually what things are like: a bit unpredictable, a bit messy.

Life, like the inside of a MacBook or the guts of VGRO, is not simple. It just looks that way from the outside. Up close, it’s layered, interconnected, and not fully knowable. We get ourselves into trouble when we insist on the polished version, when we pretend things are simpler or more under our control than they really are. Because eventually, the hood opens anyways. The bubble pops.

So maybe the practice is this: be a little more curious. Look under the hood when you can. Not to figure everything out or tidy it up, but just to see what’s there. It might be messier than you expected. It might also be more interesting and beautiful than the shiny, polished version you were holding onto.

- The Buddh-ish Investor

I’d love to hear from you! Email at Sangha@TheBuddhishInvestor.com or drop a comment below!

Listen to The Buddh-ish Investor Podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify

Follow me on Bluesky: @buddhishinvestor.bsky.social

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Take home points:

• Simplicity is often a polished surface over deep complexity.
  Whether it’s a MacBook, VGRO, or our own lives, what looks clean and controlled on the outside is actually layered, interconnected, and far more complex underneath.

• Get acquainted with “groundlessness” and messiness.
  When reality disrupts our expectations, the instinct is to restore comfort—but the real practice is to pause, stay curious, and learn to sit with the uncertainty rather than smoothing it over.

If you’re looking for more:

• A heartbreaker of a song from about life after the bubble pops—and leaning into the uncertainty:
  “I felt just like a tourist, seeing it all for the first time. Like a guest. Unsure of what I might find.”

• And, for good measure, some tunes from another great Toronto artist—share widely please:

“What seeds am I sowing?”

That’s my refrain these days.

My 3-year-old refuses to put on his snowsuit. “Seeds.”

My call gets dropped after an hour waiting to talk to an airline rep. “Seeds.”

Someone cuts me off in traffic. “Seeds.”

Seeds.

What do I mean by this?

The idea comes from Pema Chödrön, the Buddhist teacher whose work I’ve been sitting with recently. She writes about how we are constantly planting seeds of karma in our lives. Not karma as a cosmic system of rewards and punishments, but something far simpler and more immediate: cause and effect.

The seeds we plant—with our thoughts, words and actions—change ourselves and the world around us.

Some seeds are skilful. Others are not. Some grow into patience, steadiness, and generosity. Others grow into irritation, anxiety, and hate. And while we can’t control every circumstance in which we live, we do have some say in the seeds that we plant.

When I whisper “Seeds” to myself, I’m trying to remember that this moment matters more than it appears to.

Financial Seeds

This plays out in our investing lives in ways we rarely stop to notice.

Think about the small, habitual things: compulsively checking the markets during a quiet moment, scrolling Yahoo Finance before bed, half-listening to a financial podcast while you make dinner. These feel like nothing — just background noise. But they’re seeds too.

Here’s how it can unfold.

You check the markets out of habit and see that Microsoft (MSFT) is having yet another down day — down more than 20% over the past few months. The chart looks ugly:

A thought arises: Surely Microsoft’s going to bounce back to new all-time highs. I should buy it now while it’s cheap.

You convince yourself this is too good an opportunity to pass up. So you buy some MSFT shares.

There’s a flicker of doubt — after all, you already have a globally diversified portfolio suited to your risk tolerance and goals — but you reassure yourself. It’s okay to have a bit of fun sometimes.

Time passes. Microsoft comes roaring back. You feel vindicated. Maybe even a little brilliant.

So you buy another “fallen” stock. And then another.

Before long, these single-stock positions start piling up in your portfolio. You’re still mostly diversified. But now a non-trivial portion — maybe 5 or 10% — is made up of individual, perhaps volatile, names.

You start watching those companies more closely. You check the markets more often. BNN hums in the background while you make dinner. You’re hitting up ChatGPT for hot stock tips during your son’s swimming lessons.

And so one seemingly innocent glance at an app — one seed — grows into something much larger than you intended. And keeps growing…

Maybe you lose sleep. Maybe your family senses the shift in your mood. Maybe financial decision-making becomes charged rather than calm. Maybe your kids pick up on your financial anxiety and this shapes their relationship with money.

We could keep tracing the ripple effects outward. That’s precisely the point.

Nothing is isolated. Everything is inter-connected. What we do, think and say has far-reaching effects on the world around us.

One Calm Person on the Boat

Thích Nhất Hạnh tells a story that vividly illustrates this.

After the fall of Saigon, nearly a million Vietnamese people fled the country in overcrowded, barely seaworthy vessels. Many were lost to storms, starvation, or pirates.

As he tells it:

“When the crowded Vietnamese refugee boats met with storms or pirates, if everyone panicked all would be lost. But if even one person on the boat remained calm and centered, it was enough. It showed the way for everyone to survive.”

- Thích Nhất Hạnh

One person planting a seed of calm could alter the fate of many.

Of course, the opposite is also true. Panic spreads just as quickly. So does anger. So does fear.

We see this every day. A bad mood enters a room and, within minutes, it belongs to everyone.

Seeds Change Us Too

The seeds we plant don’t just impact the world around us. They change us too.

What we think, do, and say is not neutral. It reshapes the brain over time. Tendencies get reinforced. Neural grooves deepen. What begins as a reaction slowly becomes a habit, and what becomes a habit starts to feel like who we are.

If I snap at my son, that reaction doesn’t simply evaporate once the words leave my mouth. It strengthens impatience. It makes the next snap a little easier, a little more automatic.

The same dynamic plays out in traffic. In marriages. In markets.

Planting Better Seeds

So how do we plant better seeds?

Mindfulness is often sold as a personal wellness practice — something you do on a cushion for twenty minutes to feel better about your day. But I think it’s more practical than that. Awareness of our habitual thoughts and reactions is the first step toward changing them. And changing them — planting more skilful seeds, even in small moments — has effects that extend far beyond us.

In our financial lives, this might mean noticing the impulse to check the markets and pausing before you do. Asking yourself: Why am I doing this, and what am I likely to do with what I find?

These feel like small things.

But so does a seed.

So the next time your child refuses to put on a snowsuit, or the market flashes red before breakfast, you might pause and ask:

What seed am I about to plant?

- The Buddh-ish Investor

I’d love to hear from you! Email at Sangha@TheBuddhishInvestor.com or drop a comment below!

Listen to The Buddh-ish Investor Podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify

Follow me on Bluesky: @buddhishinvestor.bsky.social

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Take home points:

• Seeds get bigger. Tiny reactions — checking markets, chasing a stock, snapping in traffic — are “seeds” that quietly grow into larger patterns in our portfolios, moods, and relationships.

• Awareness changes the seeds we plant. A brief pause before reacting can shift us toward calmer, wiser choices — and those small choices ripple outward.

If you’re looking for more:

• Harry Chapin’s cautionary tale on the ripple effect of seemingly inconsequential decisions:

• More Buddh-ish thoughts on habitual reactivity:

Not one of my posts, dear reader — though I do appreciate you tuning in.

It was a piece from Citrini Research: a fictional letter written from three years in the future describing an economic crisis triggered by artificial intelligence (AI).

In their imagined 2028, unemployment in the United States has climbed to 10%, and the stock market has fallen by 40%.

