On Suicide
Below is a reply to a 28-year old who lost all his money and posted online that he wants to kill himself.
Having been in your exact shoes, I feel compelled to say a few words that you really need to hear.
My background: graduated Lehigh in 2009 with a 2.9 GPA, got hired at a hedge fund (complete luck/backdoor), worked like a dog for four years, went to Columbia for MBA, worked at another fund, worked at Citadel, worked at Schonfeld, and then at age 32 went off to start my own fund. Born lucky, worked hard and had a ton of breaks go my way both in my career and financially.
Here’s where our paths align. During the pandemic I broke discipline and traded horribly, going into a steep drawdown and spiraling out of control. My personal dollar losses, and I say this not to dick-size, were quite a bit higher than yours with the added kicker of losing a lot of other people’s money. Until you’ve experienced it yourself, I can only say that the pain of losing other people’s money makes the pain of your own losses feel like a boo-boo from scraping your knee at the playground.
Here’s what our paths (hopefully) diverge. Instead of giving up, I took out millions of dollars of fraudulent PPP loans, put them into the fund and went on operating as if nothing had happened. This action set me up for about a billion different felony charges – Federal charges for the loans, state/regulatory charges for getting the fund involved. I was arrested less than a year later – deservedly so – and went to jail, then a rehab clinic, then another jail, then spent two years in the Feds, and now I’m here today.
So, once again, I am not here to dick-size but let’s just say I have been to the level of hell you currently find yourself in, as well as many deeper levels.
Here’s what you need to hear.
RELATIONSHIPS: You say you have no relationships, which I doubt is entirely true, but either way it shows that you aren’t placing enough value on family and friends.
When I got arrested and written up in the papers, the immediate aftermath was what you’d expect. Damaged relationships with family and friends. Damaged relationships with investors, with former coworkers and colleagues. The guys who were all over your dick yesterday, today they don't know you. Many others will quietly let you know, look, we’re still cool, but I have to protect my own reputation so I can’t be associated with you. It was a wake-up call in how shallow, transactional and disloyal many relationships really are, but there were also valuable lessons pertinent to your situation.
For all the broken relationships, a lot of friends came flying out of the woodwork to support me, and straight up, very few of them did it from the goodness of their heart. I heard over and over “you were there for me, so now I’m here for you” or “if the tables were turned, I know you’d do the same for me.” Having these people show up was the difference between “I am so fucked and want to die” and “you know what, I’m actually going to be okay.”
You never know when you will need a friend, and the hard truth is that if you want reliable friends, you have to be reliable first. It doesn’t appear to me that you are doing that. You reap what you sow, the bad of course, but also the good, and what I take away from your messages is that you have sown nothing. Tough times reveal the truth. You feeling like you’re all alone is the sum-total of your past actions. Use this experience as a sign that you need to devote more time to building and maintaining healthy relationships.
REGRET: This part is very important. You have regrets over your financial loss. Anyone would. What you need to realize is that it was going to happen no matter what – maybe a year from now, five years, ten years, twenty years, whenever, but IT WAS GOING TO HAPPEN. You had some defect of character, or mental weakness, or inability to control your emotions, that was going to express itself through poor financial decisions.
You are very lucky that it happened at such a young age. If this had happened when you were 50 – which it does to people, all the damn time – your wife would have left you and taken the kids, and you’d be not only dead broke but on the hook for all their costs forever.
You cannot sit around pining about your bad choices. It was fated to happen, if not now, then later, and that’s just life. What matters is that you use this rock bottom as motivation for it to never happen again. I can tell from your pain that the lesson has sunk in, which is a good thing. Use the pain to remove the defect of character that caused this in the first place. It wasn’t the market, it wasn’t luck, it wasn’t a bad stock pick, it was YOU. Hold yourself accountable or you’ll never make any progress from where you are now.
SUICIDE: This topic is why I felt compelled to reply in the first place.
When I was 23, a close friend killed himself. What you need to realize with suicide is that for the next 40, 50 years, whatever it is, all your family and friends will wake up every single morning with an ice-cold dagger plunged into their chest. It never goes away. You think you are ending your own pain, yet you're creating a lifetime of pain for a much larger group of people. It sounds like you believe in the supernatural and in the afterlife but I don't see you thinking deeply enough about the consequences of your actions.
