Hoarding is a human instinct, but it can skew your priorities as an investor.

Why do those hardcore Christians in America hoard food for the apocalypse?

Have you seen those guys? There’s like one particular tele-evangelist guy – says he’s a priest – that has a cable TV show. He got a bit of attention when Trump was elected because he firmly believed that Trump was God’s favoured candidate.

I would have thought if God was taking sides, he wouldn’t need our help to get his man elected.

[Shock: Divine hand identified in vote-rigging scandal.]

You might know him actually. His name is Jim Bakker. You might remember him from the 1980s, when “Jim and Tammy” (his wife), got convicted for embezzling $160 million from their flock.

And for you other property nerds, he convinced 165,000 people to fork over $1,000 each to help him build a resort at his Christian-themed water park. If they chipped in $1,000, they’d be entitled to a four-day stay in the resort, every year for the rest of their lives!

(The resort was never built.)

Anyway, without his signature hair and a new wife, he’s back on TV. And from what I can tell (and I could only watch so much), his new business model seems to be selling buckets of food to Christians.

Yup. Buckets of food. Buckets that have a 35-year shelf life. You can get curries, pancakes, slop. You name it. You can even get a Mexican themed “Fiesta Bucket”.

(Seriously, who on earth is buying this stuff.)

And for just a few thousand dollars you can buy yourself an 8-year supply of slop. And from the safety of your fortified bunker, you and your heavily-armed friends will be able to comfortably ride out the End of Times.

It all seems to be based on an unconventional interpretation of the Revelation. Normally, it says that the righteous will be raised up into heaven, and the rest of us (I’m guessing I’m probably not on that guest list), will be left to our own devices when the devil is given control of the world.

In Jim Bakker’s cosmology though, the righteous have to endure the Tribulations with all the other sinners before they can hope of being redeemed.

And Tribulations go better with a bucket of slop.

Yeah, nah, I still can’t get my head around this. I just can’t imagine how this makes sense to anybody. You believe in a God that is very picky about who is righteous and who is not, (a list that includes Donald Trump!), that God is very active in shaping the world to His liking, but when it comes time to wrap it up, he’s just going to leave all the righteous ones to their fate, so that only the ones with a big enough stash of slop will survive?

Am I missing something?

I think religions over the years have done a pretty good job of fingering people’s fears. And what I think happens is that our world has become so complex and so complicated, that many people feel an intense kind of fear that they just can’t name. They can’t get a handle on.

But then along comes the tele-preacher and says, yeah, there’s a good reason why you feel scared right now. That’s because there’s a massive wrath-God about to send the whole joint up in flames.

“Oh thank goodness. I thought I was crazy. That just makes so much sense. Better buy some buckets of slop then.”

It is a massive to release to be able to give your fears a name, and it is something that people will pay money for.

QED.

Anyway, this isn’t where I was planning on going with this piece. I didn’t plan to sink the boot into Jim Bakker and his sheep – sorry flock. What I find interesting about it is the psychology of hoard = safety.

This idea is primal and deep, but we need to disentangle ourselves from it is we’re going to make it in the world, and particularly make it as investors.

Let me break it down.

Hoarding is a fear response.

If you always believed that whatever you needed would come to you, you wouldn’t hoard anything. You’d just wait for it to arrive.

And I think most creatures on earth live like this. The only animals that hoard seem to be those that live in places with extreme winters, where the sources of food do all dry up. The rest lead a simple life. Eat when you are hungry. Make babies when you are full. Repeat.

Humans, however, hoard all the time. Not just through winter, but all the time. Our hoard instinct is constantly turned on.

And again, I think this comes from living in a world that is scary in ways that we just can’t understand.

Like, we can’t predict if the global economy will be up and running in a year or two, so better save up just in case. Better buy lots of food and weapons, and build up a bank of social credit so I can call in some favours if I need to.

We cannot predict what will happen, so we cannot predict what we will need.

(Spending several millennia growing crops that would periodically fail also probably drove this instinct pretty deep into the psyche.)

So hoarding is a natural response. It tempting to say it is humans being greedy, but I don’t think many people are taking more than they think they genuinely need. It’s just that they don’t know what they will genuinely need, and want to make sure they have a sufficient buffer.