The authors admit they’re not certain any of it will actually happen. But the scenario feels uncannily plausible.

Their argument unfolds as a cascade1:

Widespread adoption of AI
↓
AI replaces large numbers of white-collar workers
↓
Those workers spend less
↓
Consumer demand falls
↓
Economic growth slows
↓
Markets tumble
↓
Housing weakens
↓
Unemployment rises further

One domino knocks over the next, and the next, and the next.

The Citrini essay itself had a domino effect on the market. In the immediate aftermath of its publication, the S&P500 was down 1% and companies named in the report, including Uber, American Express, Mastercard and DoorDash, all lost between 4% and 6%. That’s tens of billions of dollars in value.

The predictions in the essay are striking. But even more striking is the chain reaction it describes — and briefly managed to set off itself.

It points to a deeper truth:

Everything is connected. Nothing arises in isolation.

A war breaks out halfway across the world, and suddenly gasoline prices rise in Toronto2. A central bank decision shifts housing markets. A new technology threatens the livelihoods of people who have never written a line of code.

Interdependence goes both ways

The Buddha spoke about the interconnectivity of our world—or interdependence as it is called in Buddhist circles—in his earliest teachings:

In the intervening three thousand years, our world has become even more interconnected—particularly in the age of global finance, social media, and AI.

And yet, paradoxically, many of us feel increasingly isolated — living more individual, hyper-personalized, me-centric lives.

But there’s no escaping the truth beneath it all.

We can’t live without each other — even if, sometimes, it feels like we can’t live with each other.

We are constantly being shaped by events far beyond the borders of our own lives.

The Citrini piece is simply a dramatic illustration of this reality. A single technological shift sets off a cascade that spreads through economies, markets, and households.

But the truth runs in the other direction too.

Because if the world affects us, then we affect the world as well.

Our choices, our words, our decisions — even the small ones — move outward through the same web of connections. Often in ways we will never see.

A harsh word can travel farther than we intend.

But so can a kind one.

In an interconnected world, nothing we set in motion stops with us.

- The Buddh-ish Investor

I’d love to hear from you! Email at Sangha@TheBuddhishInvestor.com or drop a comment below!

Listen to The Buddh-ish Investor Podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify

Follow me on Bluesky: @buddhishinvestor.bsky.social

Take home points:

• Everything is interconnected. Small shocks—technological, economic, or geopolitical—can cascade through the global system in unexpected ways.

• The influence runs both ways. We’re shaped by the world around us, but our own actions send ripples outward as well.

If you’re looking for more:

• Some more Buddh-ish thoughts on interdependence:

  The Buddh-ish Investor

  Embrace complexity and win big

  Stock markets are the sum total of millions upon millions of asset exchanges each day. Retail investor A sells to Corporation B who buys from Hedge Fund C which sells to... and so on. It is dizzyingly complex…

  Read more

  2 years ago · The Buddh-i$h Investor

• Ben and Michael’s thoughtful and very human take on the Citrini article:

In this episode, I unpack the quiet misery of portfolio FOMO and why comparing your returns to the wrong benchmark guarantees dissatisfaction.

We’ll explore how the investing industry exploits our innate tendency to compare, why the bar always moves even when we’re “winning,” and what the Buddha’s concept of Right View can teach us about finding peace with our portfolios.

Plus, I share my 5 personal rules for dealing with portfolio FOMO—practical guidelines that help me step off the comparison treadmill and remember what investing is actually for.

Listen if: You’ve ever felt behind the market, questioned your investment strategy after a few bad months, or can’t stop checking your portfolio even though you’re a long-term investor.

Thanks for listening!

- The Buddh-ish Investor

Read the Substack post that inspired this podcast episode: Why I Feel Bad Every Time I Check My Portfolio

Read more: TheBuddhishInvestor.com

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Reach out at Sangha@TheBuddhishInvestor.com or drop a comment below!

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That’s the small but persistent question I face most mornings as I rush to get ready for the day. Time is precious in my life right now—especially in the morning. We’re talking about increments of minutes. A couple of minutes to make the bed. A couple of minutes I could instead put toward meditation.

Lately, I’ve been choosing the meditation.

It’s part of a broader attempt to live more deliberately—to let go of old habits and examine how I actually spend my time.

My wife has noticed. She’s used to coming home each day to an immaculately made bed. Now, the bed is often left unmade. I think she’s a little worried about me.

Meanwhile, I’m probably benefiting from both the time spent meditating and the time not spent making the bed.

Tidiness & the Illusion of Control

I’ve been a neat freak my whole life. Only recently, in my fourth decade, have I started to see that neat-freakery for what it really is: my futile attempt to impose control on an uncontrollable, chaotic, often scary world.

This impulse shows up everywhere. Tidying up. Packing the dishwasher just so. Making sure all the apps on my phone are up-to-date all the time. [I could go on. And on.]

These are deeply ingrained habits—automatic, unquestioned.

But I’ve reached a point where I’m thinking more critically about what I do and why. I’m noticing just how much time and energy I spend trying to manufacture a sense of control.

And I’m realizing that it’s not time particularly well spent.

Sure, it might scratch a small itch of insecurity in the moment. But it doesn’t help much in the long run.

Making the bed doesn’t change the fact that I’m going to die someday. That I’ll lose everything I know and love. So these days, I often leave the bed unmade—much to my wife’s chagrin.

That said, she hasn’t started making it herself either.

Rumpled Sheets & Right Effort

It’s a strange feeling, crawling into an unmade bed at night. But I’m getting used to it. That mild discomfort, settling into rumpled sheets, has become a quiet reminder that I’m trying to live with more intention—doing things because they’re genuinely good for me, not just because they momentarily make me feel in control.

In Buddhism, this distinction matters. The Eightfold Path, the Buddha’s roadmap to inner peace, includes something called Right Effort.

Despite how it sounds, Right Effort isn’t about trying harder or doing more. It’s about learning where effort actually reduces suffering—and where it doesn’t.

Some effort is skillful. Some effort, like compulsively making the bed each morning, is just busywork/distraction/delusion dressed up as responsibility.

Not Making the Bed of My Portfolio

I’ve been bringing this same perspective into my investing.

Over the past year or two, with encouragement from my financial planner, I’ve significantly simplified my portfolio. At first, the process was distressing. It felt like giving up control—even though, if I’m honest, the control I thought I had probably never translated into better returns.

What it did give me was a feeling of being in charge. Of control. The feeling I got from a military-grade made-up bed.

Since switching to an all-in-one ETF, I’ve noticed something unexpected: I think about my investments far less—and paradoxically, I think about investing more.

I get ideas for posts like this one. And more importantly, I seem to have more time and mental space to actually write them.

All because I consciously decided to stop “making the bed” of my portfolio every day.

These days, I check my brokerage account less often. I trade far less. I leave rebalancing to Vanguard. They’re better at it than I am.

And the time and energy I’ve saved? I try to put it toward things that genuinely bring me joy and peace—writing this Substack, meditating, being present in the middle of a mad morning.

The world is crazy. That’s not something we can change.

But we can acknowledge the craziness along with the finitude and impermanence of our lives. And we can choose to live as intentionally—with Right Effort—as we’re able.

Even if that means leaving the bed unmade.

