We Need To Believe That We're Good

Who Would You Trust Right Now? Which Bank Would You Trust? Which Investment Would You Trust? Do You Really Want To Put Your Money; Do You Want To Suffer More Of These Losses That We Just Had? You Know, These Volatility That We See Is Just Unexplainable By Any Rational Standards. Nobody Has Any Clue About How To Explain This, And Nobody Wants To Experience That. So, We Hold More Money Back, We Don't Necessarily Want To Invest In The Market And By Default, People Are Saving More.

Money Actually Becomes Even More Difficult Than Other Things Because It's Very Hard To Imagine What The Benefits Are To Saving. So, Imagine That You See A New Bicycle, A New Pair Of Shoes, Or Something Today. You Know Exactly What You Are Giving Up If You Are Not Buying It, What Are You Gaining In The Future If You Are Not Getting It. So, You Are Giving Up The Bicycle Today, What Is It In The Future? What Will Happen If You Send Another $1,000 To Your Retirement Fund? What Difference Will It Make? It Is Very, Very Hard To Figure Out.

But Suppose We Are Nothing More Than The Sum Of Our First, Naive, Random Behaviors. What Then?

The Companies That Provide Debt, What Do You Think Their Goal Is? Is Their Goal For You To Fully Understand The Cost Of Your Debt? No. So They're Basically Creating These Approaches To Make You Feel Like It Is Incredibly Cheap Or Just To Think About The Cost Per Day Rather The Cost Per Year Or Cost For A Lifetime. So Debt Is Very Simple Mistake.

We All Want Explanations For Why We Behave As We Do And For The Ways The World Around Us Functions. Even When Our Feeble Explanations Have Little To Do With Reality. We’re Storytelling Creatures By Nature, And We Tell Ourselves Story After Story Until We Come Up With An Explanation That We Like And That Sounds Reasonable Enough To Believe. And When The Story Portrays Us In A More Glowing And Positive Light, So Much The Better.