How are you feeling?

Thursday, January 17, 2008 by Dave Winer.

Okay, if the mind is powerful, how is your mind making you feel today? It's worth thinking about -- with the stock market down this year, every day worse than the last, many of us are losing lots of money, I know I am, and it's not a good feeling.  

I keep arguing with myself, even though I'm losing money at a huge rate, I'm still in good shape financially, I have a nice house, I can pay the bills. But it doesn't help. Inside I feel unsettled, poor, I'm having trouble concentrating. 

Does it help that I've been through this before? The crash of 1987 was much worse than this downturn, and then I had no cushion, nothing to fall back on, I wasn't even employed when it happened. I was a lot closer to being broke around the turn of the century, even though the market was doing very well. But it doesn't help. No matter how many times I've been through it, I've always known that it's cyclic, that the outlook will likely improve, but knowing isn't the same as feeling. The feeling is much stronger, it can't be counteracted with logic. I can't reason with the feeling, you might say it's un-reasonable. 

Then I heard that a friend of mine, much younger, with a lot less at stake in the market, is having trouble sleeping because of this feeling. I realize I'm not alone, probably millions of people have a heightened sense of insecurity right now. Does that make it better? Not really... 

Anyway, I thought, let's post something and find out how others feel about the economy and how much of an impact is it having on our state of mind.