You’ve Lived Here Your Whole Life

It got up to 85 degrees here in Rochester last week (that’s Fahrenheit, to anyone concerned…or about 30 Celsius). We fired up our grill and ate dinner on the back deck. We filled the kiddie pool for our daughter. One or two people even complained it was too hot — tough criticism coming off the frigid winter.

But then this weekend arrived. 48 degrees, gray skies, a cold rain that reminded us, “It’s not summer yet.”

And then they said it.

They always say it.

They have always said it and will always say it.

“I just can’t believe this weather! It won’t make up its mind!”

You’ve lived in upstate New York your whole life. This is exactly what May does. Every May past, every May future. There is not a single year on record in which the weather politely stayed in its lane and transitioned smoothly and linearly from one season to the next.

The whiplash is the weather. It’s not a bug or a one-off. This is it!

Yet, somehow, it continually surprises us.

Markets Work the Same Way

Long-term investors spend decades building their portfolios. They’ve lived through bull markets and bear markets, corrections and crashes, “irrational exuberance” and scary panics.

Even if we’re newer investors, the history is there for all of us to learn from.

And the message is clear: volatility is not a flaw in the system; it is the system.

But when the market drops 15% in 6 weeks, the typical response involves surprise, shock, fear.

“I can’t believe what’s happening.”

Financial media goes into emergency mode. Investors who were perfectly calm at Christmas enter a full-blown existential crisis by Valentine’s Day.

But this is just…investing. This is exactly what markets do. They have always done this. We don’t get an uninterrupted, linear 10% growth per year. That has never existed over any meaningful stretch of time. The turbulence is investing.

This is Us (and Our Brains)

The lesson isn’t that people are foolish.

It’s that memory is short and emotions are loud.

When things are good, a slow unconscious simmer grows in our heads: “This is the new normal; things will always be this good…”

Then, when the music stops (which it always eventually does), it registers as an aberration. An unexpected abnormality. A shock. Even though we should know it’s simply the unavoidable swing of a pendulum that has never once stopped moving.

What’s the solution?

It’s not a crystal ball. Never was, never will be. Nobody knows when the cold snap is coming or exactly when the bull run ends.

Instead, the antidote is expectation. We need to build a mindset and a plan that already accounts for the swings before they arrive.

Because they’re always coming. They always have been. You know this. You’ve lived here your whole life.

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