Love Is Our Most Widespread Speculative Mania

Love is perhaps humanity’s most widespread speculative mania. People plunge in headlong, intoxicated. When the tide recedes, they scramble to escape, complain about fate, then fall into reflection and declare that “the wise stay out of love.” First, no one is born a sage; those who preach staying out of love are usually those who have loved and been hurt. To give up on love for that reason is like abandoning investing simply because you are not Warren Buffett. Second, we rarely understand what level of intimacy will bring what kinds of consequences, and those consequences are inherently unpredictable.

We must learn to identify risk blind spots in our daily lives. Your everyday choices shape your entire life, and you need to view everyday existence through a risk-aware lens.

As I see it from a mean-reversion perspective, the risk blind spot in relationships appears precisely when life feels perfect. That is when you most need to be vigilant. From a risk-management perspective, the question is: if you lose your current happiness, can you keep that loss from becoming “the start of a long, deep trough”?

I am not a divorce lawyer, and I am not here to discuss asset protection; that is secondary. What matters most, in my view, is preserving the mindset and capacity to rise again in adversity, and knowing clearly how much rest and recovery you need before you can stand up again.

All speculation requires risk management, and entering a relationship is no exception. When you enter a relationship, if you treat it as a journey, rather than as the meaning of your life, your sole purpose, or the entirety of your dignity as shaped by gender or culture, you greatly reduce the chance of irrational behavior or irreversible outcomes when the relationship hits a major crisis or ends. At the same time, try to keep responsibility and desire from overwhelming each other. Even a small balance between reason and passion can significantly reduce extreme outcomes. I once read a note by a Qing-dynasty official. He observed that most homicide cases were crimes of passion. This is understandable. Killing for money requires calculation and is relatively controllable; being trapped by emotion is pure passion, utterly out of control.

In speculation or investing, the first rule is to protect your principal, or, put more starkly, to stay at the table. You can earn back lost money. A major crime or a devastating emotional blow, however, can take you out permanently; once you truly leave the table, you may never return. If in finance we plan for extreme scenarios and black swans, then planning for them in life is even more natural and, I would say, absolutely necessary. After all, money becomes mere paper in two situations: when catastrophe strikes you, and when you are genuinely at peace.

But relationships are closely tied to age and experience—or, biologically speaking, to hormones. We learn in school that hormones trigger love, yet we are still unable to control them. This is what I mean when I say that some experiences can neither be gained nor reshaped by knowledge alone.

Old-timers often say that investing is defined less by your wins than by how you handle your losses. I therefore believe it is crucial to avoid major failures in life and to prepare behavioral and psychological contingency plans. This is especially true for those who acquire wealth at a very young age. As the ancients put it, “Sudden wealth in youth is rarely a blessing.” I think the main reason is that strong hormones greatly increase the chance of losing control and suffering major failures. In essence, this is a high-risk state. Each person, age group, society, and culture has its own risk profile and its own ways of coping. We can discuss these with family and friends, and we can adjust ourselves. We often gather to discuss investment targets, yet rarely gather to discuss what plans we have if our emotions spiral out of control.

We usually seek support only after our positions have been “liquidated.” If we prepare beforehand, we may be able to cut our losses more effectively. An emotional shock consumes body and mind much like losing 50% of your capital: you then need a 100% gain just to get back to where you were. After a breakup, many people rush into the next relationship, much like rushing into the next trade right after a margin call. Some do manage to recover this way, but certainly not everyone.

At the same time, I want to be clear. I respect people who treat relationships as the whole meaning of life, even if that runs counter to everything I have said here. I am sharing my views and experiences, not issuing directives. I have come to feel that the least replaceable parts of life are precisely those that cannot be acquired through learning or knowledge alone. That is also the motive behind this essay.

For me, my self-reminder is that any crisis is acceptable. The essential goal is to avoid it becoming the start of a long, drawn-out trough in life. A friend told me this during a major crisis, and I felt he offered a forward-looking way to see life, as a process of rises and falls rather than a simple tally of wins and losses. I once heard a commander say that, in battle, he cared only about the battle itself, not the opponent.

Betting on Attention — A Guide for Speculators in the Eyeball Generation

This year, I speculated on memes in various languages. Beyond any financial gains, I sensed something more. A new form of speculation is about to go mainstream. People are starting to create attention assets peer to peer, instead of relying only on attention manufactured by authorities.

Buying a meme is, in essence, very similar to buying TikTok’s stock. Looking at it from the perspective of “living through the experience,” I quickly recognized this parallel.

In both cases, you are buying an attention-capturing asset. TikTok must be run by a corporation, with authoritative senders broadcasting messages. A meme, in contrast, is a kind of Cartesian self-proof: I watch, therefore others will too. In Chinese “School of Mind” philosophy, this is captured by the saying, “We all share this heart, and this heart shares this principle” (人同此心，心同此理).

