| Karma

If you want to never be bored, just take up trading (gambling). In my opinion, it's the worst of the vices, especially if you're clever, since it can reward you as much as it punishes. Reward you in ways the world praises, and sucks you up into the grandest of the insatiable pits.

It used to be that when I wanted to feel closer to God, I let the market fuck me in its karmic chamber. Honestly, the market offers immense freedom. Every loss became my own; every win became my own. Actions became guiltless, because every other entrant had signed the same flattened covenant that exalts itself from the daily moral clusterfuck and replaces it with one where the only sin is to lose. And this is a sin that gets settled, when the bet folds, you see what's left, and you're forced to know if you made the right choice. Life becomes much more obvious that way.

Gambling, to me, was always dysfunctionally spiritual. There's a fallacy where a gambler thinks they've beaten the odds through some grand intuition, and builds atop that prejudice, hardens, and fortifies it until they trust it almost entirely. Once that certainty is entrenched, that hubris of a man who is certain he can triumph over all others, that's when they go all in and lose everything. That always made me quite happy: that there was a place that judiciously dealt retribution, since Pride is the sin I despise most.

Originally posted on Instagram, Mar 2025