Some Jottings on What I'm Reading

I've been reading Wall Street financial analyst Mike Mayo's new book Exile on Wall Street for a review of fiancial books that I want to do at Daily Kos.

Mayo comes off as too much of a moral scold for my tastes, personally, but there is this:

I think the meaning of life is to find something that you're good at, something you love and work to make that situation just a little bit better than it would have been without you. There's a phrase in Judaism, tikkum olam, which means "repairing the world." The concept is that people shouldn't do something simply because the religion requires it but rather because it makes things-- something, anything--a little bit better.

Now that, I do believe in. I have always resented the notion of simply being a worker bee simply to survive; which is what I learned and despised as I saw it growing up.

It's a big tension in my life as I've been going through this unemployment phase.

I also browsed through The Devil's Derivatives: The Untold Story of the Slick Traders and Hapless Regulators Who Almost Blew Up Wall Street . . . and Are Ready to Do It Again by Nicolas Dunbar. The entire notion of those who were taking the huge risks on Wall Street and in London...is a way that I have envisioned myself and which I would haved loved to emulate.

More on that later. But the tension between the two states; risk taking and tikkun olam stiil would fit a useful description of me.