The Ordinary Miracle of Existing, The Looming Tragedy of Trying to Rush It & How MFG Uses Tech

Charlie Brown IV, CFP®

June 26, 2026

Hello Marathoners-

Happy Summer. I hope you’re enjoying the arrival of summer and finding time to take advantage of the longer days and warmer weather.

Whether you’re planning travel, celebrating graduations, spending time with family, or simply enjoying a quieter pace, this season provides a welcome chance to recharge.

Last weekend (Juneteenth), I went out to Fire Island for my first long weekend of the season. I have a 5-week share rented with a group of close friends between now and Labor Day.

For years, I considered myself more of a Provincetown devotee, but spending more time in New York has made Fire Island the easier escape. "Easier" is relative, of course—it still requires a train ride, a ferry, and a fair amount of luggage schlepping before arriving in a place with no cars—but the journey quickly fades from memory once you're there.

Northeast summers are far too short to waste. I'm a firm believer in taking advantage of them while they last: spending time outdoors, gathering with friends and family, and finding opportunities to recharge close to home. Let’s appreciate our seasonal ‘prime’ while we have it!

A trip to Fire Island, New York's sandy LGBTQ sanctuary and long-time font of inspiration, where simplicity meets fantasy | South China Morning Post

(Source: Wikipedia)

Summer provides an opportunity to step back from the constant flow of headlines and focus on the bigger picture. That perspective can be especially valuable for investors. While short-term events often dominate the news cycle, long-term progress continues across the economy--technology, healthcare, and innovation.

But first, allow me a brief tangent to really zoom out on perspective. I don’t know how many of you are regular readers of The Atlantic, but I am, and while sometimes it can get very ‘dark’, they recently published an article titled “The Ordinary Miracle of Existing’ by physicist Alan Lightman. In his essay, Lightman essentially highlights that merely being alive at all is the most extraordinary stroke of good luck any of us will ever experience.

Think about it —you are a walking symphony of 30 trillion cells, all working in subconscious harmony to power your ability to think, breathe, and feel. Pretty miraculous!

Lightman begins with a historical example: in the 15th century, Prince Henry of Portugal pushed explorers beyond Cape Bojador, a boundary many Europeans feared crossing. Each major expansion of human knowledge—from geography to astronomy to biology—has enlarged our understanding of the world and our place within it.

Lightman then turns to modern science. Over the past century, we have discovered that Earth is a tiny planet orbiting an ordinary star in a galaxy containing roughly 100 billion stars, itself one among countless galaxies in a universe nearly 14 billion years old. Against this backdrop, an individual human life is astonishingly brief and seemingly insignificant.

Yet the essay's central argument is that the opposite conclusion should be drawn. The same scientific discoveries that reveal our smallness also reveal the staggering improbability of our existence. Each person is the result of an almost unimaginable chain of events—cosmic, evolutionary, historical, and genetic. The odds that any particular individual would ever come into being are so remote that simply being alive is akin to winning an inconceivably large lottery.

Lightman argues that because existence is our everyday condition, we overlook its wonder. We become absorbed in routines, obligations, deadlines, and anxieties, forgetting that consciousness itself is extraordinarily rare and precious. The "miracle" he describes is not supernatural; it is the ordinary fact of being here at all.

The essay ultimately asks readers what they should do with this enlarged perspective. Lightman's answer is not religious or mystical but humanistic: recognizing the improbability of our existence should foster awe, gratitude, humility, and a greater appreciation for the fleeting moments that make up a life.

Right now, we are enjoying a moment of total economic, financial, political, and geopolitical crisis, such as quite rarely occurs. I’m delighted to report that the chaos has only deepened, and the equity markets have declined even further.

But this is my opportunity to, yet again, press my essential beliefs as far and as hard as possible. It’s the pure essence of a teachable moment.

To quote Howard Marks, “In real life things fluctuate between pretty good and not so hot, but in the minds of investors they go from flawless to hopeless.”

As I write this, the S&P 500 is up 7.48%, and Nasdaq Composite up 9.11% YTD. Not too shabby (at essentially the half-year mark), however, these figures are still obscured by the media given that the market did recently suffer one of its most severe one-day hiccups, with the Nasdaq decline at 4.2% and S&P 500 decline at 2.6% on Friday, June 5, 2026. And those kinds of dips make great headlines! The important thing to note is that this came after a truly remarkable two-month sprint higher for these major U.S. stock market indices.

(Source: https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/index/spx)

For perspective, the current drawdown is still less than the average annual intra-year correction in the S&P 500 (since at least 1980) of ~14%. And yet each new incidence of decline—whatever the precipitating “crisis”—is treated by catastrophist media as the incipient end of economic life on the planet.

The current market unpleasantness is mostly attributable to the oil supply interruption caused by war in the Middle East. The resulting price spike has been identified by any number of media outlets as the largest of all time. It’s not even close. The world price of oil effectively quadrupled in five months following the October 1973 embargo. It more than doubled in 1979 following the Iranian revolution. And it’s imperative to note that over the intervening five decades the United States has also gone from being a huge and quite desperate importer of oil to being the world’s largest producer. But this of course interferes with ‘The Narrative’.

