Imagine loving the stock market Imagine your entire sense of self worth is tied to the stock market going up. And AI happens. Amazing tailwind. An incredible stroke of good fortune But then you fumble the bag because you love tariffs. And in your anger you cause multiple compression by turning your country into an emerging market because these two loves - tariffs and the stock market going up - are in direct tension with one another It would drive anyone crazy. He’s a tragic figure in a lot of ways

He understood it at last, not with the cold clarity of a theorem but with the sickly light that comes before dawn, when every object wears its true face. His two loves stood before him like accusing saints, each demanding the whole of him, each trembling at the thought of sharing even a crumb. He tried to reconcile them with prayers, with sophistries, with the coward’s calendar of tomorrow, and each attempt only multiplied his shame. He saw that to choose one was to murder the other, and that he had already committed the crime in his heart a hundred times. His soul, that shabby tenement of borrowed words and frightened hopes, rang with their rival music until the sound became a single anguished note. He whispered that he loved them both, and the words tasted like blasphemy. Then he covered his face, not to hide from them but to hide from the part of himself that still imagined he could be innocent. In that moment he felt the world become narrow, as if a door had closed behind him forever, and he stepped forward, knowing that whatever he chose would be a confession written in blood.