Morning Walk #24
Prepare for the worst mentality
Hi. I’m Stepa Mitaki. Morning Walk is a personal weekly newsletter where I share some musings on tech, working on startups, productivity and some nerdy stuff.
This issue was sent out to 78 subscribers (+1 from the previous week). Last week’s issue received 139 views.
Unfortunately, this week again I won't cover any tech, startup, or business-related issues. It's simply impossible to even think about when the war is unfolding.
📝 Prepare for the worst mentality
When my wife and I got married a couple of months ago, we started discussing our joint finances and picking our family investment tools.
I held some of my money in stock, some on saving accounts in USD or EUR, and a minor portion in crypto.
She used almost the same tools as me, except for one. She holds some of her savings in cash (USD and EUR) in a desk drawer. That was nuts to me. Why would anyone do that? First of all, you constantly lose on money power due to inflation, and second of all, it simply doesn't seem secure.
We have a saying in Russian «хранить деньги под матрасом» ("keep money under your mattress"), and I've been familiar with that phrase since elementary school. This means that you hold these funds no matter what happens. If you can't trust your bank or your government, the best way to keep it secure is to keep it closer to yourself.
Any sane financial advisor would tell you not to do that. But it doesn't apply to Russia. Parents of my generation (born mostly between 1955-1970) lost all of their savings in 1991 when the USSR collapsed. Then most of it again in 1998 during the biggest financial crisis in modern Russia. And it stuck in our mind. Everyone knew that they had to keep some money under their mattresses if they were serious about risk aversion.
I always had to keep that possibility in mind my whole adult life. What if things go very bad? What if the government would take hold of my savings? What if the ruble collapses? What if the government wouldn't allow me to withdraw my USD (that's a thing right now in Russia)?
On the one hand, I'm glad my wife have prepared for the worst. It saved us. On the other hand, I'm so pissed off that we were wired to prepare for that from an early age. The government fucked my parents all their life again and again, and we did nothing. We adjusted and kept on going. And it's not about savings at all. It's about everything from running a business to planning a big vacation. I always lived with preparing for the worst mentality. It's not a bad strategy, but only now do I realize how fucked up that was. It's like I knew for sure, given the history of my country, that something horrible might happen. I don't want my kids to always be in a state of preparing for the worst.
Now tens of thousands of people are moving their savings from Russia. And I'm not talking about oligarchs but the typical middle-class (which is tiny in Russia compared to the US). They do it both to rescue their earnings and stop paying taxes to fund this war.
👓 Things I've been reading/watching/enjoying
Russians Must Accept the Truth. We Failed.
Ilia Krasilshchik, the former publisher of Meduza, a Russian independent news outlet (now blocked in Russia), wrote a piece for The New York Times sharing his feeling of being Russian and what we should do. It resonates a lot with how I have been feeling since February 24th.
The invasion of Ukraine marks the end, definitively, of Russia’s postwar era. During the 77 years since World War II, Russia was regarded — no matter what other perceptions it carried — as the country that helped to save humanity from the greatest evil the world has ever known. Russia was the heroic country that defeated fascism, even if that victory forced 45 years of Communism on half of Europe. Not anymore. Russia is now the nation that unleashed a new evil, and unlike the old one, it’s armed with nuclear weapons.
Arnold Schwarzenegger tells Russians Putin is lying about ‘illegal war’ with Ukraine
My childhood hero made a heartbreaking video that says it’s all. Beautiful. Thank you, Arnold.
How Anti-war protests in Russia are going
Putin’s machine is now arresting everyone. Woman with a blank sign, a guy with a sign that was comprised entirely of asterisks, a girl who was wearing a hat of blue and yellow colors.
That’s it for today. Thanks for reading.
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