Apparently my excursion from the other day left me laid up a while afterwards, so I’ve been using the time to rest, catch up on current events, and read up about one of my other perennial loves: finance.
I can’t mention it enough: a great many people I’ve encountered over the course of my life have great difficulty doing something as simple as balancing a chequebook. They take on too many bad debts at unrealistic interest rates, they take on financial instruments that built with only the short term in mind, they lose track of where the money goes each payday, or they neglect the purpose of creating and protecting a savings. All of these are pathological and may not at first seem to have that much of an impact, but they cause serious damage and a great deal of strife in the end.
Worse still are those who create an artificial crisis: they catastrophize the state of their being to exclude themselves from scrutiny, or choose to stay anchored to circumstances they could extract themselves from — for example, making proactive renovations or repairs to a home that’s bleeding out money through excessive energy bills each month, instead of putting up with the status quo.