- The Buddh-ish Investor

I’d love to hear from you! Email at Sangha@TheBuddhishInvestor.com or drop a comment below!

Listen to The Buddh-ish Investor Podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify

Follow me on Bluesky: @buddhishinvestor.bsky.social

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Take home points:

• Not all effort is skillful. Some of our daily habits—from making the bed to managing investments—are attempts to feel in control, even when that effort doesn’t meaningfully reduce suffering.

• Right Effort means letting go of unhelpful striving and living with intention. Choosing meditation over tidying, or simplicity over constant portfolio tinkering, can free up time, attention, and peace of mind.

If you’re looking for more:

• A counter-argument for making your bed every morning

• More Buddh-ish musings on neat-freakery:

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In this episode of The Buddh-ish Investor Podcast, I explore why the stock market feels like drinking from a firehose – with billions of shares traded daily and endless commentary pulling us in every direction – and how Buddhist wisdom can help us find our focus.

What You’ll Learn:

• Why our brains struggle with the 34 gigabytes of information bombarding us daily

• How “papañca” (mental agitation) mirrors the market’s restless monkey mind

• The research showing less active traders outperform by ~6.5% annually

• Three anchors to keep you grounded: your investment plan, financial goals, and evidence-based research

• Why the NYSE opening bell can become your daily reminder to refocus

Using the concept of the monkey mind swinging from vine to vine, discover how meditation principles can help you ignore market noise and stick to what actually builds wealth.

Perfect for: Investors struggling with information overload and anyone tempted to overtrade in response to daily market movements.

- The Buddh-ish Investor

Read the Substack post that inspired this podcast episode: The Market’s Monkey Mind

Read more: TheBuddhishInvestor.com

Follow me on Bluesky: @buddhishinvestor.bsky.social

Reach out at Sangha@TheBuddhishInvestor.com or drop a comment below!

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Humbling.

Over the past six months, my portfolio has underperformed both indices1—by a pretty good margin, too.

My first thought is obvious: “What am I doing wrong?”

That thought quickly multiplies:

• “Shouldn’t I at least be matching the market?”

• “Should I ditch my tried-and-true VGRO and just buy the S&P 500 and the TSX outright?”

• “Am I selling myself short?”

Then I try to talk myself off the ledge:

• “It’s only six months. Wealth is built over decades, not months.”

• “You want diversification—global equities and fixed income—not just Canada and the U.S.”

Eventually, as my mind eases, a different set of questions emerges:

• “Why am I even comparing my portfolio to the S&P 500 and the TSX in the first place?”

• “And who decided that I should be forced to look at this comparison every single time I log in?”

Surely not me.

Once I tumble down that rabbit hole, it’s hard not to get a little suspicious. Is this chart really here to help me? Or is it designed to cultivate just enough discomfort—just enough FOMO—to nudge me into trading more often and generating revenue for someone else?

After that brief conspiracy spiral runs its course, I look back at my portfolio, realize there’s nothing for me to do, and go on with my day.

Which raises another uncomfortable question:

Why do I even check my brokerage account anymore?

I’m not day-trading. I’ll sometimes go weeks without making a single trade. Vanguard keeps my portfolio neatly rebalanced at 80% stocks and 20% fixed income. There’s no lever for me to pull.

And yet, not checking feels irresponsible.

If I’m not watching my portfolio, I might miss something.

If I’m not paying attention, I might fall behind.

Behind the market.

Behind my peers.

Behind my goals and dreams.

FOMO hums quietly beneath it all.

The investing industry understands this about the human brain—and it exploits it. It churns out expensive products for every new investing fad2, confident that many people would rather chase the next opportunity than risk missing out.

I think that chart serves the same function.

Its job isn’t to inform me. It’s to keep me comparing.

FOMO & The Comparison Trap

Because even if my portfolio were outperforming the S&P 500 and the TSX, I wouldn’t suddenly feel at peace. I’d worry about staying ahead. I’d wonder how long the streak would last. I’d look for the next thing to beat.

In that sense, comparison—whether to market indices or to other people—is a remarkably reliable source of suffering.

We’re either falling short of expectations, or we’re anxious about losing what we have.

So what’s the solution? Just stop comparing?

Easier said than done.

Comparison is an innate feature of the human brain. It’s an unavoidable byproduct of being social creatures. Without it, we wouldn’t function very well at all.

But we can work with it.

We can notice when comparison is quietly shaping our sense of worth.

We can limit exposure to systems—like social media—that profit directly from FOMO.

And if we’re going to compare, we can be far more thoughtful about what we compare ourselves to.

Just because Drake drives a Bentley doesn’t mean I should be driving one.

Just because a coworker gets to work from home on Mondays doesn’t mean that I should too.

And just because the TSX is up 20% over six months doesn’t mean I’m falling behind if my globally diversified, balanced portfolio is only up 12%.

My portfolio was never designed to beat an all-equity Canadian or U.S. index. It was designed to support a specific life, with a specific tolerance for risk, volatility, and uncertainty.

Comparing my portfolio to the wrong benchmark doesn’t make me a bad investor—it just guarantees dissatisfaction.

When we’re in the grip of FOMO, we tend to look for happiness in the wrong places. We tell ourselves we’ll be content once we get the next toy, the nicer car, or the better-performing portfolio.

And if we do get it, the bar quietly moves.

Now we’re comparing ourselves to the next rung up.

The next benchmark.

The next chart.

It never ends.

Right View & Portfolio FOMO

The Buddha understood this dynamic more than 2,600 years ago. He taught that much of our suffering comes not from our circumstances, but from how we misunderstand them. FOMO is a misunderstanding of where happiness actually comes from.

In the Eightfold Path, the Buddha begins with Right View—seeing reality as it actually is.

Right View asks us to question the stories our minds are telling us. It asks whether happiness really comes from new toys or from comparing ourselves to others.

I think most of us understand, at least intuitively, that neither of those leads to lasting peace or contentment.

But it’s easy to forget this when we’re in the grip of FOMO, like when I see that cursed chart every time I open my brokerage account.

That’s why I’ve set some rules around checking my portfolio:

A Practice: Rules for dealing with portfolio FOMO

1. Don’t log in to your investing account unless you’re prepared to make no changes. If I already know I won’t change anything, logging in is usually curiosity dressed up as responsibility.

2. Don’t judge long-term decisions by short-term results. A diversified, balanced portfolio will underperform something most of the time. That’s not a mistake—it’s the trade-off.

3. Don’t compare your portfolio to benchmarks it wasn’t designed to beat. An 80/20 portfolio shouldn’t be competing with an all-equity index. They’re playing different games.

4. Only make portfolio changes when your life changes. New goals, a different timeline, or a real shift in risk tolerance—those are reasons to act. Market noise isn’t.

5. When the feeling of “falling behind” shows up, pause. Then remind yourself what this portfolio is for. Not to win—but to support a life you already find meaningful.

Try them out if you’re dealing with portfolio FOMO.

And consider making similar rules of engagement around other sources of FOMO in your life, like social media or real estate listings.

Even if you don’t follow the rules perfectly, the act of setting them is still useful. It’s a way of seeing your situation more clearly—with Right View—and a small step down the path toward inner peace.

- The Buddh-ish Investor

I’d love to hear from you! Email at Sangha@TheBuddhishInvestor.com or drop a comment below!

