Christmas Tree Lights
Today, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019) premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.
It is a long time until the 2020 Academy Awards, but we will probably watch Quentin Tarantino’s latest film, which so far has all fresh (positive) reviews on Rotten Tomatoes.
I sometimes confuse this film’s plot with The Irishmen (2019), which will also feature an all-star cast and has Martin Scorsese at the helm with a premiere date for later this year.
Perhaps if these two films had a baby, it would’ve been the 1984 film Once Upon a Time in America, which was directed by Italian filmmaker Sergio Leone and starred Robert De Niro.
It’s fun to hear the words, “Once upon a time…”
Maybe because it makes one think they are about to be read a children’s book.
Nick Maggiulli wrote on his blog today about financial pornography, which is those clickbait headlines about fast and furious fortunes made seemingly out of thin air that make everyone envious:
“Though I wished the financial media would stop inundating us with so much financial pornography, I wouldn’t bet on it anytime soon. Why? Because of how we are wired.
In Atomic Habits, James Clear discusses how some animals respond quite strongly to particular kinds of stimuli. For example, researchers found that baby herring gulls will peck at a beak (even a fake one) when they want food, as long as the beak has red spots on it. And the larger the red spot, the harder they peck.
The same kind of reaction was found amongst mother greylag gooses who will roll any large, round object back to their nests, believing these object to be their eggs. One mother goose even managed to roll a volleyball back to its nest before sitting on it.
Clear goes on to explain why this occurs: ‘It’s like the brain of each animal is preloaded with certain rules for behavior, and when it comes across an exaggerated version of that rule, it lights up like a Christmas tree. Scientists refer to these exaggerated cues as supernormal stimuli. A supernormal stimulus is a heightened version of reality — like a beak with three dots or an egg the size of a volleyball — and it elicits a stronger response than usual.’
The same can be said of humans when it comes to financial pornography or actual pornography. Whether it is a quick path to riches or the pronounced ‘assets’ of a pornographic entertainer, supernormal stimuli drive attention.”
In this year’s Modern Wealth Index Survey, the team at Charles Schwab summarizes Americans’ current state of FOMO as such:
“More than a third of Americans admit their spending habits have been influenced by images and experiences shared by their friends on social media and confess they spend more than they can afford to avoid missing out on the fun, according to Schwab’s 2019 Modern Wealth Index Survey, an annual examination of how 1,000 Americans think about saving, spending, investing, and wealth.
Survey respondents place blame on social media platforms and not people — they rank social media as the biggest ‘bad’ influence when it comes to how they manage their money, while they put friends and family at the top of ‘good’ influences.
According to the survey, three in five Americans pay more attention to how their friends spend compared to how they save, with an equal number saying they’re at a loss to understand how their friends are able to afford the expensive vacations and trendy restaurant meals they portray on social media.
The pressure to spend as a result of social media envy and the desire to not be left out of friends’ experiences is particularly acute among Generation Z and millennials, the survey found:”
Even when a film is “based on a true story,” I know the majority of elements are dramatized or considerably fictionalized.
When I read financial news from newsmakers, I am cautious about concluding what the moral of the story is.
Or, I just skip and don’t read those articles.
