Dumb Luck Strikes Again

A moment of reflection on the known unknowns

Phew! That was close!

Last week, your editor and his family took to the skies once again. After months of delays and false starts, we finally received our six-year-old daughter’s renewed passport in the mail. (It had expired during the 2020 lockdown, when embassies bravely addressed their citizens’ needs by embarked upon indefinite leave.)

Barely a week after the little blue book arrived, we three were back on board our semi-regular flight, Buenos Aires to Houston... 

Then, not 24 hours after our departure... Argentina’s government sent the country into hard lockdown once again, citing rising coronavirus cases and fatalities there. It’s going to be a long winter down on the Rio de la Plata. And, through no foresight of our own, we got out just in time. 

Sometimes, dumb luck pays off. 

Which got us thinking... In “ordinary” times, we take international travel for granted. 

South America one week, North America the next... Easts Middle and Far, Worlds Old and New... from Sydney to Shanghai, New York to Rome to London, Buenos Aires to Berlin and beyond... 

We had come to expect the gates to the world’s great cities to always be open, for their cafes and restaurants and hotels to forever be available, their theaters and museums and sporting arenas to be but a quick “click-and-purchase” away. 

This is the age of jet fuel and cheap travel and digital nomadism, after all. A perfect time to be alive for the perennially peripatetic. 

And yet... just as all ages have their great strides forward, so too do they suffer their giant leaps backward. 

War... pestilence... disasters, man-made and natural, too. All conspire and connive to thwart our best intentions, to subvert our carefully laid plans, to make a mockery of our reliable commitment to hubris. 

And that, for the rhetoric students among us, is not a bad “ascending tricolon” to describe 2020. 

Along with would-be travelers all around the world, we too spent the better part of the last year forcefully “grounded.” We HAD planned on moving to Europe for a few months... maybe we’d pass a season in Moscow, perhaps rent a little dacha out in the countryside, spend some time reacquainting ourselves with the Ruskies (Pushkin, Dostoyevski, Chekhov, et al. ...)

But the Fates had other ideas. Borders shut. Gates closed. And the best laid plans hopped in their proverbial hand basket... and went straight to hell. 

How can one plan for the unexpected? How do we take flight, when the skies are so very full of Black Swans? 

Wherever you care to look, in all walks of life, things get turned on their heads. In  business and markets, love and money, sickness and health, we mere humans are treated to a spectacular show of celebration and disappointment. 

Take a look at the markets over the past week... 

While your editor was flying high on the wings of good fortune, his beloved crypto markets were crashing from the heavens. 

Lead dog in the crypto pack, Bitcoin (BTC) was cut more or less in half, from something like $60k to something like $30k, before recovering to something like $40k. Many of the so-called “alt coins” fared even worse. (Readers will notice we use vague approximations when calling crypto prices. We do so in humble observance of their inherent volatility.) 

Ok, you might say, that’s not exactly ideal... 

But hey! Consider the alternative! Better our portfolio crashes and our plane flies than the other way around!

Moreover, we recall rather clearly when $30k bitcoin was seen as an astonishing milestone/nosebleed price (depending on your outlook). That was barely a few months ago. Now it’s the result of a “bloodbath.” 

How short is the crowd’s collective memory...

And yet, for all our careful planning, our studious prognostication, we humans owe a lot to sheer chance, both good and bad. Oftentimes, it’s really all a matter of perspective. (“Luck,” as the reader has heard it defined before, is simply “that thing which enables others to succeed where we, ourselves, have failed.”)

Indeed, many of the happiest times in our life occurred when we were “down on our luck.” Conversely, it was often those moments we thought we knew it all when life taught us the most valuable lessons. 

So we remain grateful for what we have and try to enjoy the ride along the way. It’s the only one we have, as far as anyone knows for sure. Seems a shame to waste it, worrying about things we can’t control. 

True wealth, as Henry David Thoreau once said, is the ability to fully experience life. 

Never a wiser word spoken.

And speaking of the original “social distancer,” I thought this might be a good moment to revisit a conversation Chris Mayer and I had a while back, all about Henry David Thoreau’s life and work. Not only is Chris a much accomplished investor and student of the markets (see his Family Office site here), he’s also a keen observer of the way humans come to know what they think they know. His book, How Do You Know?: A Guide to Clear Thinking About Wall Street, Investing & Life won the 2019 Samuel I. Hayakawa Book Prize, which recognizes outstanding contributions to the field of general semantics.

We recorded this little confabulation during the peak of the 2020 pandemic, at a time when the world was decidedly “down on its luck” and it was difficult to imagine a way out of the general malaise. Listening back on it now, I think there’s a lot of good stuff in there, life lessons from a man who knew how to appreciate the little things and who never lost sight of what was truly important. 

Please enjoy this BPR Podcast classiqué and feel free to leave your own thoughts and comments below.

Cheers,

Joel Bowman
May, 2021 ~ Houston, Texas