Anyway, in a financial sense, we’re talking about wealth. Wealth is hoarded money.

And again, nothing wrong with that. I like wealth.

But as an investor, there’s something just as important as wealth, and that’s cashflow.

But cashflow doesn’t have an instinct driving it the way wealth does.

I mean, we like cashflow. We can see that it’s useful. We can tangibly get a sense of what it enables.

But it just doesn’t sit on top of an evolutionary drive the way wealth does.

I don’t get a soothing sense of safety out of my cashflow situation. But when I look at my bank balance, I breathe a sigh of relief.

(Ahhh. So many buckets of food right there.)

So where wealth accumulation is given a helping hand by our instincts, our drive to build cashflow is a little more naive, or pure. We’re like little birds, just eating the bugs as they come, when they come.

Cashflow comes when it comes. The seasons turn, rental income comes in.

But I think this difference helps us understand why most investors don’t give cashflow enough attention.

I mean, most get there eventually. After you’ve lost a few deals because you don’t have enough serviceability, you start to appreciate cashflow.

But when we’re starting out, most of us just aren’t giving cashflow the attention it needs.

And I think that is why many investors stumble three or four years into their journey.

If they’ve put all of their energy into wealth, and haven’t created any cashflow, they’re not really getting a first hand taste of the benefits. They’re stashing benefits away for a future self, but there’s nothing for them in the here and now.

You need cashflow to keep you nourished. It is a gift you can give yourself, either through some nice things, or best of all, free time.

Wealth is great, but cashflow is the juice of the here and now.

And since it is the juice of the here and now, it is in the realm of abundance.

When we’re focusing on cashflow, we’re closer to the birds and animals, just trusting that the rains will come, and the fruits will grow.

But as I’ve said before, the human is unique because it straddles time. It lives in the here and now, but must also live in the future as well.

And so there needs to be a balance. A balance between the here and now, and the future. A balance between the hoarding of wealth and the spending of cashflow.

The only point I want to make is that our drive for cashflow just doesn’t have the same biological drive that wealth has. So, left unchecked, we can naturally end up a little out of whack.

So my recommendation is, give a little more thought to your cashflow situation. In your mind, try to see it as just as important as your levels of wealth.

This is the ticket to being a harmonious and successful investor, I think.

We may have just found the first proof that alien life exists.

Ok this is about space, aliens, theories of advanced technology, and the power of wonder. I’ve just had this stuck in my head this week, and I was wanting to right something about it, but it’s not property, it’s not makets, it’s not persuasion.

Where do I put it?

Of course. No B.S Friday. Because this is about being grateful for this wonderful strange old universe we’re living in.

So this all started about a week ago when someone sent this article about some weird asteroid to me.

So I had a look. I’m always wary about crack-pot theories about space on the internet, so I scroll down to see who wrote it.

Chair of the Astronomy Dept at Harvard. Ok, we’re not talking about some tin-foil hat crank then. This is science!

And what’s he writing about? The first ‘interstellar’ object ever discovered.

On October 19, 2017, the first interstellar object, ‘Oumuamua, was discovered by the Pan-STARRS survey. The experience was similar to having a surprise guest for dinner show up from another country.

They weren’t looking for it. They just happened across it. It was an asteroid, they think, but not one of those common ones that are trapped in our solar system. But one travelling between the stars, boldly going where no asteroid has gone before.

And it shot right through our solar system and out the other side.

But that’s not exactly right either. It’s more that our solar system, which is actually traveling quite fast, sailed right on past ‘Oumuamua, which was sort of stationary.

And this is where things start to get a bit weird:

‘Oumuamua is like a buoy sitting at rest on the surface of the ocean, with the solar system running into it like a fast ship. Could there be an array of buoys that serves as a network of relay stations or road posts, defining the average galactic frame of reference in interstellar space?

Now I’m starting to wonder if this is a spoof. But it’s on the blog of Scientific American. As far as I can see, it’s legit.

But it gets even weirder:

We do not have a photo of ‘Oumuamua, but its brightness owing to reflected sunlight varied by a factor of 10 as it rotated periodically every eight hours. This implies that ‘Oumuamua has an extreme elongated shape with its length at least five to 10 times larger than its projected width. The inferred shape is more extreme than for all asteroids previously seen in the solar system, which have a length-to-width ratio of at most three.