This is the viewing and speculation guide for our eyeball generation.

In this essay, I treat all trading in risk assets as betting. Countless investment analyses and biographies of the successful define the “holy grail” of investing as rational trading and long-termism, and even tightly link conservative morals and lifestyle to investment success. This creates a hegemony of narrative and capital. It implies: he is rich and successful, therefore his lifestyle is the model.

Studying the failures of successful people is far more important, because their success is usually not replicable, while their failures can comfort you and give you patience to build your own trading system.

This further suggests that his investing is rational from beginning to end: before the bet, when he places it, and when the result comes out. This is clearly impossible. He did not succeed through “pure rationality” but through betting. And not just betting. He succeeded by putting in place everything that surrounds the bet: his desk and chair, his daily routines of Coke and burgers if he likes, his position sizing, his investor management. This supporting infrastructure is what allows him to focus on the battle rather than the opponent.

If you lack that infrastructure, you are forced to fight life’s other opponents first—rumbling stomachs, credit card bills, and so on—before you can even engage in the trading battle itself.

How can anyone call betting “rational”? They are either pretending to be stupid or they are simply stupid. In the mathematical world of trading, rationality should mean verifiability. You can verify a physics formula across past, present, and future. You cannot, in the present moment, verify whether anyone’s current position is “correct.”

So, to me, the bet itself is a game; the rational part lies in everything that surrounds the bet. Solving basic livelihood issues today really will make you more comfortable tomorrow; only after that does your portfolio truly matter. Investment gurus have no obligation to solve young people’s survival problems, and they rarely talk to them about those problems. That is their freedom, but it is also something young people must stay alert to.

As an ambitious person, I try to build my own frameworks for understanding global finance. I see attention as a basic principle—a tradable underlying, measured by how intensely and how widely something occupies people’s minds. That is just one framework. Around it, I build my own betting framework: observing how much attention people give to those targets.

In my view, most news, reports, and public commentary are elaborate ways of naming and directing attention toward investment targets. They are products of institutions piling up text, a precise reflection of how bureaucratic and academic our world has become. With authoritative voices they broadcast messages, steering people’s attention and driving certain assets to higher market capitalizations. You may call this financial nihilism, financial populism, or anything else you like. But for a homeless person, it can be a way to transcend class. A healthy society should offer many unconventional, harmless paths for people to move beyond their assigned class.

The world constantly feeds you incomplete fragments of information—gold output, total U.S. electricity generation, South African mineral production, and so on. If you plunge too deeply into these, you become overly focused on the “opponent.” The fatal part is that, in reality, you are just one of the blind men touching the elephant.

In a rising stock market, it is good advice to buy when no one cares and sell when the crowd roars. But what if you have not lived through several bull and bear cycles? What if you cannot tell where it is quiet and where it is noisy? What if the duration of your capital cannot survive the long quiet before the noise arrives? As a young person just entering society, you must play to your strengths. That strength is to bet on real-world attention.

This is also why waves of meme coins keep coming, and why today’s prediction markets are booming. People are constantly reinventing trading pairs and mechanisms that connect real-world order with attention. Watch for the things in this world—or in the part of the world you can perceive—that attract the densest attention. Then find platforms where you can bet on both other people’s attention and your own, and participate. You may suspect that this is a form of gambling. But this gray zone between morality, speculation, and regulation is itself a form of change.

This is a kind of reproductive instinct between modern humans and finance. People always find new financial mechanisms that leave old interest groups anxious, forcing them either to suppress these innovations or to join them.

Speculation, the Capacity for Adventure, and Character

“Character is destiny,” “Destiny shapes character”—both clichés contain truth. Ultimately, over the course of a long life, what matters is that after each speculative success and failure you draw your own conclusions again and again.

This presents a difficult task. You must extract principles for future action from the past, while making sure that past experience does not block your future boldness.

“How you play reveals who you are.” You cannot derive a trading style from books alone; you need losses and profits, breakdowns and joy. You must build your investing character out of the real world’s gains and losses. If character truly shapes destiny, then no one’s character is formed without falls from bicycles and the ecstasy of first love. Investing is the same. Your playing style can train your character, and your character can shape your playing style; they reinforce each other. Destiny is constructed, not simply decreed.

Traditional societies overemphasize stable, linear growth. In today’s world, however, the cost of adventure has fallen dramatically. Columbus, Zheng He, and da Vinci risked their lives; we risk losing money and then going back to work. Precisely for this reason, we should consciously use the privilege of our era to observe and cultivate our own capacity for adventure.

All human abilities atrophy if not used. The capacity for adventure and an adventurous character are no exception.

