2024 Year in Review
It's not too early to do a self-indulgent entry on the previous year. I lead an incredibly dull life outwardly but inwardly, the last few years have been quite wonderful.
2021, 22 and 23 were good years for me spiritually. 2024 in contrast saw a gradual decline in time I allocated everyday for practice. Whereas I used to do walking and sitting for 1.5 - 2.0 hours every day enthusiastically, in 2024, I became preoccupied with the personal matters related to economic survival.
I talked earlier about my side hustle doing day trading and after losing thousands, I've decided that come the economic collapse, I will not be using any remaining savings to try to maintain anything like my current lifestyle. Day trading or even swing trading is not really my forte.
Truth is, swing trading (which is separate from day trading although there is overlap in the principles) is 99% research and discovery and if you've not the time to devote to it day-in and day-out, it's probably not going to lead to financial freedom. I was trying to devote energy to learning, reading and researching and this just begins to consume your thoughts. Getting off work and spending the day studying trading and then getting up extra early to lose money in the markets takes its toll.
At this point, I've seen the difference between a mind that is calmer, more collected and the raging torrent of garbage that flows through the untrained variant. Trading was not the latter, but it reminded me of the old pre-meditation period in my life where my mind was always racing. There is no boast of having a trained mind here, but the beauty of practice is that you can see changes in your thoughts and reflections.
So meditation in 2024 took a back seat to other things and in point of fact, time was not the issue. I've time every day to do the practice, but in becoming panicked about the future, my mind has become less focused, less open. I convinced myself that one could even get good enough at trading a few hours day so as to quit the regular job in a few years. Sure, it would lead to less steady income and more stress from trading stocks or futures, but it would mean more hours in the day for doing more practice. Or nothing. I'm a big believer in doing very little outside of normal work hours. Life shouldn't be stressful, at least in the areas where some control is possible. Never let anyone tell you that you are powerless to change anything. Just changing yourself by following a positive spiritual path is like moving a mountain.
The causes and conditions which create a consistently profitable trader are very, very rarely combined altogether in one person. Trading is one of the many things in life that the younger you start, the more likely you will experience success. One view now holds that anyone over 40 has lost all mental plasticity and can no longer learn anything new. This is an exceptionally bleak outlook on human life and one that I steadfastly work to disprove by learning new stuff.
But that was my thesis: I will sacrifice some well-being now in order to have it pay off in the future.
My biggest fear in life is losing my home. It's a house that I waited a long time to find and purchase; it's quiet, isolated but not too isolated. It's been a place to heal and dig into Buddhism while working through questions which only matter to me. I live with cats and have a whole quiet forest out my front door where birds chirp and sing and critters run around. To lose this, to be forced back into a city where life is really hard, cold and lonely especially at an older age is too terrible to ponder.
This fear is something I take as a study subject and lately, I study things as they arise and pass away. Homelessness tends to be long term and there are many older workers who find themselves bereft of a nice corporate job and are instead, cast out into the street. Ageism is a thing even in a society where the population is shrinking and the talent pools are drying up for various occupations, from the semi- to the highly skilled.
So practice-wise, I'm at the point of avoiding meditation because I'm still obsessed with trading for survival. Not trading for riches although it's something one fantasizes about, but just so I'm not homeless in old age.
The obsession has begun to give way to remorse. At present, I just want most of the stocks that are in the red to get back to breakeven or better so I can bail. I made $30k in realized gains and am sitting on $40k in unrealized losses. The stock market is a casino and while I'm not overly concerned about the state of my portfolio, there are some real stinkers in the litter which could easily lead to a realized break even situation for the year. This is not good as the point is to increase net worth.
Following the election, the markets began surging. I made a quick $6k in a few days and had I been a little more proactive, would've made a few more. I was holding positions that were up and I said, "Nah. I'll wait some more, they'll go higher." Those positions are now down and I've no idea when they will rebound.
I retired a lot of credit card debt this year and am looking at months where I will have two or three thousand to save and invest. Maybe more. I also began taking cash out of the ATM every week and setting aside money for home repairs, appliance replacements, etc. It's a good idea to keep cash on hand; my mom before she passed managed to stuff her house with greenbacks. Thousands of dollars squirreled away in brown envelopes and shoeboxes. She had no trust for banks and expected them to close out at any time. As I get older, I get more like her.
