The Ant and the Grasshopper

This is a famous story by Aesop that was used to illustrate the power of hard work and how doing that would get you through the toughest times.   I come from many generations of thrifty German peasant farmers.   My parents were both children of the Great Depression and this was one lesson they beat into us. So kinda hard to be anything besides an ant with that training.

For 25 years, I have kept my head down and done my work.  Digging the perfect ditch no matter what I was employed doing as per my father's instructions.  That made my inner grasshopper absolutely miserable.  I started at the beginning and no matter how broke-ass I was, I paid myself first putting money aside into an account for retirement.  When TIAA-CREF became available to me the money was invested there.  When I got a pay raise, I simply changed the amount to my investment account so that my take home pay remained relatively the same over the last 15 years.  So I was doing really well for a single income.

Then the stock market tanked and the economy went bust.  I saw my investments shrink to a piddling amount.  The grasshopper jumped up and said I told you so. The ant mourning the loss of all that time and effort.  The grasshopper in me mourning all the fun I could have had blowing that money on things like travel and stuff.  I continued investing because that was what I had been taught to do.  Many quarters I couldn't even open my report because it made my eyeballs bleed to see how my investments were losing money faster than I was putting it in.  Stashing it in my mattress would have been better than investing it.  The grasshopper in me kept saying I should stop investing and enjoy the hell out of it RIGHT NOW and screw winter.   But the ant continued to win out in those arguments.

In the last year, it has made a small recovery.  Today it's only about 1/3 of where it was at the max and that despite another 2 years of added investments.  Today I have been unemployed for five months.  Today, I broke down and gutted part of that small storehouse I had put aside for my winter.  The little ant in me is inconsolable.  Turns out Aesop was a damn liar!