Some people make their living from the sea because destiny placed their birthplace on the coast. But others migrate from inland to the shoreline and then set sail. If you yearn for distant horizons, you should not let your origins bind you. Do not complain, “I was born in the mountains; I know nothing of water.” Focus on the battle itself, the craft of taking risks.

Put bluntly, even if any trait can be oversimplified, it is usually obvious who has this capacity for adventure. They are the ones whose eyes light up whenever distant places are mentioned.

I feel that the breadth of the world—both material and spiritual—is expanded by those who long for distant places, while its depth is developed by those who know how to cherish and preserve the gains of their journeys.

Much of the education in many countries and societies is risk-avoidance education. It is as if, to prevent drowning, we all abandon the coastline. That may reduce the single risk of drowning, but it increases many others. At the same time, we stop traveling and stop gaining new skills for survival through our journeys.

“Ai pia cia e ia” (愛拼才會贏), which means “You have to fight to win,” is a saying from my hometown. For a long time, especially when I was at my poorest and literally could not afford to eat (many people do not believe such situations exist in modern society; they do, because I chose not to beg), this saying encouraged me deeply. I repeated it like a mantra. Within a few months, I regrouped and reached a point where I no longer had to worry about living expenses for the time being. Today, I add a line of my own: if you don’t fight, you certainly won’t win.

Traditional finance aims to build thresholds and bureaucratic layers so that opportunities and information flow in a steep pyramid. Blockchain, by contrast, aims to give everyone a chance to participate, even if, in the process, believers, fraudsters, the righteous, the wicked, and everyone in between all enter the scene.

We do not need to pursue a “pure” blockchain world. Even among the followers of Jesus or the disciples of the Buddha there were both good and bad people. To the traditional order of their time, Jesus and Buddha were ill-timed outsiders, yet they remain immortal figures. This means that all adventurers, especially today’s blockchain adventurers, should clearly recognize that their capacity for adventure and their adventurous character deserve serious observation, reflection, and cultivation.

My Understanding of Life

As I noted at the beginning, from a mean-reversion perspective, we should be most vigilant when life feels perfect. From a risk-management perspective, we must plan so that any loss of present happiness does not become “the start of a long, deep trough.”

We can suffer devastating psychological blows when we are mentally unprepared for life’s accidents. Such blows can destroy our financial stability, the positive state it brings, and the spirited attitude toward life that grows out of that state. For this reason, we have to remain constantly vigilant.

For me, there is a single “childhood memory” that constantly recalibrates me. It contains my entire philosophy of money, and I use it to shield myself from both gains and losses.

One summer when I was seven or eight, I visited my aunt in the countryside. It was temple-festival season. The smoky traditional temple was packed with pilgrims by day, and at night the courtyard was full of people watching opera performances offered to the gods. My aunt sold shaved ice at the temple entrance, so my cousin and I had unlimited bowls—heaven for a child—and we played there with all the village children. At dusk, as things quieted down, my cousin took me out to catch river snails. In the twilight rice paddies there were water snakes, field crabs, and earthworms, almost like a Balinese landscape. When darkness fell, we brought back a large bag of snails. Dinner was already prepared. My uncle took the snails, washed them quickly, and stir-fried them with dark soy sauce, ginger, garlic paste, and pepper. He poured himself an ice-cold beer and poured ice-cold Coke for us children. After a day of activity, we rolled up our sleeves and trouser legs and sat barefoot on the floor, feasting. Later that night, my cousins and I lay down on the floor to sleep. From the distant banana groves came the sounds of frogs and dogs. We whispered the secrets that only children have. With the doors and windows wide open, the night breeze carried the coolness of summer evenings before global warming. Lying on that floor, I felt a complete, unqualified happiness.

All my ambition and striving are ultimately for one thing: so that someday I can escape the shackles of daily, repetitive labor, ignore the reproaches of “social responsibility,” and return to that countryside to enjoy my original happiness.

When I ate the first US$1,000 meal of my life, I felt relaxed, and it brought back memories of the snails I scooped from the mud and the frogs calling beyond the banana leaves. That field was where I could stretch out like a plant undisturbed by people. Money, I realized, can buy freedom from certain gazes. In that field, all of us children were equal. It turned out that this was what I had been earning money for.

I secretly suspect that no one can fully relax while eating a US$1,000 meal. In the field you can. I have been trained into a kind of refined egoist. Rationally, I know that being a farmer means poverty and humiliation, yet my body knows the joy of being close to nature. I have no intention of “fixing” capitalism; for an individual, that task is far too grand. But within myself, I must overcome everything that modernity has built, including, to some extent, even the idea of family.

This determination to overcome has long allowed me to focus on the battle and forget the opponent. It has helped me through many crises. Because if, at my core, I am still that eight-year-old child, then everything beyond the joy of that field and village is surplus. Victories in gilded halls are surplus, and so are the failures.

This essay was inspired by @Cyber​​Philos and@Wilsonchen1101.