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Take home points:

• FOMO and comparison are reliable ways to make ourselves miserable.

• A good portfolio can still feel bad when it’s measured against the wrong benchmark.

• If you’re feeling portfolio FOMO, try the “Rules for dealing with portfolio FOMO” above

If you’re looking for more:

• Oliver Burkeman on JOMO—the JOY of missing out

• The Buddh-ish Investor’s collection of favourite Buddh-ish quotes: MyDailyBuddha.com

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I do. All the time.

I hear the sound of my infant son crying… but he’s no longer an infant.

I hear my wife making coffee in the kitchen… but she’s already at work.

I hear my phone ping… but it’s charging on another floor.

At this point, you’re probably thinking that the Buddh-ish Investor is finally losing it. Or that my shower is haunted. Or that I need to call a plumber.

But it’s none of those things.

What I’m experiencing is auditory pareidolia, a well-documented scientific phenomenon in which the brain misinterprets random or ambiguous sounds, like rushing water, as something familiar and meaningful: a crying baby, a loved one’s voice, a phone notification.

It’s not a hallucination.

It’s just my brain doing its thing.

Our eyes do the same thing. Check this out:

Try as you might, you can’t not see faces on the surface of Mars, in an electrical outlet, or on a slice of toast. Or that unmistakable dolphin floating in the sky.

Our brains can’t help themselves. They are sense-making machines.

Our pattern-hungry brains

When we’re faced with randomness, whether it’s water noise in a shower or clouds in the sky, the mind does what it was designed to do: it fills in meaning. Even when none is there.

This broad tendency to find patterns in noise has been called patternicity. Pareidolia is simply one vivid expression of that deeper impulse.

Patternicity isn’t just a quirky bug in the human brain. It’s probably one of the reasons we’re still here.

Our ancestors evolved in environments where missing a real pattern—say, signs of a predator—was far more costly than falsely detecting one. A false alarm meant a spike of anxiety. A missed signal could mean death. So natural selection favoured brains that erred on the side of seeing something rather than nothing.

There may be no sabre-toothed tigers lurking in shopping malls today, but we still carry that same pattern-hungry brain around in our modern skulls.

And that instinct doesn’t switch off when we open our investing accounts.

Stock market pareidolia

Investors, like everyone else, love patterns. We love spotting trends, streaks, and shapes in market data. Maybe—just maybe—we’ve found something that will help us avoid a painful loss or capture a spectacular gain.

Which investor hasn’t bought a stock after a strong run-up, quietly assuming that the “pattern” would continue?1

Perhaps there’s no better illustration of patternicity in investing than candlestick charts.

Candlesticks compress a stock’s price movements over a given period (minute, day, week) into neat little shapes. Clean visual summaries of messy reality. Here’s an example from NVIDIA on December 19, 2025:

Over time, investors have named and catalogued countless candlestick patterns. Entire books and web sites are devoted to them. To give you a flavour, some of the more famous patterns include names like “bullish abandoned baby,” “three black crows” and “hammer”:

And—my personal favourite—the Adam and Eve candle pattern:

Did American Eagle actually go on a tear in the fall of 2024, as predicted by the Adam and Eve pattern?

Honestly, I can’t even be bothered to check.

I don’t use candlestick patterns in making investing decisions2. While they probably do a better job of predicting market movements than tortilla Jesus, I think of them as the investing equivalent of hearing noises in the shower.

They take something noisy and ambiguous—price movements—and overlay a compelling pattern on top of it. But just because a pattern appears doesn’t mean there’s anything real there to respond to.

The danger here is that we mistake the pattern for a promise—and end up making a regrettable investing decision as a result.

Patternicity, as helpful as it has been to us as a species, can cause similar troubles in the rest of our lives.

The problem with patterns and what to do about it

Faced with uncertainty and randomness, our brains stitch together stories that feel explanatory and comforting, even when they rest on little more than noise. The problem isn’t that we look for patterns. The problem is how rarely we notice when we’ve invented them. We do it constantly in daily life. We read intent into a short email. Meaning into a friend’s silence. Causation into coincidence. Destiny into a brief streak of good or bad luck.

Getting the wrong end of the stick like this can land us in all sorts of trouble: seeing threats where none exist, blaming ourselves for random misfortunes, getting pulled into unnecessary conflict—you name it.

Buddhism can help here.

The Buddha laid out a path for us to follow to reduce our suffering. One of the steps on that path he called “Right View”.

Right view isn’t about having the correct explanation for what’s happening—it’s about seeing clearly how quickly the mind turns noise into meaning. We still hear the sounds in the shower and notice the patterns in markets or relationships, but we stop assuming they’re telling the whole truth.

Holding our interpretations lightly creates space for curiosity. It naturally invites questions like: What might I be missing here? What assumptions am I treating as facts?

This curiosity sets the stage for us to be more compassionate—toward others and toward ourselves. When things go wrong, we don’t have to assume it’s because we failed or someone is out to get us.

Life is far more complex than we can fathom. There are countless factors shaping our lives that we’ll never fully see. And there’s randomness too.

While we can’t stop our brains from reacting to noise—hearing babies cry in the shower or spotting patterns in market charts—we do have a choice about what we do next.

When I hear crying through the rush of water, I don’t assume something is wrong. I recognize it for what it usually is: noise being shaped into meaning by a well-intentioned but overzealous brain.

The same habit serves us well in investing and in life. Notice the pattern. Acknowledge the story. Then step back and ask whether anything real is actually happening.

- The Buddh-ish Investor

I’d love to hear from you! Email at Sangha@TheBuddhishInvestor.com or drop a comment below!

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Take home points:

• Our brains naturally turn noise into patterns, in the shower, in relationships, and in markets.

• Problems arise when we treat those patterns as facts and act on them with too much certainty.

• Right view means noticing the story the mind tells—and holding it lightly before reacting.

If you’re looking for more:

• If you want to go down the rabbit hole on candlestick patterns, check out ThePatternSite.com

• And if you want to go down the Jesus tortilla rabbit hole, check this out: Christ on the Comal

On November 20th, the index spiked to a high of 23,147 on the news of NVIDIA’s blowout earnings.

Within hours, this euphoria gave way to jitters of an “AI bubble” and the NASDAQ fell by 4.6%—about $1.5 trillion dollars in value wiped out almost immediately.

Headlines were screaming…

…but I didn’t bat an eye. Meh.

It still surprises me—how little I react to market volatility. My family has a lot tied up in the market: years of savings, our safety net, our future dreams. The stakes couldn’t be higher. And yet when the market lurches, I just… shrug.

But if my three-year-old pees his pants at daycare? I spiral.

What’s with that?

The Illusion of Control

Here’s the difference, as far as I can tell:

With investing, I’ve fully accepted that I have no control.

Wars break out. Tariffs appear overnight. CEO scandals erupt. Interest rates zig when I expect them to zag. None of this has anything to do with me.

I can’t predict recessions or stop policymakers, but I can choose how I invest. And I’ve chosen passive, globally diversified investing—the financial equivalent of a bear hug around the unknowability of markets. I don’t pretend I’m steering the ship.

But in my daily life?

I’m gripping the steering wheel like everything depends on me.