… The Spitzer Space Telescope did not detect any heat in the form of infrared radiation from ‘Oumuamua. Given the surface temperature dictated by ‘Oumuamua’s trajectory near the sun, this sets an upper limit on its size of hundreds of meters. Based on this size limit, ‘Oumuamua must be unusually shiny, with a reflectance that is at least 10 times higher than exhibited by solar system asteroids.

… The extra push exhibited by ‘Oumuamua’s orbit could not have originated from a breakup into pieces because such an event would have provided a single, impulsive kick, unlike the continuous push that was observed. If cometary outgassing is ruled out and the inferred excess force is real, only one possibility remains: an extra push due to radiation pressure from the sun. In order for this push to be effective, ‘Oumuamua needs to be less than a millimeter thick but with a size of at least 20 meters (for a perfect reflector), resembling a lightsail of artificial origin. In this case ‘Oumuamua would resemble the solar sail demonstrated by the Japanese mission IKAROS or the lightsail contemplated for the Starshot initiative…

Let me get this right, Abe. We found this weird object in space, that is most probably less than a millimetre thick and at least 20 metres long, but possible a couple of hundred metres long..?

And it’s just sitting there?

The Kepler satellite revealed that about a quarter of all the stars in the Milky Way have a habitable planet of the size of the Earth, with the potential to have liquid water on its surface and the chemistry of life as we know it. It is therefore conceivable that interstellar space is full of artificially made debris, either in the form of devices that serve a purpose on a reconnaissance mission or in the form of defunct equipment. However, to validate an exotic artificial origin for ‘Oumuamua, we need more data. As Carl Sagan said, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

I don’t really have anything to say about this. I’m not an astronomer and the opinions of an amateur philosopher aren’t really useful.

But I just wanted to share the sense of wonder that I felt. The way my mind spins beautifully when I imagine intergalactic civilisations leaving strange sign-posts just floating around in the cosmos.

The sum of human knowledge is still just a drop in the Ocean. There is still so much we don’t know.

And when we look at all the problems we face right now, that is comforting. We’re making a mess of things at the moment, but of course, we are. We don’t know anything about how the universe works, or what or who else is out there.

It drops me back into humility and wonder.

And I think we all need that from time to time.

JG

We all know what it’s like to be stuck in lives that are too small for us… Here’s how to get out.

“I feel like I’m living in a cage.”

There are some transcendent human experiences – experiences that straddle cultures, countries and history.

The feeling that comes when a mother looks in her child’s eyes for the first time is the same here as it is in China, as it was in Rome 2,000 years ago.

There are things we can all relate to. Watching your crush walk off in the arms of another. Watching your child’s first steps. Watching your team come from 4 goals down at three-quarter time to take out the flag.

And I think this is another one: The feeling that your life is just too small for you.

In this particular case, I was talking to a mate who was having some trouble at home. He and his wife were arguing about a particular career move he wanted to make – a move that would have meant less money and less job security, but more freedom and creativity.

She was having trouble coming to the party, and I could get that. With three small kids her appetite for risk was probably at a life-time low. That’s perfectly natural.

And my mate could see that too. Still, it felt like he was being stifled – held back from the life he really wanted to be living.

And I feel like I should give another example now. I don’t want to make it sound like I’m playing into a “wives are a handbrake” trope. I’m sure just as many women as men feel limited by their partner.

I mean, even my mate’s wife probably felt limited in this situation. “I just want to be free to love my kids and relax into our life, but numnuts here wants to go an quit his job and tip over the whole apple cart.”

But as I said, and based on my experience, I think this feeling that our lives are too small for us is fairly universal. It’s a very common experience. So I think there is a jewel of understanding here – something here that might will shed light on the whole human condition.

So let’s go looking for it.

For me, the first place I want to go looking is in our social mind.

If we have a feeling that our life is a cage, then the walls have been built by other people.

Like, I sometimes wish there wasn’t so much gravity around, so I could fly like the condor my spirit really longs to be.

(Soar, spirit-bird, soar.)

But despite the limitations gravity puts on my life, I don’t really feel ‘caged in’ by it. I never lose sleep over it.

