The Drowning Man's Guide to Bull Markets

Marcus stood at the edge of the pool at 2 AM, the water black as ink beneath the orange glow of safety lights that bathed everything in an apocalyptic haze. Forty-two years old and he was still swimming laps when he couldn't sleep, still trying to outpace the thing that lived inside his chest.

His phone buzzed on the pool deck—another notification from the trading app. Another zombie company's stock had surged in after-hours trading. These were the businesses that should have died years ago: retailers with no customers, tech startups with no products, restaurant chains that served microwaved despair. But the bull market didn't care about viability. It fed on momentum, on speculation, on the collective delusion that somehow, somewhere, someone knew what they were doing.

"You're like a zombie yourself," Elena had told him three months ago, the night she finally left. "You died years ago. You just keep moving because your phone tells you to."

She wasn't wrong. Marcus had memorized the patterns: how certain stocks would rally on nothing but hype, how the market would punish actual companies that reported honest losses while rewarding frauds that promised infinite growth. He knew which analysts to trust (none of them) and which CEOs were bluffing (all of them). He'd made three million dollars last year betting on things he knew were worthless.

The orange safety lights reflected on the water's surface like fire. Marcus dove in.

The water was cold enough to make him gasp. He began to swim, stroke after stroke, trying to exhaust himself enough to sleep. His body moved through the water while his mind churned through positions and percentages. Tomorrow he'd sell the zombie tech stock. Tomorrow he'd take the profits and disappear somewhere without cell service. Tomorrow he'd become human again.

But tomorrow was just another bull market day. Another day of being dead but still moving.

Marcus surfaced, gasping, and understood: the water and the market were the same. You could swim forever, but there was no other shore.