It seems probable that whenever and under whatever circumstances global oil flows are normalized (and/or new and more secure routes are established), prices will migrate toward their pre-crisis levels, all else equal. The timing and scale of that resumption—like those of the war itself—are perfectly impossible to forecast with any confidence by anyone. Much more to the point here, they are perfectly irrelevant to our investment policy.

We are goal-focused, plan-driven, long-term investors. Our portfolios have been dictated by your plan, which in turn has been formulated to pursue your most cherished lifetime financial goals. In that sense, event-driven market “crises” have nothing to do with us—other than as potential buying opportunities.

The Looming Tragedy of Trying to Rush It

Northwestern Mutual recently put out a study which “explores U.S. adults’ attitudes and behaviors toward money, financial-decision making, and the broader issues impacting people’s long-term financial security.” Among the more interesting findings of the recently released 2026 edition of this exercise were the following:

About 39% of Americans say they are investing or considering investing in high-risk assets such as cryptocurrencies, options, prediction markets, sports betting, or meme stocks.
Among the investors drawn to speculative assets, 73% say they are doing so because they feel financially behind and believe those investments could help them reach their goals faster than traditional approaches.
That sentiment is particularly strong among younger generations. Roughly 80% of Gen Z investors who are considering speculative assets say they are motivated by the feeling that they need to accelerate their wealth-building efforts.

To me, this is the stuff of a potential tragedy. Financial advisors all but daily encounter people careening toward retirement—having invested too little too late, and now desperate to take what amount to moonshots. This is lamentable, and even sad, but it’s all too human. It doesn’t rise to the level of tragedy.

The looming tragedy of younger people taking fairly desperate risks such as those the study identified is that they don’t have to—such is the historically powerful effect of compounding in mainstream U.S equities. It’s been wisely observed that time is the single most powerful force in investing. And time is what younger investors have the greatest abundance of.

At the S&P 500’s hundred-year average annual compound rate of 10%, money doubles in seven years and three months. Then it doubles again in another 7.2 years. Then again in another, and so on. That said, since 1950 the S&P has been compounding not at 10% but 11.5%, at which rate money doubles in six years and four months. If these mathematical abstractions are starting to make your head hurt, let’s examine some real-world specifics.

If you invested $1,000 in the index in January of 1996—a bit over 30 years ago—and added $1,000 a month, by February of this year you had (assuming you paid taxes from another source) $2.3 MM.
If you started 10 years earlier, in January 1986, you ended with $7.2 MM.
And if you (or your parents!) began this program 10 years before that—January 1976—you had $28.2 MM.

(Source: https://ofdollarsanddata.com/sp500-dca-calculator/)

That’s the power of compounding—perhaps all the more remarkable for the fact that the broad equity market effectively halved twice in the most recent quarter century.

And what did you need to do, throughout all the existential economic/financial crises of these tumultuous decades, to achieve this accumulation of wealth? Why, nothing, of course! In fact, it was critically important that you actually did nothing.

Successful long-term investing in mainstream equities isn’t supposed to be exciting. It’s supposed to be like watching paint dry, or grass grow. The critical issues are how much you invest and for how long. Everything else is commentary. The longer your time horizon, the more the force of compounding has historically propelled you forward into affluence and even wealth. Time, not timing, was the fuel.

Below is a famous viral quote and motivational analogy shared frequently by author and podcast host Mel Robbins. She uses the analogy to highlight the gap between wanting a result and putting in the work and time to achieve it. The running shoes represent the daily grind, the training, and the difficult parts of the process that people usually try to avoid. I thought it was especially apropos to include given the name of our organization 😉

How Tech Supports Our Human‑First Approach

We believe great planning starts with listening and is strengthened by the right tools. Behind the scenes, we use a modern, secure planning stack, enhanced by AI, to help surface opportunities, reduce complexity, and support clearer conversations, for clients and for the professionals who support them.

Our firm leverages tools like:

eMoney, our central planning platform, where we model scenarios, connect accounts, and coordinate decisions across a client’s full financial picture.
Holistiplan, an AI‑driven tax analysis tool that helps identify planning opportunities and supports more productive collaboration with CPAs.
Zocks, which helps our team capture and organize meeting insights, so clients spend less time taking notes and more time moving forward.
RISR, a newer business valuation platform, allowing us to model business transition scenarios and bring clarity to exit planning, succession, and next‑chapter decisions.
Wealth.com, a modern estate planning platform that guides you through creating or updating your estate plan with a more affordable, easy-to-manage process.
Pontera, a secure platform that allows us to manage eligible 401(k), 403(b), and other workplace retirement accounts alongside the rest of your investment strategy for a more coordinated financial plan.

Technology doesn’t replace relationships, it supports them. By handling complexity behind the scenes, these tools allow us to focus where it matters most: thoughtful advice, coordinated planning, and long‑term partnership.

If you’re a client or professional partner and curious how these tools support our planning work, we’re always happy to share more. Just let us know.

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