60. On a wartime birthday

It's a myth that ostriches bury their heads in sand to avert danger.

I’m on the phone with a representative at Voya about an hour before his workday ends. I explain to him that I’ve been on the fence about adjusting my investment allocations, and that I’m calling to solicit input from a trained financial professional (with all the customary caveats that what he says cannot be interpreted [by me] as strict financial planning advice). On the recorded line, we discuss my options.

It’s my birthday in a little over a week and my government has launched yet another war of aggression, this time on Iran. More than anything, the human cost has been calamitous, as we’ve murdered schoolgirls and caused environmental ruin such as oil literally raining on Tehran. In response to our actions, Iran has rightfully followed through on a blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, effectively crippling global energy supplies. For the United States in particular, this has catastrophic domino effects across every industry, not least because of our consistent failure to meaningfully invest in clean energy sources like wind and solar—in fact, as of July 2025, clean energy projects have been significantly sabotaged due to provisions in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The most predictable outcome is an increase in the cost of transportation for virtually everything worldwide; as a result, stock markets are faltering.

I tell the Voya guy that I’m feeling particularly bearish because all signs point to a protracted market decline. The oil refineries and production sites that have been attacked in the past two weeks alone across Southwest Asia will take months, if not years, to resume activity at their full operating capacities even if the war ends today. Meanwhile, oil production from other international sources will be unable to fill in the gaps, and the United States is ill-prepared to weather this disaster of its own making. (There’s a clear through line from attempting to take control of Venezuela’s oil production to waging this war on Iran, but I avoid going this far into detail during the call.) I want to liquidate my stocks in favor of cash and bond positions before the markets tank further, but I can’t find that option on the Voya website. Likely, it’s because my accounts are under professional management.

I’m in partial disbelief that this is the world in which I live—partial, because I do my best to keep up with the news and to actively perform my civic duties as a citizen of the failed democracy that is my home country, and I’m disappointed yet unsurprised that our idiocracy has achieved this outcome. As a direct consequence of our continued depravity, the poles are melting and people are being killed and nobody is doing anything about the fact that there’s demonstrable evidence from the Epstein Files and the Panama Papers that our government is operated by a cabal of child molesters. Without hyperbole, I am a citizen of the evilest national entity in recorded history, but pointing this out makes me sound like a deranged conspiracy theorist because, fundamentally, Americans do not read and do not care that we bear responsibility for the havoc our tax dollars wreak. Ours is a profoundly selfish society.

The Voya representative, it turns out, is a senior consultant. He listens to and doesn’t contradict me, but when I pause he offers an obviously boilerplate response: Voya’s asset management formula accounts for market volatility. Dips are commonplace, and investors should be less concerned with the short term. I don’t think he grasps that I am thinking precisely of the long term.

I try a different tactic. Given the context that the material damage is measurable, it’s simply following a chain of logic to assume the economic fallout will lead to a widespread recession, and I need to protect whatever assets I have while I can. He tells me that Voya knows the money is mine, it’s been rightfully earned by me and therefore I should be able to exercise whatever control over it as I see fit, but that—if my assumptions are correct—this would actually be the time to invest, to buy low and sell high, as the adage goes. He notes that we’re the same age, and therefore that conventional wisdom dictates we adopt the same aggressive risk tolerance because we have decades ahead of us to compound our investments. Still, the choice is ultimately mine.

Quite often, I feel like a broken record. This was supposed to be my Sex and the City, I was supposed to discuss and ridicule the intersection of my life where sex meets New York City, but I guess this is just what it’s like to reside within the imperial core as a conscientious objector. (And, besides, I’ve been celibate for over a month.) I wrote about virtually the exact same sentiments around the time of my birthday last year as well, and I fear that it makes for a rather uninspiring read, but this is what’s been on my mind as of late. It’s been an uninterrupted onslaught of bad news followed by worse news these past couple of years and still I can’t stop considering the happenstance of birth, that so much of your existence is predetermined by a choice you did not make. It’s deeply unjust that the deciding factor between whether you launch or suffer missiles is where you are born, and even more so that there are no concerted attempts to right this wrong.

I want to believe that the long arc of the universe bends towards justice, but the truth is that it must be actively and collectively bent, and all the available evidence I’ve witnessed here in the Global North throughout my lifetime points to it curving in the opposite direction. The people who immiserated a generation by causing the 2008 financial crisis were never meaningfully punished and their actions were never reversed; record domestic protests against racist police violence were brutally suppressed, and ever-higher allocations of our tax dollars were funneled to the very perpetrators of police brutality; public outcries against our forever wars have made no impact on the fact that the Pentagon’s spending has failed eight consecutive audits; immigrant children are currently—literally, it's ongoing—being subjected to routine sexual violence in the concentration camps we've established. It’s not my interest to be a pessimist, but I do consider myself a realist and this is what is materially real. We don’t have a democracy because our elected representatives are unaccountable to us.

My Voya representative endeavors to dissuade me from timing the market, so to speak. I guess he presumes that I’m an unsophisticated investor—and I am, at least in comparison to institutional investors and brokerages and all the other industry players, but this was once my industry too and all those people were also my colleagues and I hope that my many years spent toiling away within have imparted some wisdom unto me. It’s not that I’m day trading or hoping to profit during this turmoil, particularly because I know that such volatility is inherently unpredictable, but rather that I strongly feel the protracted downturn is substantiated. Moreover, I don’t have the sort of excess cash to be pumping into the market right now, to buy low so that I can later sell high, like he thinks I should be doing. I just want to freeze what little I’ve accumulated so far.

I’ve reached the point where I feel like I’m planning for a future that won’t occur, but I go through all the motions anyways just in case. My father has finally stopped pestering me to date the (fake) women he meets online, but it’s in favor of trying to quickly push me into surrogacy arrangements with any available agency. Yet I can’t fathom bringing a child into this world, a derelict existence marred by ecological apocalypses under the yoke of pedophilic capitalists. There’s talk of Republicans gutting the FDIC and whispers of bank runs that they’re trying to preempt by moving to enact withdrawal limits, we’re bombing oil fields and assassinating sovereign leaders, and how many birthdays do I have left? Will I ever even arrive at retirement, and will I be able to rely therein upon a safety net that may or may not still exist?

By the time I hang up, I feel like I’ve been stonewalled. The best I could do was adjust my risk tolerance from aggressive to conservative, instructing Voya’s algorithm to re-balance my positions in accordance. There’s probably a way to get what I want, but I didn’t get it from that phone call. I plan to investigate further.