And that’s just one of the restrictions placed on my physical body. Human is a pretty limited experience. I’m marooned on the land-masses of a watery planet, confined to the more pleasant climatic ranges, with my movements defined by current technological limits and my own capacity to endure red-eye flights.

But you know, that’s just how it is. It doesn’t plant the seeds of dissatisfaction in my soul…

… the way social limitations do.

And social limitations themselves come in different flavours as well. We could call them ‘hard’ and ‘soft’.

The hard limits are encoded in law or contained in explicit cultural expectations. So I don’t steal stuff, or drive on the right hand side of the road, because that’s against the law.

I also don’t cock my leg and let rip with a massaman-curry-flavoured-fart on a crowded tram. Not that there’s a law against that or anything. But there’s a pretty clear cultural understanding that that kind of thing is not ok.

(We’re a sophisticated culture.)

Interestingly, even though these hard limitations are more heavily enforced, I don’t really feel like they impinge on my life.

I mean road rules literally determine where I can go and how fast I move. That’s a pretty tight constraint. But most the time I don’t even think about it.

So that brings us to the soft limitations – the binds on our life that emerge from complex and nuanced social relationships:

The expectation that you’re not going to make risky career moves when your family is depending on you.

The expectation that you’re not going to invite Bryan, the PT from the gym, out for a drink, even though you’re totally just friends and totally both ok with the attraction you feel towards each other.

The reluctance to enrol in that art class because that kind of stuff makes your partner feel insecure.

The way you don’t tell your family about the new investment course you’re taking, because you get the sense that they’d prefer it if you were poor, like them.

The decision that you’re not going to challenge your mother in law on her interfering, because that just triggers her insecurities, and creates whole worlds of drama.

The social world is complex and navigating it is hard. We are constantly having to make concessions against our own instincts and our own interests, just to keep the peace.

But, after a while, it gets frustrating. We start to feel like we’re not living our truth. We start to feel we’re living in a cage.

That old chestnut.

But notice here how it’s only as we move right along the spectrum from hard to soft limits, that we start to feel frustrated.

That’s odd, isn’t it?

I think the key to understanding that is ‘inevitability’.

Like, gravity is a constraint. But it’s very hard to imagine a universe without it, and it’s not going to change anytime soon, so why worry about it. It’s inevitable.

Likewise, our laws are set in stone, pretty much. They evolve slowly over time, but that’s not a process you’re going to engage with, no matter how silly it is that it drops down to a 50 zone just there after that bend, and what was he doing there anyway, it’s just revenue raising.

The laws are the laws, and you just get on with it.

Same story with the more formal cultural norms. I personally think my duck imitations are hilarious, but I can see that society is better off if we don’t generally sanction farting in crowded spaces.

These structures give us hard limits, and because they are hard – inevitable – then we just get on with it.

BUT… those limitations that come from our immediate social relationships, they don’t have the same sense of inevitability.

We recognise this truth: different people create different limitations in our life.

And in that sense, we recognise that if there’s a limit that is holding us back, if the person creating the limit changed, the limit itself might change.

Like:

If you were braver and had more faith in abundance, you wouldn’t mind if I took a gamble with my career.

If you weren’t so controlling, you wouldn’t mind if I caught up with other men socially.

If you weren’t so insecure, we could have an honest conversation about your engagement in our family life.

If you weren’t so afraid that I might actually succeed, you’d be happy for me to be taking this investment course.

And here it is. The cruel and bitter truth:

When our lives feel too small for us, it is because the people around us are too small for us.

We can deal with limitations on our life. We deal with them all the time. The human experience is fundamentally limited. Most the time it’s fine.

But it is a bitter pill to swallow when those limitations come from a smallness in others, a smallness that could, perhaps with a little work, be overcome.

And so of course we feel frustrated. Of course we feel angry. Of course we feel resentment.

So yeah, screw that.

I thought I was going to write a piece about how limitations are a part of life and you just have to find some freedom with in it.

But that’s a cop out.

The truth is that if someone is making you live a life that is smaller than the life you want to be living, you should call them on it.

You have a right to be frustrated. You have a right to be angry.

(And hiding that anger and frustration from them doesn’t honour them. Filtering the reflections so they never see what impact their actions are having doesn’t honour them.)

