The High Ground: Ideas Don’t Exist Independently of the Lives they’re Meant to Serve.

Communism is the perfect analogy here: beautiful in abstraction, hostile to human nature in practice. It promises harmony on paper, then collapses the moment it meets incentives, desire, envy, ambition, and variance.

Same dynamic in finance.

If you take the average person’s portfolio and tell them, “You can make 30%,” it sounds incredible—until you translate it into absolute life impact.

For most people, 30% doesn’t mean freedom.

It means:

• you still have to show up tomorrow,

• you still need more years, more cycles, more exposure,

• and you’re still one drawdown away from fear.

So the pressure doesn’t disappear. It just gets deferred.

And if you need to keep going, that’s the tell:

the style may be “right,” but it’s not necessarily serving the life it claims to serve—today, or even decades out.

That’s where the conflict starts.

Because it becomes morally strange to sit there and indict people—especially the ones who actually live and breathe markets—who are trying to build methods that produce real alignment: liquidity when it’s needed, proof when it matters, and survivability under constraint.

Markets don’t just test strategies.

They test whether a way of operating can carry a human life without forcing compromises.

And alignment is what keeps people whole.