If my son has an accident at daycare, I immediately assume I should’ve coached him more. If Thanksgiving dinner turns out great, I take the victory lap. If my wife gets angry at me… well, that is probably my fault.

I definitely influence how things unfold in my life.

But how much, really?

One Captain… Out of a Thousand

A Buddhist monk named Kusala Bhikshu once put a number to it.

Kusala is a harmonica-playing, animal-loving, seventy-something monk in Los Angeles who has spent his life serving the community. He likes to say:

Okay. So I’m the captain of my life, but there are 999 other co-captains at the wheel.

Kusala’s words are humbling. Am I really that much at the whim of the universe?

But they’re also deeply refreshing.

Sharing the Blame (and Credit)

Most of the time, my life feels more like a rollercoaster than a ship. I’m strapped in the front seat, feeling queasy with every up and down.

Taking Kusala’s words to heart gives me an off-ramp from this wild ride.

A huge amount of suffering comes from the tiny bit of control I do have. When something goes wrong, I assume it’s my fault. If only I’d planned better. If only I’d been more patient. If only I’d seen it coming.

But there are 999 other forces at play: timing, weather, moods, biology, random chance, other people’s choices… and so on.

They deserve some blame too.

And honestly? They deserve some credit when things go well.

This mindset has helped me chill out, be kinder to myself, and stop taking every bump in the road as a moral commentary on my competence.

A Small Story From Yesterday

Yesterday my son woke up way too early at 6:00 AM, demanded candy for breakfast, and then refused to get ready for daycare. Meanwhile, I had an 8:30 meeting that I couldn’t miss.

Old me would have spiralled: Did I put him to bed too late? Am I giving him too much sugar? Why does this always happen when I’ve got a meeting I can’t miss?!

Instead, I took a breath and reminded myself of the 999 other captains at the wheel:

He’s in a developmental phase.

He’s getting over a cold.

He’s three.

I’m just one cause out of a thousand.

So I gave him a vitamin D gummy, put a tutu over his snowsuit (don’t ask), and somehow got him to daycare in time for me to swing a coffee before the meeting.

It wasn’t perfect. But it worked.

Just Like the Market

It’s exactly the same with investing.

If we obsess over every bump—like the NASDAQ’s drop last month—we make ourselves miserable. We end up surprised, disappointed, reactive… and often we do the worst possible thing: we bail out of the market.

But when we accept the radical uncontrollability of markets, we can stay invested through the chaos and come out ahead.

And when we accept the radical uncontrollability of life, we can stay grounded through its chaos and come out kinder, wiser, and more resilient.

In both cases, we stop gripping the wheel and start enjoying the ride. Wee!

- The Buddh-ish Investor

I’d love to hear from you! Email at Sangha@TheBuddhishInvestor.com or drop a comment below!

Subscribe now

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Take home points:

• You control only a small part of what happens in life and markets, so stop treating every outcome like it’s all on you.

• Letting go of the illusion of control helps you stay calm, adaptable, and steady through both market swings and everyday chaos.

If you’re looking for more:

• If you’re looking for more Kusala, check out his podcast:

• One buyer offers $1 million in cash.

• Another offers $1 million worth of Bitcoin.

Which would you take?

I know my answer. And I’d wager most people would take the million dollars in cash. Cash feels like the safer bet. Cash is what we know and trust.

But some would take the Bitcoin.

They’d point to the astronomical rise in the cryptocurrency’s value over the years:

They’d also point out that Bitcoin is going more mainstream. Major financial institutions, like JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley, are starting to take interest. Heck, you can even use Bitcoin to buy real-world things: cars, houses and over-priced pizza.

Despite Bitcoin’s growing value and adoption, many people remain cautious or hesitant. Some of it comes down to the wild price swings. Some of it is all the bad press—the scams, the crashes, the environmental concerns.

I think there’s a deeper reason that rarely surfaces in these debates, one that gets to the heart of why Bitcoin feels so unsettling to so many people:

Bitcoin challenges our deeply held ideas about what currency should be.

When you think “currency,” you think cash, bills, coins, bank vaults. You think of something tangible, backed by governments, printed in secure facilities. You don’t think of numbers on a screen, of blockchain, of something that exists purely as distributed data.

Bitcoin strips away the trappings of traditional money. In doing so, it disrupts how we see the world.

Simplifying the world in order to live in it

There’s a concept in Buddhism called signlessness.

It teaches that reality is not what it seems. We assign signs—labels, concepts, categories—to every aspect of life and reality in order to function in the world. Without these labels, we’d be lost. Reality is far too complex for us to wrap our heads around unless we simplify it.

Money is a perfect example of a sign. It’s worthless paper or metal, but we collectively, as a society, assign great value to it. We use it as a means to exchange goods, time, and labor. We all trust in it.

Imagine a world in which we didn’t all trust in the sign of money. How would you react, the next time you’re at the store, and the teller refuses to accept your $20 bill saying “that’s just a worthless piece of paper”?

Modern life relies utterly on the sign of money. It makes the world go ‘round.

When our labels become prisons

As useful (and necessary) as signs are, they also carry heavy baggage with them. They can cause us a great deal of suffering, particularly when we hold too firmly to a sign or when we mistake the sign for reality itself. In doing so, we close ourselves off from a deeper understanding of what’s actually in front of us.

Here’s an example. Think about your last negative encounter with another person, whether at home, at work, or in passing. Maybe your brain immediately labeled them: jerk, narcissist, or <insert political party affiliation here>:

Your mind came up with a convenient label and an associated narrative. But in doing so, it glossed over the complexity of that person.

No one is just a jerk. They’re a whole human being with a history, with struggles you can’t see, with good days and bad days. Maybe that person is going through something devastating right now. Maybe they just received terrible news. Maybe they’re dealing with chronic pain or grief or fear that has nothing to do with you.

The sign or label we assign to a person doesn’t do them justice.

A real-world Bitcoin use case: Teaching us about signlessness

Signlessness teaches us to reach for a deeper understanding, to hold our labels lightly, to remember that our categories are useful fictions, not ultimate truths.

Perhaps the best “use case” for Bitcoin is the valuable lesson it teaches us about our beliefs around money and the world in general:

Our unwillingness to see the full reality beyond the sign—that Bitcoin is a viable currency or that jerk is actually a suffering human—causes suffering.

It keeps us from understanding others. It keeps us from adapting to change. It keeps us trapped in a narrower version of reality than the one that actually exists.

The real question isn’t whether you’d take the Bitcoin or the cash.

The real question is: what do your signs prevent you from seeing?

- The Buddh-ish Investor

I’d love to hear from you! Email at Sangha@TheBuddhishInvestor.com or drop a comment below!

Subscribe now

Share

Take home points:

• Bitcoin feels uncomfortable to many people not just because of volatility or risk, but because it challenges our fundamental assumptions about what money “should be.”

• We suffer when we mistake our signs and labels for reality.

  ---

If you’re looking for more:

• Noah Rasheta unpacks signlessness on the Secular Buddhism podcast:

• If you have your doubts about Bitcoin, best steer clear of Shitcoins (yes, that’s their actual name):

  

  Thanks for reading The Buddh-ish Investor! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

I'm sitting on the front porch of a rustic cottage, looking out on a still pond on this beautiful early autumn evening. I couldn't ask for more ideal circumstances to just sit and be—to do nothing at all.