And I’m not saying just go our and do whatever the F you want. That’s a quick way to call a tonne of chaos and drama into your life.

But I do think you can own your feelings front on.

“When you don’t want me to take this job, it feels like it comes from a place of fear, and that makes me angry.”

“When you stop me having friendships with other guys, I feel that’s all about your insecurities, and that makes me angry.”

“When you take the piss out of my desire to be financially secure, I feel that’s about keeping me in your comfort zone, and that’s frustrating.”

I don’t know where that conversation will go. It’s not going to be an easy one.

But I do think you have to go into bat for what you believe in. You have to call BS when you see it.

That might not win you the freedom you want, but you will have been true to yourself, and that will make things a lot easier.

And I think this will be an important evolution in our society – when we get to a space where it’s not ok to make people live small lives – where we look at a situation where someone’s unwillingness to do the inner work restricts another’s freedom and we say, that is just not ok.

It’s been a slow road. This is has been around forever. It’s a universal human experience, because we are all social beings.

But maybe it is changing. It has to change.

And maybe it’s up to us to take it there.

This quirky Halloween ritual made me see my family in a whole new light.

My friends have a tradition they do every Halloween. Since it is traditionally the day of the year when the veil between this world and the spirit world is at it’s thinnest, they have an ‘ancestor dinner’.

The idea is that everyone brings photos or memories of their ancestors, and we all eat a meal together in silence, with the memory of our ancestors. And then there’s some drinking and storytelling afterwards.

And so I was digging up some photos of my family to take along. There’s one photo of my grandfather on my father’s side that I’ve always like, so I got it out and held it in my hands.

And a strange feeling came over me.

I realised that right now, I am quite a bit older than my grandfather was when this photo was taken.

Suddenly I saw my grandfather in a whole new light.

I was young when I first saw that photo, and the man in the photo didn’t seem all that different from the man I knew then. My grandfather – wise, strong, in control.

(And from the perspective of an eight-year-old boy, everyone looks old.)

But now I’m looking at this photo with fresh eyes. He’s probably early 40s, and quite a bit younger than I am now.

And so now, rather than seeing my wise old grandfather, I’m seeing a man in their mid-40s, just doing the best they can.

I’m seeing someone who probably doesn’t have it all figured out. Few 40-year-olds do. (Few 90-year-olds do!) I’m seeing someone who is probably wrestling with all the usual stresses of life – work, raising a family, putting food on the table, educating the kids.

I’m also seeing someone whose daily life is hemmed in chaos. The war, the years after the war, the fascists, the communists, the nuclear age.

Suddenly, I’m feeling two things I haven’t felt before.

The first is compassion. Like, geez, bloke. You had it tough. You didn’t have all the blessings that I have now. You had to wash your socks by hand, and that’s just the start of it!

Us grandkids were never shown the realities of your life. We were too young. You don’t burden kids with stuff like that. You let them live in the peaceful fiction that everything is fine.

But now I know there must have been so much going on that we just never knew about. That your life would have been full of stress and anxiety and drama… just like everyone else’s.

And so I feel compassion for the hardships that you must have endured.

And the other thing I feel is gratitude.

When I looked at the hardships you must have endured, the challenges you must have overcome, the bullets you must have dodged, just to set us up in this lucky country we call Australia, I feel deeply grateful.

My life is the gift you gave me.

And now I feel ashamed that I never thanked you for it. I had to come this far in life before I could even recognise the gift for what it was. I’m embarrassed that I’d never thought to look up from my own indulged, self-centred and childish understanding of my place in the family.

Perhaps I just wouldn’t have understood until now.

But I just wish I could shake your hand and say thanks.

The other thing that comes is the realisation of that old truth – we’re all just doing the best we can.

My father and grandfather were products of a particular time and a particular culture. Maybe it would have been nice if they were more “emotionally available”. Maybe it would have been nice if their views were more ‘modern’. Maybe it would have been nice if they didn’t think moral character was won with the slap of a belt strap.

But that’s just how it was. They were just doing the best they could.

All my ancestors were just doing the best they could.

And the best they could do has won me the life I have now.

So thanks, ancestors. I wish I could go back in time and shake every one of your hands.

But I can’t. So I’ll have a drink for you instead.