We Are the One-Percenters

What is the connection between the 2008 collapse of the financial system and a tragic loss of a loved one?  I have been reading several books on probability, prediction and prodigious failures.  Each book has made the same three points about the 2008 debacle:

1. The experts confused precision with accuracy.  A probability calculated to four decimal points can still be dead wrong.
2. The experts based their estimates on a limited period of previous prosperity rather than on a longer and more representative record.
3. Experts and investors ignored the one percent--that rare event when the worst case scenario becomes reality.

The combination of these errors created an artificial financial bubble.  When the bubble burst, lives were devastated as trillions of dollars evaporated out of the economy in a few short months.

What does that have to do with tragic personal loss?  We live with personal varieties of the daily delusions and denials that produced the financial debacle.

1. We often make quite precise plans for the future and rarely consider that we may be missing the target (or that there really is no objective "target" for our life plans).
2. We look at the relatively tranquil, uneventful and pleasant life we have had so far.  And we assume--or even insist--that such a path is ordained to continue.
3. We know that terrible things can happen to someone, somewhere, sometime   But such things don't happen to us.  The one percent of human experience doesn't happen to me.

And then it does.

Suddenly all the previous plans and predictions are beside the point.  We are the ones who lose a job, a home, a spouse, a child.  We are the ones who must remake an entire worldview to make room for catastrophe.  We are the ones who can never again be unconscious, oblivious, unfettered by the mutterings of mortality.

We are the one percenters.

The financial system has responded much like a bereaved person.  There has been a period of denying that anything really happened.  There have been the futile efforts to breathe life into corporate corpses.  There has been the emotional overreaction in the overly tight credit markets.  Just ask anyone who has tried to buy a house in the last three years.

Now there is a return to the oblivious state on the part of those who survived or were spared the suffering.  Did you notice that the Dow broke 15,000 on May 7th?

That willful unconsciousness in the market may produce a secondary financial bubble and subsequent contraction--perhaps even more painful than the current one.  Oblivious enthusiasm is bad for all but the very rich.

When it comes to loss and grief, I suspect a certain amount of mortality unconsciousness is necessary for people to get up each morning.  For those who have suffered losses, however, mortality unconsciousness ceased to be an option.  The reality of mortality changes how we approach life.  That awareness can trap us in a cycle of self-serving bitterness and hyperactive fear.  Or it can create the desire to live even more fully each day in this valley of the shadow.

Each day I strive to make the choice to live.  I'm not so sure about the economy...