Yet my mind is unsettled. I'm preoccupied with mosquitoes, the week ahead, whether to have another drink. It strikes me how difficult it is to simply do nothing. Our minds are restless, constantly prodded into action by FOMO, feelings of inadequacy, and compulsions to always be productive.

The Restless Portfolio

These same devils that torture us on quiet porches also plague our investing lives. We have a strong tendency toward action when inaction is often what a situation demands.

During market volatility, we feel compelled to do something—anything—rather than sit with uncertainty.

But there's more to doing nothing than just resisting the urge to act.

We need to set the stage for doing nothing, both in life and in our portfolios.

In investing, this means constructing a portfolio that will work under all circumstances without requiring constant intervention. If your entire portfolio consists of NVIDIA shares or complex derivatives, you can't afford to do nothing—you'll be forced into reactive trading, constantly monitoring and adjusting.

But when you're broadly diversified across asset classes and properly allocated to meet your long-term goals, you can comfortably do nothing beyond regular contributions and periodic rebalancing. The portfolio itself becomes a vehicle for peace of mind, designed specifically to free you from the need to constantly monitor markets and second-guess decisions.

Consider the parallel: just as a well-constructed portfolio lets you sleep through market storms, preparing our minds for stillness helps us navigate life's chaos with greater equanimity.

The challenge of stillness

How does this portfolio wisdom help me here on this porch, trying to wrangle my brain into feeling okay with doing nothing?

In my younger days, before jobs, mortgages, and family responsibilities, I could easily unwind on Friday nights with all my work done for the week. There was genuinely nothing urgent to do, so I could lose myself in TV or read for hours on end.

But that wasn't really doing nothing—that was distracting myself from doing nothing. I used entertainment as a buffer against the discomfort of pure stillness, much like how we now use our phones, our anxieties, our endless mental to-do lists.

The difference now is that there's never truly nothing to do. At any given moment, I can think of ten things I've been avoiding or should be tackling. Simply pretending these don't exist feels like torture and is definitely still doing something.

The Buddha's answer

The Buddha's solution was radical: aimlessness.

The basic idea is that peace and contentment lie within us and are not found in external achievements or circumstances.

This concept gets an unfair reputation, often conflated with laziness or lack of ambition. But aimlessness is neither of those things. A person can embody aimlessness while still accomplishing great things. The Buddha himself, maybe history’s most aimless person, launched a religion/philosophy that has endured for over two millennia and continues to reduce suffering worldwide.

The key difference is motivation. With aimlessness, we can set out to accomplish great things, but we don't depend on the outcomes of our actions for our sense of peace or self-worth. We don't have to earn contentment through productivity (despite what Western culture has been drilling into our heads).

Swimming against the current

How do we learn to live more aimlessly? How can we swim against this relentless current of constant doing?

One approach mirrors our portfolio strategy: we can deliberately create space for aimlessness. Just as we construct portfolios that allow us to sit back during market turmoil, we can structure our lives to include guilt-free periods of non-doing. This might mean blocking out time with no agenda, creating physical spaces designed for rest, or simply practicing the radical act of sitting still without immediately reaching for our phones.

Another way, as Oliver Burkeman explores in "Four Thousand Weeks," is to embrace our finitude. We'll never complete our infinite mental to-do lists, so we might as well lay down our swords occasionally.

The Practice

As I sit here with the evening light fading, contemplating these ideas isn't exactly doing nothing—it's work toward the goal of doing nothing. Sometimes the path to stillness requires effort, just as building a low-maintenance portfolio requires initial design.

The art lies in recognizing when we're genuinely resting versus just distracting ourselves. True aimlessness is about finding the courage to be present without immediately needing to do something.

Perhaps that's enough “doing something” for now. Time to let my mind drift and be as still as the pond in the golden evening light.

- The Buddh-ish Investor

I’d love to hear from you! Email at Sangha@TheBuddhishInvestor.com or drop a comment below!

Take home points:

• Build systems that let you do nothing: Smart investors construct portfolios that don't need constant tinkering—apply the same principle to your life.

• Stop earning your peace: Contentment isn't a reward for productivity—it's your natural state that culture has trained you to forget.

If you’re looking for more:

• Watching the Wheels: John Lennon’s divine ode to doing nothing:

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Why do I own companies tied to war, climate change denial, and even child labor?

In my defense, I also hold a bunch of virtuous companies:

So why don't I just ditch the bad ones and keep the good ones?

The Buddha certainly would’ve endorsed this based on his teachings in the Pali canon 2,600 years ago:

“there are these five trades that should not be practiced by a lay follower. Which five? Business in weapons, business in human beings, business in meat, business in intoxicants, and business in poison”

- Aṅguttara Nikāya 5.177, Vanijja Sutta

But it’s not so straightforward to ditch the baddies. All of these companies—good and bad—are bundled together in VGRO2, my primary portfolio holding.

The next question is obvious: couldn't I just sell VGRO and switch to a fund of only “good” companies?

Yes, I could. This is the whole premise of ESG investing.

ESG and why it falls short

ESG stands for Environmental, Social, and Governance—a trend that has gained momentum in recent years. Companies tout their virtues to appeal to socially minded and environmentally conscious investors. There are entire funds dedicated to this approach.

But ESG investing has some drawbacks. While it's supposed to measure how responsible or ethical companies are, it can fall short. ESG ratings can be inconsistent, sometimes rewarding companies for good disclosure paperwork rather than actual real-world impact3. Many ESG funds end up looking surprisingly similar to broad market funds, often holding some of the very same companies with questionable reputations4.

Perfection or bust?

ESG investing might be a step in the right direction, but it’s not perfect. Perhaps perfection—being absolutely ethical—can only be achieved by avoiding the stock market and capitalism altogether.

After all, capitalism is mired in human tragedy. It has driven incredible progress, yes—modern medicine, global connectivity, prosperity for billions. But at what cost? The same system that built hospitals also built sweatshops. The same markets that created wealth also created devastating inequality and environmental destruction.

We’re told to ‘take the good with the bad’ when it comes to capitalism. But when the bad includes child slavery, deforestation, and crushing inequality, how can we simply accept it?

It’s enough to drive a person to throw up their hands and go live in a cave.

But that just isn’t practical. We are all completely enmeshed in capitalism—through our purchases, jobs and investments. There’s no getting away from it.

We have to find a way to live in this world as imperfect as it is. This is the whole basis of Buddhism. It meets people where—and when—they are.

The Buddha’s world of 2,600 years ago also had its share of problems—constant warfare, inhumane justice systems, slavery, famine, gender inequality and more. He created a set of beliefs and practices that helped the people of that time navigate the world they lived in.

If there had been a stock market in India in 5th century BCE, something tells me that the Buddha would’ve been okay with people investing their money in it. So long as they did it with the intention of minimizing harm to others and using any wealth accumulated to improve the world and lives of those around them.

Passive investing, active good

I don’t like the fact that I’m actively supporting warmongers and climate change deniers in my portfolio.

But, for now, I’m going to keep VGRO.

Am I violating the Buddha’s prohibition on investing in weapons and harmful businesses? Technically, yes. But the Buddha wasn’t a hardliner—he encouraged people to take steps toward less harm rather than demanding perfection. This is my imperfect step.

