The delusion of tidying up & active trading
The things we do to deny the chaotic truth of reality
I recently swore off house-scrolling on HouseSigma (Canada's version of Zillow). It’s a bad habit I picked up a few years back while my family and I were looking for a new home. We got the home, but I kept looking at other listings.
I'm not sure what I was looking for. Was it a perverse need to see all the "ones that got away?" Or a desperate attempt to validate the decision that we made ("well, OUR place was a much better deal than THIS one")? Or was it strictly as entertainment/distraction? Maybe all of the above.
Whatever my reasons, it gradually became clear to me that it wasn't the best use of my time. It's not as if my family and I were keen on another move.
Worse still, I realized that seeing an endless parade of "move-in ready", white-washed, professionally staged and photographed houses made me a little unhappy.
What goes through your mind when you see a photo like this, dear reader?:
For me, it’s a feeling of inadequacy.
My living room doesn’t come close to being as “Scandi” or immaculate as that one. Our couch is one big butt groove, the coffee table is heavily stained with actual coffee, and, most of the time, it looks like someone overturned a wheelbarrow of broken toys right in the middle of the room.
Definitely not move-in ready.
I mostly understand the absurdity here. No one’s house looks like the ones on Zillow or HouseSigma. And even if it does, it’s only for a few short minutes after it’s been cleaned. Before the dog runs through the door with muddy paws, the baby spills the entire milk carton on the kitchen floor, or the spouse cooks one of their epic meals (and you, the resident Neat Freak, are on clean-up duty).
But even knowing this, it’s a hard compulsion to shake.
Deleting my HouseSigma account helped.
However, this sense of inadequacy goes far beyond house envy.
The delusions of perfection & control
I'm a perfectionist in recovery. A certified certifiable neat freak. I prefer a neat and tidy environment with everything in its place. Having things like this makes me feel in control. Even though this is a laughable delusion.
Having a child 3 years ago was the death blow to my illusion of a neat and tidy life. Keeping the house clean with a toddler around is a Sisyphean task. Like this guy trying to mop up the beach (my all-time favourite GIF):
Instead in my case it's LEGO pieces, stickers, partially eaten crayons, socks, unidentifiable organic nuggets and all the other detritus of toddler life.
I have had similar struggles with my portfolio. From constant tweaking to get the allocation just right (75:25? Or is it 80:20? Or 60:40?) to ensuring I hold only the "best" funds.
And it extends pretty much into every other aspect of my life, including my journey along the Buddhist path: Striving for the perfect meditation, reading only the most authoritative texts, listening to the most insightful dharma talks, demanding puritanical pursuit of Buddhist principles (while constantly falling flat on my face).
It's exhausting. And all in vain. I've come to realize that all this tweaking and tidying are my futile attempts at self-soothing in the face of the untidy chaos of reality. I exert the little control that I actually do have to feel better about the fact that pretty much everything is outside of my control.
I think this mentality underlies a lot of active stock-trading. At some level the active trader knows that he or she is just straight-up speculating, that the market is beyond their fathoming. So, as a balm against this scary notion, they do something: day-trading, options trading, buying triple-leveraged ETFs, etc. These risky strategies might make the trader some money, but mostly it just feeds their delusion of control.
Let the imperfect light in
I've committed to stop feeding my own delusion of control and to start radically accepting the imperfections of life:
I still clean up after my son, BUT now I make a point to leave a stray sock here and there.
I still tweak my portfolio, BUT I try not to agonize if my allocation is more than 5% off of target.
I still have a regular Buddhist/mindful practice, BUT I'm okay with it being just daily-ish.
This is not a comfortable process for me. I’m trying to unwind decades of perfectionistic tendencies and expectations, to break all those strongly reinforced neuronal connections in my brain.
Self-compassion helps. I’m doing metta or loving-kindness meditations regularly and just generally cutting myself more slack. I feel a little more at peace and comfortable in my own skin.
Gratitude helps too. Letting go of perfectionistic expectations has created space for me to appreciate and be grateful for the many good, but not 100% perfect things in my life (which is everything basically). The more perfectionistic me couldn’t give these things their full due. But there’s so much beauty in imperfection, which the incomparable Leonard Cohen put so eloquently:
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in- Leonard Cohen, Anthem
Scrolling houses on HouseSigma reinforced my delusion that life can be perfect, but my life isn't perfect. It left me constantly wanting more—while not completely enjoying or embracing the good, but imperfect things I already had.
So the next time you find yourself mindlessly scrolling pristine living rooms and “spa retreat” bathrooms on Zillow or Realtor.com or HouseSigma or whatever, think of this image:
Scandi perfection, meet messy, beautiful reality.
Thanks for reading!
- The Buddh-i$h Investor
Big points
The chaos and uncertainty of reality can be very unsettling to us human beings.
To cope with this uncertainty, we have a tendency to delude ourselves into thinking that we have more control than we actually do. So we keep our houses spic ‘n’ span and are disappointed with anything less then perfection in our lives.
Opening ourselves up to imperfection can help us get in touch with the true nature of reality (i.e., messiness).
If you’re looking for more:
The Imperfectionist newsletter by Oliver Burkeman. Burkeman is a fellow perfectionist in recovery and generously offers advice, much of it with a Buddhist bent, on how you can give up the fight/delusion too.
If you’re struggling to kick the house-scrolling habit: How to break your Zillow addiction from the New Yorker