Blessed by the Potato

In case you’re not familiar with the commencement speech/excerpt from Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, Richard Feynman describes South Sea Cargo Cults following WWII: “During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he’s the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land.” So it has the superficial form, but of course the form is not what’s important, and without the core functions, it doesn’t work.

A recent post on doing laundry got me thinking about cargo cult adulting.

After I graduated and got a real job, my dad bought me a bunch of nice grown-up work shirts. They’re the kind of thing you have to take to the dry cleaners, or be very fiddly with about washing at home. And of course, they had to be ironed.

So, there I am*, sleep-deprived and busy as hell, watching my baby girl play in the playpen while I futz about with this scorching-hot hunk of metal. And she starts to fuss and wants out to crawl around on the floor and play with her daddy and eat all the dirt, but it’s not safe. This unstable burn hazard and relic of Victorian values is not even really safe for me to be handling in my current state. And even then, I ended up missing part of my shirt, going into work with a wrinkly arm the next day**.

I did not enjoy ironing. I had better things to do with my time, but what could I do, it was part of being grown-up and having stable employment. Then the epiphany: screw that noise. Ironing shirts didn’t make me an adult, being a good dad to my kid was my biggest ticket to adulthood, and she didn’t want me to be ironing my shirts. Wearing shirts that needed ironing (and actually ironing them) was just a symptom of someone else’s adulthood. Besides, it was 2012 (or 2013) and wrinkle-free fabrics existed in the world. Once Wayfare bought me a few wrinkle-free shirts, that was it for ironing.

Now I have a very simple laundry procedure: everything goes in together in one bunch.

If it can’t handle cold/normal followed by tumble dry low, I don’t want it. There’s no room for primadonna fabrics in my world, so if someone gives me a gift of clothes and it can’t deal with how I manage laundry, it just goes in the donate pile. I’ve ruined a few pairs of really superficially nice wool pants, and I have zero regrets. It wasn’t meant to be, anyway***. For the ones with sufficient warning labels (or only slightly scarred by my treatment), maybe Diabetes Canada can find someone who has that kind of time.

Of course there’s an even bigger source of cargo-cult adulting: buying real estate. Just today Rob Carrick has an anecdote in the Globe of one young adult living at home, hoping to save enough to buy a house at the expense of renting, being independent, and “[getting] on with the next phase of [her] life.”

And this isn’t some article assignment he had to go terribly far to find: it’s a story I’ve heard dozens of times in recent years. Real estate’s too expensive and out of reach, but people can’t [won’t] move out/have kids/really become adults without a house they can mortgage.

Now there’s a bit of a political brou-ha-ha in Ontario over the sex ed curriculum. Apparently we’re still using the 1998 one. Well, I graduated in 1998, so I don’t know what exactly is in that iteration — I was subjected to the one even older than that — but from listening to some millennials whine about how they have to buy before they can have kids, but the market’s too expensive to buy, so therefore they can’t have kids… well, I can only conclude that there’s something deeply misleading about how you use property deeds in there. As someone who has taken a university-level biology class and is a father, let me reassure you that there’s eggs and sperm and sleep deprivation and inordinate amounts of patience, but at no point does the legal ownership of land or structures factor into reproduction.

Anyway, there will be lots of adjustments from previous generations. Maybe you won’t have a single job that you use interchangeably with the word career — the gig economy is a monster and it’s coming for us all. Maybe you won’t own the roof over you head, or a car. Maybe you will have more monthly bills as Netflix and cell phones weren’t a thing for your parents. Maybe you won’t spend half your weekend on lawncare (or maybe you’ll spend more as you turn your little patch of dirt into an apocalypse-ready source of calories and essential fatty acids).

You are**** an adult and you get to decide what that means. You don’t necessarily need the same trappings and signifiers of adulthood that your parents had. And they won’t make you an adult any more than coconut headphones could call down a C-47. Don’t make yourself feel like you’ve put your life on hold for something that doesn’t even matter in the end.

In conclusion, screw ironing. Long live the wrinkle-free workshirt!

* – This is like 6 years ago, so it is safe to assume that this anecdote has been heavily embellished by time if not my story-telling.

**** – Unless you’re not. It’s the internet, after all.

There are a lot of things in the world to potentially research. Even just restricting the conversation to investing, there are a lot of potential avenues to put your money to work. However, you don’t have to have an opinion on everything.

I was on Tom’s podcast recently, and he threw me some questions on bitcoin and peer-to-peer lending. Things like this pop up from time to time, and I usually do have something to say. But just because I have an opinion and want to talk about it doesn’t mean it’s a strong opinion, or that you should go off and waste some time doing a bunch of research.

There’s a difference between having an opinion for the purposes of a discussion or entertainment, and an opinion for guiding your investment decisions. I’m not trying to talk you out of ranting about bitcoin or whatever individual stock is in the news or whatever you like to talk about at parties. But just because some new option is there doesn’t mean you have to give it full due diligence and a careful pro/con decision process to determine if it belongs in your portfolio.

Sure, bitcoin went up however many gagillion percent through to the end of 2017, but it just as easily could have gone another way — that doesn’t mean you have to start researching bitcoin or every potential growth story in the future now. If you missed out on the crypto craze, you’re probably still doing just fine on your trajectory to retirement (and if you jumped in late last year you probably regret it at this point).

And almost all the stuff on TV and in the paper on investing, all the different styles and strategies and specific companies — most of that is just discussion and entertainment. It’s very hard not to talk about something when someone else wants to talk about it. That goes double when there’s a camera on you. Engaging in a discussion on some potential investment is not a pointer that you should be researching this stuff or taking the opinion seriously. Often guests on BNN have opinions on stocks they do not own, to reinforce that point.

Buffett had this concept of the “too hard pile” — he didn’t have to come to a buy or sell decision on every stock, if it turned out it was too complex or outside his circle of competence he could just shelve it and move on to the next opportunity. Sometimes in a conversation someone may give you a forced choice “which one would you pick? OK, but if you could only take one with you when you’re stranded on a desert island…” but real life rarely does in the same way. And it’s ok to say that you don’t know and don’t care to waste the time trying to decide.

Focusing on the essential building blocks — your savings rate, fees, risk tolerance — is what will help you meet your goals. Debating the blockchain flowchart can make for good conversation, learning about new things can be fun, but that doesn’t mean you have to seriously consider how much of your portfolio to put in whatever the obsession of the week is.