I believe passive investing, even with its moral compromises, can be a vehicle for good when combined with intentional action.

Here’s my logic:

• Time is a form of capital. Every hour I’d spend researching ESG funds, comparing holdings, and rebalancing toward ‘cleaner’ companies is an hour I’m not spending on direct impact5. I could use that time to volunteer at a community kitchen or do something to improve the world around me.

• Wealth can be redirected. Passive investing consistently builds wealth over time. That wealth doesn’t have to stay locked in the market. It can fund a neighbor’s GoFundMe, support a local community aid organization, or help family members in need.

• Perfect portfolios don’t exist. Even ‘ethical’ funds often hold questionable companies. And even if they didn’t, no publicly traded company operates in a capitalism-free bubble.

The Buddha gets it

The Buddha doesn’t demand perfection from us—or our portfolios. He understood deeply that we live in a messy world and that we can only do our best to navigate it as skillfully as possible. He encouraged people to take steps toward less harm, more kindness, and greater freedom.

I believe that our portfolios can hold troubling companies like ExxonMobil or Halliburton, and we can still choose to live in ways that tilt the balance toward good—through our actions, intentions, and generosity.

It’s not perfect, but maybe it’s good enough.

- The Buddh-ish Investor

Listen to The Buddh-ish Investor Podcast

Follow me on Bluesky: @buddhishinvestor.bsky.social

Reach out at Sangha@TheBuddhishInvestor.com or drop a comment below!

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Take home points:

• Investing is ethically messy. It’s hard to avoid companies with “bad” practices—even with approaches like ESG.

• Imperfect doesn’t mean we can’t do good. Even if our portfolios or financial lives are ethically fraught, we can still leverage what they bring us (e.g., wealth, time) to do good in the world around us.

If you’re looking for more:

• The Stranger in the Woods - a fascinating account of Christopher Knight, who renounced capitalism and the other trappings of modern society and lived in the woods of Maine for 27 years:

  

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In this debut episode of The Buddh-ish Investor Podcast, I share my struggle with selling underperforming bond ETFs that had been dragging down my portfolio for years – and the breakthrough moment that finally gave me courage to let them go.

What You’ll Learn:

- Why the “disposition effect” keeps us clinging to losing investments

- How loss aversion costs investors an estimated 4% per year

- The transformative power of having a trusted financial advisor

- Why focusing on future potential beats dwelling on past performance

Using the metaphor of a centuries-old Buddhist statue hidden under clay, discover how the right guidance can help chip away obstacles preventing clear-headed investment decisions.

Thanks for listening!

- The Buddh-ish Investor

Read the Substack post that inspired this podcast episode: How I Finally Sold My Losers (& Found My Financial Golden Buddha)

Read more: TheBuddhishInvestor.com

Follow me on Bluesky: @buddhishinvestor.bsky.social

Reach out at Sangha@TheBuddhishInvestor.com or drop a comment below!

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Could you stomach losing 10% of your portfolio?

20%?

50%?

90%?

I’ve always thought of myself as risk-averse. I shy away from speculative, risk-on type investments like options, crypto, or leveraged ETFs. I prefer a globally diversified mix of stocks and fixed income—a portfolio that feels, at least in theory, safe.

It runs in the family. My father keeps his money in Guaranteed Investment Certificates (GICs)1 with guaranteed but inflation-lagging returns. His father? He probably tucked spare cash under his mattress.

Early in my investing career, I would have said I could only handle a 10% drop, if that. The thought of losing my hard-earned savings felt unbearable.

But over time, my answer has changed. Not because I’ve become a thrill-seeker, or because I like risk any more than before. If anything, the stakes are higher now: I have a family, debt, and retirement on the horizon. I still don’t like risk.

But I know I can live with it. Because I’ve lived through it.

In 2020, when the COVID crash wiped 34% off the S&P 500 in a matter of weeks, I didn’t sell. I held steady and even kept buying. It was deeply uncomfortable—I wrestled with doubts all the way down and all the way back up. But I came out the other side, scarred and steadier.

That experience taught me more about risk than any book, blog, or podcast ever could. They told me drawdowns happen; they didn’t teach me what I would do in the middle of one.

Legendary investing writer Fred Schwed Jr. said it best in his 1940 classic Where Are The Customers' Yachts? after living through the cataclysmic 1929 crash, which saw the market dip 90%2:

Schwed might as well have been talking about Buddhism too. You have to experience it to really get it.

I’ve spent hundreds of hours reading about its history and philosophy. I’ve accumulated a conceptual understanding. But concepts aren’t reality—they’re just our brain’s attempt to make sense of it.

I didn’t really understand Buddhism until I tried to live it. To “walk the walk” instead of just “talking the talk.” That practice has been uncomfortable too—challenging my view of myself, even reality itself. Accepting that suffering is unavoidable. Trying to get better at carrying it. Living more skillfully according to the Noble 8-fold Path.

Investing and Buddhism have both taught me this: you can’t learn what something feels like from the outside. You only learn by being in it.

Markets will crash. Life will hurt. The only real question is: when it happens, how will you carry yourself through it?

- The Buddh-ish Investor

I’d love to hear from you! Email at Sangha@TheBuddhishInvestor.com or drop a comment below!

Take home points:

• You don’t really know your risk tolerance until you live through a downturn; the 2020 crash taught me more about investing than any book or podcast.

• Like Buddhism, investing is something you can’t just study. You have to practice, endure discomfort, and “walk the walk” to truly understand it.

If you’re looking for more:

• Take Vanguard Investor Questionnaire if you want to get a sense of your investing risk tolerance

The collective gasp was almost audible.

When Warren Buffett announced at Berkshire Hathaway's annual shareholder meeting on May 3rd that he would step down as CEO by year's end, the reaction of the investing world was that of shock and surprise:

Everybody saw it coming, and no one did.

For over half a century, Buffett was Berkshire. Since 1970, he has transformed it from a struggling textile company into a trillion-dollar conglomerate. His name is woven into its fabric as tightly as Steve Jobs with Apple or Coco Chanel with Chanel.

To lose Buffett is to lose a piece of what Berkshire is.

And more than that, it is to be reminded that death waits for us all and impermanence is the rule, not the exception.

Denying death & impermanence

We do a good job of denying death in the Western world. We sanitize it with euphemisms—people "pass away" or are "lost" rather than dying. Most deaths happen hidden away in hospitals and care facilities. We pour billions into anti-aging treatments, desperately trying to outrun the inevitable.

Buffett's frank admission that he's too old and frail to continue running Berkshire cuts through this comfortable delusion. At 94, he's acknowledged the reality of physical decline while maintaining the mental clarity to recognize when it's time to let go.

This kind of honesty about mortality is jarring. Especially coming from someone we could always count on being around. He has been a constant in a world that is anything but. The same can be said for folks like Bob Dylan, the Dalai Lama, Willie Nelson, Clint Eastwood, Queen Elizabeth II and Buffett’s late buddy Charlie Munger.

Their constancy flies in the face of mortality and impermanence and helps lull us into a sense of complacency.

So when these icons eventually step back or pass away, we're genuinely shocked. The ground beneath our feet shifts. We're forced to confront the impermanence we've been so carefully avoiding.

