Why I no longer want to invest in the stock market

August 19, 2023. I lay in my room on the bed, contemplating the loss of my assets through knockout certificates and wondering why I even invested money in the stock market. What did it mean for me to be rich? Wealth definitely didn't mean having a fat bank balance. To me, a lottery winner wasn't rich if they spent all the money after a few years and now lived the same life as before the win. Being rich meant to me being financially independent of employers and the state. It also meant not having to exchange my time for money. Investing was currently trending, and I was doing it because everyone else was. But what did I gain by increasing my wealth? Most people invest for retirement because they don't trust the German pension system and want to be financially secure in old age. However, I was already financially secure. I had essentially earned myself a passive income that funded my life, and I also had emergency funds to get through tough times. Even if all my savings were to disappear overnight, I could quickly recover due to my minimalist lifestyle, with minimal expenses. And if not, I still had my family to support me. I felt financially well-positioned and could therefore devote myself to things that my heart desired without worrying about money. Financial security was therefore not a plausible reason for me to invest. If economic growth correlates with the rise in the stock market, and it seems to be the case, then I also asked myself: Can the economy grow indefinitely? It has always grown so far, but that's no guarantee for the future. And what about the ever-increasing resource consumption? If I invest, I hope that my wealth will grow. This assumes economic growth, which goes hand in hand with increasing resource consumption. Do I want to support a system that only benefits me if resource consumption increases? Of course not. That completely contradicts my pursuit of more sustainability and less resource consumption. Of course, there is the possibility that resources will be recycled and used so efficiently in the future that economic growth (and hopefully also the growth of my wealth) will be partially decoupled from resource consumption. At this moment, I thought of the third law of thermodynamics, which states that a machine can never achieve one hundred percent efficiency, or in other words: There is no perpetual motion machine. So there will always be energy loss in the machines that become more efficient and drive economic growth. This energy loss must be somehow compensated for by additional resources. According to thermodynamics, it is therefore impossible to completely decouple economic growth from resource consumption. These were my considerations that led me to stop investing in the stock market and bid farewell to the hope of continuous economic growth without increasing resource consumption. I sold my remaining Apple knockout certificates and transferred the money to my account. Then I closed my account and deleted the Trade Republic app. I lay on the bed, relieved, staring at the ceiling. "Never again look at the stock prices and let my mood be influenced by them," I thought. My mood dropped when I was in the red, and it rose when I was in the black. My good mood also seemed to depend on economic growth. From today on, I decoupled it from that.