And nothing about your life changed. Your brother-in-law still has a scary surgery on Tuesday. Your kids are playing the piano badly in the hall. The front door still needs to be fixed. The emails keep coming.
Markets are important because they enable regular people to benefit from the ownership of companies that, over time, have done really well in the aggregate. And this historical reality has enabled people to maximize their savings so that when they cannot work or choose not to work, they can still live their lives and afford the things that cost money along the way.
So yes, when markets go up and achieve some new threshold, it’s nice in a symbolic sort of way. It is perhaps a welcome validation that investing “works.”
But it should work in the background. It shouldn’t change your life, not on a day-to-day basis certainly. Life is hard; beautiful and terrible and mundane things happen. Don’t let the stock market get in the way of all that, because that’s where all the life actually lives.
Meaningful Returns 