Buffett’s Final Lesson

Buffett has always been generous with his wisdom:

"Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful"

"Time in the market beats timing the market"

“Most institutional and individual investors will find the best way to own common stock is through an index fund that charges minimal fees.”

These were lessons in money. But his resignation—a quiet, honest acknowledgment that his time is finite—might be his greatest lesson of all.

And every one of us would do well to be as honest with ourselves about our mortality as Buffett is. Even if we aren’t in our 9th decade of life.

Acknowledging death's inevitability opens the door to richer, more intentional living. We appreciate what we have because there will come a time when we don’t have it anymore.

This is what the Buddha was getting at when he coined the 5 Remembrances—5 things we should regularly remind ourselves of toward living a more fulfilled life:

1. I am of the nature to grow old. There is no way to escape growing old.

2. I am of the nature to have ill health. There is no way to escape having ill health.

3. I am of the nature to die. There is no way to escape death.

4. All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change. There is no way to escape being separated from them.

5. My actions are my only true belongings.

The Buddha probably would’ve high-fived Buffett as he walked off the stage that day back in May.

The Oracle of Omaha schooled us all for the final time - not with a stock pick or market prediction, but with a master class in letting go and facing mortality head-on.

- The Buddh-ish Investor

I’d love to hear from you! Email at Sangha@TheBuddhishInvestor.com or drop a comment below!

Take home points:

• Comfort in permanence is an illusion. We find reassurance in long-lasting figures like Buffett, Dylan, or other enduring leaders because their persistence creates a comforting sense of stability. But this comfort blinds us to the reality that everything—no matter how seemingly permanent—eventually ends.

• Contemplating mortality enhances gratitude. Rather than waiting until we're forced to confront impermanence, actively thinking about our mortality now can help us appreciate what we have while we still have it. The shock of endings like Buffett's resignation reminds us that recognizing life's temporary nature makes everything more precious.

If you’re looking for more:

• Another seeming immortal facing his own mortality—”It's not dark yet, but it's gettin' there”:

• A powerful guided meditation from Noah Rasheta on impermanence

Nick Cave, meet Ben Carlson.

Ben, meet Nick.

Aw-Shucks Mid-westerner, meet Vampire Poet.

I greatly doubt Nick and Ben have ever met each other.

They live in different worlds. Nick in the world of poetry and concert halls. Ben in the world of stocks and bonds. Nick, when he’s not jet-setting, lives in sunny California. Ben lives with his wife and young children in Michigan. Nick is partial to black. Ben to tropical t-shirts.

I can’t imagine a scenario where they’d end up in the same room together.

So I’m taking the liberty of introducing them here.

Something tells me they’d like each other. Or at least would quickly discover that they have more than a little in common.

As a start, both are prolific “men of letters.”

Ben has pumped out weekly posts on his blog ‘A Wealth of Common Sense’ since 2013. Not to mention 4 books along the way.

Nick just published issue #334 of his beloved The Red Hand Files, in which he thoughtfully responds to questions—big, small and deeply personal—posed by his fans. He has also penned 2 novels, 4 screenplays and two dozen albums of original music.

Both are versatile. Nick acts in movies, performs soul-quaking concerts around the world, and even glazes ceramic figurines. Ben helms two podcasts and, in his day job, advises individuals and institutions on their investments.

Both are regimented. Ben religiously exercises despite everything else he’s juggling. Nick goes to his office daily regardless of whether he feels inspired or not to create. And he literally jumps in a lake every day.

After the usual pleasantries—what do you do, where are you from—their conversation might drift toward something heavier, something that's been weighing on both their minds: death.

Ben might share that his brother Jon died at age 45 of pancreatic cancer earlier this year, leaving behind his wife and three young kids. As he shared in a poignant ode to his brother called ‘There Goes My Hero,’ the loss bowled him over:

At times, I’ve felt like there’s a black cloud hanging over my head. Other times, it’s as if there is a dull knife stuck in the back of my head. Sometimes it crashes into you all at once like a wave…I’m heartbroken, but we have to keep moving forward. That’s what he wanted.

Nick would solemnly nod his head hearing of Ben’s grief. He’s had his own dealings with death and profound loss.

In 2015, his 15-year-old son Arthur died following a fall from a 60-foot cliff. The immediate aftermath, as you probably don’t want to imagine, was horrific:

“It was just absolute emotional chaos 24/7, all the time…we had no control over anything.”

- Nick Cave, in a 2017 interview with Noisey

There’d be a pause in the conversation, then Nick, recognizing the raw grief in Ben’s eyes, would clear his throat and offer up something like:

“…what seems unbearable ultimately turns out not to be unbearable at all…To my great surprise, I discovered that I was part of a common human story…I learned we all actually die. I realised that although each of us is special and unique, our pain and brokenness is not.”

- Nick Cave, The Red Hand Files, Issue #331

Nick himself has found comfort in the universality of death and grief.

On the album Ghosteen, his own ode to his lost loved one, Nick recounted the Buddhist parable of the mustard seed:

Kisa had a baby but the baby died
Goes to the villagers says my baby’s sick
Villagers shake their heads and say to her
Better bury your baby in the forest quick

Kisa went to the mountain and asked the Buddha
My baby’s sick! Buddha said, don’t cry
Go to each house and collect a mustard seed
But only from a house where no one’s died

Kisa went to each house in the village
My baby’s getting sicker, poor Kisa cried
But Kisa never collected one mustard seed
Because in every house someone had died

Kisa sat down in the old village square
She hugged her baby and cried and cried
She said everybody is always losing somebody
Then walked into the forest and buried her child

- Excerpt from Hollywood by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds (2019)

Kisa, like Nick, was only able to wrap her head around the death of her child upon realizing that she wasn’t alone in her suffering. Every person in every house of her village had been touched by death.

Hearing this, Ben might think of his podcast co-host Michael Batnick, who lost his mother young, and of the countless readers who shared their own grief stories after 'There Goes My Hero.' The sting remains, but it's easier to bear knowing we all carry it.

The conversation would end with a knowing nod. Both would carry away the same truth: whether we deal in stocks or songs, wear tropical shirts or funeral black, we're bound together by the universal currency of loss—and the unexpected grace of finding we're not alone in it.

On his drive home, Ben might find himself listening to Ghosteen for the first time. Nick might bookmark 'A Wealth of Common Sense,' curious about this Midwesterner who understands that life's most valuable assets can't be quantified. Their different worlds bridged by shared grief.

- The Buddh-ish Investor

I’d love to hear from you! Email at Sangha@TheBuddhishInvestor.com or drop a comment below!

Take home points:

• Grief is universal, not unique. While our individual losses feel devastatingly personal, the experience of profound grief connects us to every human who has ever loved and lost - making us part of a larger human story rather than isolated in our pain.

• Shared suffering creates unexpected bonds. People from completely different worlds—whether they're rock stars or financial advisors—can find deep connection through their common experiences with loss, revealing that our humanity transcends surface differences.

If you’re looking for more:

• Ben opening up about his brother’s death on Animal Spirits:

• Nick’s palpable grief on this song from Skeleton Tree, an album recorded in the immediate aftermath of his son Arthur’s death: