Ce ne pas la réalité

I don’t know much philosophy and by that I mean, I don’t know stuff important philosophers have said or thought. I don’t consider it a weakness. Any philosophical knowledge I’ve gained was by accident after reading some random blog, book or social media post. My failure to specifically seek this knowledge is not because I look down on philosophy, or think philosophers are crackpots. I have at least read Camus and Satre. Contrarily, I look up to them as serious thinkers or at least as people who had their minds in the right state. It’s that I don’t find most of it to be useful to me personally in my day-to-day living. That is to say that even if it is, I am not equipped to recall philosophical musings in the heat of the moment, so such knowledge is totally lost on me.

Another problem I have with philosophy is that it seems to be organized into schools of thought, kind of like religion. Yet I find myself agreeing with this thinker, and that one, even when their ideas contradict each other on various issues i.e. they are from different schools. So rather than subscribe to philosophical ideas, I think for myself. Any philosophical knowledge I accidentally happen upon I put through the grinders in my brain and form my own conclusions about what I think is true, or at least sensible to me. Of course, this process is biased to my own subjective views, but in the process of thinking through the new ideas, I truly entertain them, going as far as to test them out in my life so I can conclusively reject or accept them as helpful or not, at least for me. I learned not so long ago that French intellectual culture is like this and ever since I’ve no longer been surprised that Quantitative Finance owes its earliest roots to French thinkers. Two things drive French intellectualism, novelty-seeking and an unwillingness to take things as granted. This is why the French are always innovative and always pushing the limits in many areas of life and it’s super useful for finance because finance is one of the places where old ways of doing things stick around much longer than they need to. Here’s a case-in-point.

It’s easy to see how these two qualities would make one love mathematics. In mathematics, you work it out and you clearly see how things interact, changing each other and canceling out until you get to the final answer. Despite my love for mathematics, I find most mathematical texts annoying because you rarely have all the prerequisite theorems ready. It takes a while before you have amassed enough knowledge to enjoy reading one. Before then, you have to study your mathematics as if you are trying to solve a local murder with limited evidence. By the way, If you are enrolled in a mathematical course of some sort, let me give you some free unsolicited advice. Separate your studies into things you do to advance your knowledge, and things you do to pass exams, and stay on top of the latter at all costs. You can always advance your knowledge later on, but those exams have an expiry date. I think this works for non-mathematical courses as well maybe.

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that I struggle with anything that presents itself as a universal truth, or prescribed formula. I work through everything case by case. Unlike most people, I do not have the need to have something to hold on to. If you want to be psychoanalytical about it, yes, it’s because in my childhood, life conspired so that most of what I could have held on to for safety was taken away. As a result, the anxiety that most people feel when they do not have a psychological safe spot is something I can tolerate with relative ease and I have also gained experience, from a young age, of having to find life answers on my own.

When you are forced to face life so head-on, you develop realism. Realism is the ability to see things as they are, but that is a grandiose claim to make of oneself. I am well aware that we all have biases; no one truly sees things as they really are. However, realists are more driven to look for the truth, and because of that, they come closer than everyone else. I’ve noticed that most traders are realists. Remember those ‘Occupy Wall Street’ demonstrations? Did you really care? Sometimes the media likes to portray traders or bankers as greedy and vain and the examples they like best are the ones where something bad happens somewhere in the world and some traders somewhere else make a killing trading it. I’ve never seen why I can’t both sympathize with those suffering and make a ton of money. I remember reading in “New Market Wizards” about a lady traded on the day she gave birth. To my mind, it makes perfect sense, the market waits for no one, but I know people who would audibly gasp at that story.

Most realists are lone wolfs, or leaders of the pack. That’s because when you are a realist, your natural inclination is to resist the societal pressures imposed by your environment. Even when you do ‘give in’, it is not because you finally drank the cool aid, but for cosmetics, gains, or some need to come off as ‘normal’. At heart, you remain resolute in your hard-fought ideals.

I am not surprised that many military veterans become traders and good traders at that. On the one hand, there are a lot of important skills in trading that are reinforced in the military, but on the other hand, to make a good warrior, you have to be a realist. So there is an overlay there too, and a more important one if you ask me. The reason realism works so well in trading in particular is because you are not looking for some objective truth like in mathematics. You are looking for some truth-by-consensus kind of thing, and even then, you do not need to be right every single time. There are no prerequisites and you find yourself grasping for straws. Furthermore, to profit, you only need to bet big in the few instances when you think you are right. Such a proposition plays well into a realist’s strengths.

Something else that is common to realists is that they are not easily swayed by emotions. If anything, they are more easily swayed by reason, especially if they believe they came to the conclusions on their own. Most emotions arise out of an inability to accept reality which realists have an easier time with. You would think that this excludes them from experiencing profound emotions but it’s the opposite. Reality often presents the best opportunities for deep emotional moments. That’s why people watch sports or participate in them.

One of the funniest things I’ve ever read is about the sentiment during the GFC market crashes. Some people truly believed that stocks would never go back up. To me, that’s the equivalent to believing the sun won’t come up tomorrow. I mean, it could happen, but also not really. I wasn’t there and I had no skin in the game so I really don’t know how I would have reacted myself, but I am sure it wouldn’t have been that extreme. I’ve always maintained that edge is about insight and insight is about perspective. Being resistant to emotions opens up your mind to seeing things more clearly and of the many scenarios you can then see, you are more likely to find the one that makes the most sense.

If I do have a philosophical leaning, it is realism. I believe realism is the most superior mental vantage point in life, with no equal. I believe realism will make you successful in whatever you do. I think realism makes you stronger and better as a human being. You hear stories nowadays of people ‘raw-dogging’ flights and stuff like that, and I think what they are doing is responding to a primal urge to expose our minds to reality. It’s the same urge as the need to take a walk. The brain can tell when you’ve been in La La Land for too long. By the way, right now social media is society’s preferred way to escape reality, but one day it will be virtual reality. Just as phones started off as clunky devices and now fit in our palms, VR sets will get better and more compact and non-intrusive. We will wear them all the time, to work, at home, everywhere. Instead of taking a walk, you will go to a virtual forest on your VR set and do some laps in your living room. And just as the dominant feeling after spending all day on social media is quite ironically more loneliness and isolation, the dominant feeling after using VR sets will be whatever is the opposite of the feeling of being in the real world, and experiencing ‘real’ things.

There is a type of art called realism and even hyper-realism that tries to create photo-realistic replications of the subject. It’s the kind of art I do when I do art. It sounds a bit dumb to spend countless hours drawing something to look as close to real life as possible, but think of all the historical figures whom we don’t know what they actually looked like. Wouldn’t it be great to have a hyper-realistic portrait of Jesus, or Cleopatra? What if apples are extinct one day and all humanity has are a bunch of hyper-realistic artworks from some random art class thousands of years ago? Such artists try to mimic life as closely as they possibly can and realists do the same thing in their minds. They train themselves to observe reality and to imagine how different realities would look like. And it takes a crazy amount of imagination to accomplish. In fact, great works of art, including works of fiction, are great because of how realistic they are. When you read a great work of fiction, you have a difficult time thinking “Wait, all this came from someone’s head??”.

The caveat with realism is that just as the hyper-realistic renditions of the thing are not the thing itself, realism is not reality. Ceci n’est pas une pipe or in this case ce ne pas la réalité. Telling that to a staunch realist is like directing sunlight to a vampire, but it’s the truth.

So how do you become more of a realist? Like this

Everyone on Twitter is sharing their Spotify Wrapped for 2024. Do you ever find out what kind of music someone is into and think to yourself “What? I thought I knew you”? lol. I say all that in good fun, music is after all a matter of personal taste. If your personal taste lean towards progressive house, here is a cool remix that you won’t find on Spotify.