So, Meta’s CTO, a guy named Andrew Bosworth who’s been bathing in Facebook Kool-Aid since 2006, thinks he’s cracked the code to human happiness. His grand unified theory? Treat your relationships like a stock portfolio.
I’m not kidding. He actually wrote this down and published it. In an article where Meta's CTO explains why you should treat your relationships like investments, he says, "Imagine each person in your life as a publicly traded security." Your partner, your parents—those are your blue-chip stocks. Your coworkers are small-cap flyers. That stranger who insults your shirt? A stock you don’t own, crashing harmlessly.
Let’s just sit with that for a second. This isn’t just bad advice; it's a terrifying glimpse into the soul of Silicon Valley. It’s the complete quantification of human connection, the final victory of the spreadsheet over the spirit. This is a worldview where empathy is a liability and emotional bonds are assets to be managed for optimal personal return. Who the hell actually thinks like this? Are we supposed to rebalance our "friendship portfolio" every quarter? Do you issue a press release when you downgrade your brother-in-law from a "hold" to a "sell"?
Bosworth calls this managing your "emotional economy." He argues we grant people "emotional equity" they haven't earned. Instead, we should invest in relationships that "deliver returns." It’s the logical endpoint of a culture that has optimized everything from sleep to breakfast. Now, your friendships need to show Q3 growth or they’re getting delisted from the personal NASDAQ in your head.
This is a bad idea. No, 'bad' doesn't cover it—this is a five-alarm dumpster fire of a philosophy. It’s a recipe for becoming a hollowed-out, transactional husk of a person. I can’t even keep my Netflix queue organized, and this guy wants me to run a psychological hedge fund just to get through the day. It’s the kind of advice you get from someone who has spent so long trying to engineer human behavior for profit that they’ve forgotten how to actually be human.
And the scariest part? This mindset, this portfolio-ification of everything, isn't just some tech exec's weird blog post. It's the exact same gospel being preached for your actual money, and it’s just as detached from reality.
Just as Boz wants you to become a day trader of your own soul, an army of financial gurus are desperate for you to become a global day trader with your life savings. At a recent summit in India, a panel of top fund managers declared that if you’re only investing in your own country, you’re basically a chump. The solution? Global diversification.
It sounds smart. Or, more accurately, it sounds impenetrable. They throw around terms like "low correlation" and tell you that the Indian and American markets have "utterly broken" their connection, so you need a foot in both. One expert, Saurabh Mukherjea, made the mind-bending point that to profit from India's growth, you have to invest in American companies like Apple and Microsoft because they make billions from Indian customers.
Think about that. To bet on your own home team, you have to send your money overseas to bet on the visiting team that happens to sell a lot of jerseys in your stadium. It’s a shell game. They’re promoting a NASDAQ ETF out of something called GIFT City and talking about "outbound active" portfolios and "Emerging Markets X India" funds. They talk about `alternative investments` like gold mining firms, because offcourse you need exposure to sectors that don't even exist in your own country. It's a dizzying maze of products and strategies that feels less like a plan for `safe investments` and more like a full-time job.
They say platforms are making it easier, a "fully digital investing journey" that takes minutes. But easier access doesn't mean less risk. It just means it's easier to get lost in a jungle of complex `types of investments` you don't understand, while the guys who created the jungle take their cut. They promise to democratize investing, but it feels more like they’re just democratizing the anxiety. And all I hear is…
While these experts are pushing ever more complex global strategies on the average person, what are the actual big-money players doing? Let’s look at the Oregon Public Employee Retirement System, a pension fund with a cool $97 billion in assets.
They’re doing the exact opposite.
According to the Oregon Treasury reducing public pension investments in private equity • Oregon Capital Chronicle, State Treasurer Elizabeth Steiner just announced they’re shrinking the fund’s investment in private equity, from a high of 28% down to a target of 20%. That’s a multi-billion-dollar retreat. Why? Because private equity is one of those opaque, high-fee `alternative investments` with "little public accountability and transparency." Turns out, the state had ignored its own consultants and over-allocated to these risky funds for years, potentially saddling public employees with a bunch of duds.
This is the part they don't tell you at the "masterclass." While you're being encouraged to dive headfirst into complicated global funds and niche sectors, a massive institutional fund is desperately trying to untangle itself from a similar mess. The so-called smart money is getting spooked by the lack of transparency and high risk, even as the financial media tells you it's the only way to win. It’s a classic bait-and-switch, where the little guy is encouraged to buy the very assets the big guys are quietly trying to offload.
Here’s the grim reality. Whether it’s Meta’s CTO telling you to manage your friendships for emotional profit or a fund manager telling you to build a globally diversified portfolio of assets you’ve never heard of, the underlying message is the same: your life is a market. Your feelings, your future, your security—it’s all just a ticker symbol on a screen, and you’d better be watching it 24/7.
We’re being conditioned to become frantic, anxious traders in every aspect of our existence. We're told to be cold, rational investors in our own humanity, while simultaneously being pushed into financial products so complex they make a Vegas slot machine look like a piggy bank. It’s a system designed to extract value, not build it. And in a market like that, whether it’s your emotional well-being or your 401k, there’s only one rule that ever holds true: the house always wins.