That shit stays with a man, for real. It will leave him grasping for answers decades later. This isn’t why I'm here but I wrote and published a book with my full story, dedicated it to my friend and donated all the proceeds to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. If any of these words are resonating with you, something in there probably will as well; message me if you want and I'll mail you a copy since you're short on dough, or just Google me and you'll see it. Regardless, I am hoping and praying that cooler heads have prevailed by now, but always remember that there is nothing in life a man cannot bounce back from, and that the way you’re feeling is just a part of the ups and downs of life. As Herodotus wrote, “no person has existed who has not wished more than once that he had not to live through the following day.”
WORK ON YOURSELF: Here is what you need to do right now. Disappear for the next three to six months. They call it monk mode, I say just be an apparition, "lock in," whatever you want to call it – you have to retreat into yourself. Don’t completely disappear; go get a job, any job, which should be easy since you have investment banking on your resume. Doesn’t have to be perfect, it can be a stepping stone for 12 months. Just get a job.
Next, go to bed at 8 PM and wake up at 4 AM seven days a week. Go right to the gym when you wake up and train as hard as you can. Afterwards, walk to where you can see the sunrise and say good morning to The Man. Go to work and be an apparition in the sense that physically, you’re there, but your mind and spirit are elsewhere. Get as much fresh air and sunshine as you can during the day, then after work, go home, read books, write, and go to bed early. Be ridiculously fanatical about sleep (eight hours), diet (eat clean) and exercise (daily) – this is how you gradually rebuild discipline.
I would strongly recommend getting sober. No more booze, no drugs, no pills. You’re not in college anymore. Grow up. There is nothing more sad and pathetic than a man in his thirties yelling “wooo I’m so drunk” while doing coke in a filthy West Village bathroom. Also, consider leaving NYC while you’re unencumbered. You’ve seen it, you’ve done it, it’s not going anywhere. Move somewhere sunny, move to a mountain, just move, it’ll do wonders to shake you out of the funk you are in.
I see you worrying about women. Listen: don’t worry about women right now. You are in no condition for that. Your energy, your aura, your mindset is all fucked up. The money doesn’t matter, it’s your attitude that ensures no high-quality woman will want to be with you right now.
Socially, you should do the bare minimum. Smile at work, be good to your family and your friends, but say no to everything else. You need to be demonic about fixing your own life right now. The guy in the comments who recommended seeing a therapist, that’s good advice – use this time to sort through all the skeletons from your past, your family history, et cetera.
All the rest of your free time should be spent reading books. For thousands of years men going through hard times have turned to the same texts, the Stoics, the Bible, Seneca, Plutarch. I can put together a list if you want one. History is littered with men who went through FAR WORSE SHIT than losing a few bucks, survived, thrived and then wrote about it. Read biographies of great men. Read history. Study how men not only dealt with setbacks but used them as catalysts to emerge even stronger. All of this will help keep your problems in perspective, because I can tell you are lacking perspective right now.
If you execute on this consistently for six months, you will emerge completely different. You will be jacked and tan and disciplined, radiating the aura and energy of a man who has been broken and rebuilt. This self-reliance and confidence is what will draw women towards you, and all your future relationships will be much healthier – husband, father, friend, son, etc – since you have wrung out all the self-pity and neediness and oh-poor-me and whatever else you have going on right now.
MAKE THIS THE BOTTOM: The next six to twelve months could set you up wonderfully for the rest of your life. When a man is broken, he either remains permanently broken or he emerges ten times stronger. Each day, you have to decide which of those two you want to be.
I believe that every man worth a shit will get completely broken once in his life. I say worth a shit because there are also lots of men who live life in fear, playing it safe, never taking risk, avoiding any path that comes with a 0.01% chance of them getting broken. Their regrets come much later, when they look back and realize that they forgot to live life.
You have to decide that you no longer want to be a boy and are ready to be a man. This has nothing to do with age. I know guys that are 40, 45, good job, wife, kids, house, all of that, but when I look in their eyes I see a boy. They’re soft, scared, never been tested, no backbone and no true principles or values that they’re willing to stand on. Use this time to figure out which you are and then start making changes. "Man cannot remake himself without suffering," wrote Alexis Carrel, "for he is both the marble and the sculptor."
Carve this out as the bottom, my friend. View life as two acts. The first act just ended and your second act is about to begin.
Good luck, and remember: the floor is no place for a champion.
GB