Noticing these things is helpful and a fruit of meditation. What do I mean? The problem of self is that we all walk around every day thinking that we are a single unified thing, a self-created reality. There's this sense of I which doesn't really break down things into their basic components when it comes to ourselves, our aggregates like body and mental phenomena. Meditation helps you do this; you are an endless series of causes and conditions which can never be mapped out even by a supercomputer. Science can explain most of the processes of life and the causes which make us human, but it can't tell you about the distant Neanderthal ancestor named Bob who gave you a higher IQ or a larger jaw.
Every strand of DNA you carry is caused so many factors strung out in a causal chain going back billions of years. Your mannerisms and psychological makeup is probably largely handed to you by our parentage. If you don't feel a personal ownership over any of it, you can kind of glide through life, not taking anything personally, even yourself. Yeah mom stuffed cash in shoe boxes and here I am doing the same LOL. Wonder where the gene sequence is that causes that behavior.
This is a healthy kind of reflection that Buddhists cultivate. It's something I appreciate about Ajahn Sumedho's talks, his reference to these forms and their quirks, from political tastes to other things. "It's nothing personal even when reality feels very personal..." The ability to distance oneself from a self and stand as a neutral observer is a kind of liberation. A few modest moments of liberation means Enlightenment is not as remote a concept as the scriptures make them sound.
Even the fear I described earlier has become a focus for reflection throughout the day. To be clear, there is no substitute for formal practice and maybe I'm just living on merit from my efforts over the past few years. But a few years of meditation will produce significant positive changes that tend to become permanent.
So while you may have days where you can't practice because of work or family obligations, you can still cultivate the observer's perception of phenomena. While walking across the room, brushing your teeth, or experiencing anxiety, you can leave the door open so that witnessing can take place. This fear, this anxiety, this worry looks like this and it feels this way. Just the ability to witness boredom or anxiety can be productive. There is a kind of victory in feeling elated or dejected and knowing inwardly that you are having this experience and its texture feels like this... and that it isn't permanent.
Seeing elation and joy as temporary states that will quickly vanish may sound like a downer but on the contrary, it's a kind of reflex which when developed leads to a calmer life. Our whole lives are built around the pursuit of these little tiny morsels of positive feeling and we never think about how temporary they are at the very moment we are experiencing them. This is what life's all about.
The observer starts to become an acquaintance and even a friend. Yes, this is me at 60 getting a pink slip and having to get rid of everything to start a new life as a bum. Happens every day. I'm destined for death, so does it matter if I live in a van down by the river in the last few years of life in the current form? Will my departure from this life be that much better working in a field that is tedious at best? Getting lost in the past and the future is counseled against by the Buddha, but we are encouraged to reflect on the future when it comes to death. We will die, we will get sick and we will suffer from aging.
What am I grateful for? Will Buddha, Dhamma and Sangha be there when I'm forced back into a city, trapped in a car for hours a day? These are healthier substitutes for the normal fear-based rumination which haunt the modern first worlder with extra time to kill.
Yes. The witness is always there. To become disenchanted with the endless becoming of compounded existence, one needs a proper perch from which to view the spectacle. The parade of shifting forms never ends of course and there's no point to it, but without the gap between the ego and it, you cannot begin to see that the pointlessness has hidden baubles with hooks into our fake identity. Even disgust, weariness and boredom with existence are no cure for endless return. They just guarantee it same as obsession with money, fame and status. Reflection on the pointlessness of existence vanishes in the moment when the pizza delivery driver rings the door bell. It's not permanent, the feeling of ennui with the incessant change.
Modern people talk a lot now about the pointlessness of existence. I see this especially in the young, who are having a hard time economically with no relief in sight. Usually what they mean is what we all mean: that life is a story that has an arc pointing to a goal where there is finality. Maybe that's paradise or death. This thing about "meaning" becomes more nebulous over time. I think it means that we've not found something that enchants us, holds us rapt, while making us feel something beyond the mundane.
Physical fatigue has become a barrier to practice for me. Blessed with hypertension, I've been taking a blood thinner for the past year or two. One of the side effects for me at least as been a general feeling of fatigue. While my BP looks great at the doctor's office, the price is a general feeling of tiredness. The first round of medication was a different type but was much worse in its side effect; after a few weeks on it, I was having to take naps. My current script is better but still has some of the same effects although more muted.
Last week I took off several days and found myself sleeping 10-12 hours per day. Doing some yard work and chores, but feeling worn out and ready for bed by 6 PM means meditation can become harder. I need to figure out a better time to do a sit because as I age, the need for naps becomes greater. The medication is just brutal but it's far better than having high BP. Walking around all day at 160/130 is harder by far, so I'm grateful for the very cheap medication I use.
To wrap up, the practice leads to permanent changes in personality that are for the better and it will carry you during times when life gets in the way of formal practice.
