greaterfool — and yes that is me, technically

the greaterfool theory says someone, eventually, will buy what you bought for more. i bought the second yoga mat. then the third. nobody arrived. that, technically, makes me the greaterfool. i defend the title. it suits the room. it suits the inventory.

writing this between two slack pings about a deck nobody asked me to update. the chair next to me is empty — carla took her coffee with her, which means she is not coming back before lunch.

so. greaterfool. one word, the way the internet writes it when the internet is trying to sound clever. the greaterfool is the person who buys the thing AFTER you, at a price higher than yours, and lets you walk away pretending you knew what you were doing. that is the entire mechanism. the entire economy, on certain days. you don’t have to be right about the thing. you have to be right about the next person.

i have, in front of me, on the floor of an apartment three miles from this desk, a third yoga mat. a third one. it has been there since 2023. it is, possibly, evolving. i bought it because i thought, on a friday, that the next version of me would use it. the next version of me did not show up. that next version is, by definition, the greaterfool i was waiting for. he is not coming. i am holding his bag. it is a yoga bag. it is, i checked, also still in the closet.

greaterfool: the person you are counting on to buy your thing for more than you paid. greaterfool theory says markets keep going up not because the thing got better, but because someone dumber is on the way. the trouble starts when you are the last greaterfool in the chain. that one is me, usually. i recognize the seat.

SOMEBODY. HAS TO BE. THE LAST fool. I VOLUNTEER.

greaterfool, what the theory actually says

the theory, in the language used by men with cuffed sleeves and second monitors, says that an asset’s price can be justified not by the asset, but by the assumption that someone, somewhere, will pay more for it later. tulips. baseball cards. the third yoga mat. the bulk membership for a household of one. there is no fundamental reason for the price. the reason is the next person. the reason is the queue.

i am, by training, terrible at queues. i join them late. i leave them early. i once stood in a queue for twenty minutes for a sandwich shop that had been closed since february. so when i tell you that i understand, in my body, the greaterfool theory, you should believe me. it is not from a book. it is from the floor of my closet, where the third yoga mat sits next to the second yoga mat and waits for someone who is not me to declare them collectibles.

the polite name in finance is “greater fool theory” with the space. the impolite name, on the internet, is greaterfool, all one word, the way you’d shout it across a room. i prefer the second. it sounds like something you’d be called by a man at a corner bar named mike, who has a beard and seems sure. and mike, on this, would be right.

the third yoga mat as a textbook greater fool case

i bought the first yoga mat in 2021 because i thought i would do yoga. i did yoga twice. i bought the second yoga mat because the first one was, allegedly, the wrong density. i did yoga zero times on the second one. i bought the third yoga mat because the second one was, allegedly, the wrong color. the color of the third yoga mat is, i can confirm, also wrong. it is purple. i hate purple.

each purchase was made on the assumption that the NEXT mat would be the one that activated my future self — a leaner, calmer, more flexible greaterfool, who would pick up the previous mat and treat it as a relic. that future greaterfool never showed. i now own three of these objects. they form a small archaeological layer in the corner of the living room. one of them, the second one, is partly under the couch. there is dust on the dust.

why i accept the role, with grace

here is the move nobody teaches you in the finance newsletters i pretended to read for a month in 2019. you can refuse to play. you can be the LAST greaterfool — the one who looks at the chain, sees the last seat, and sits down anyway. dignity is a posture. it does not require winning. it requires sitting down on purpose.

i sit down on purpose. i own three yoga mats and one tie. tom owns approximately fourteen ties and a volvo with seats that move in directions i didn’t know seats could go. tom is, by every measure, not a greaterfool. tom bought a house in 2017 and a wife in 2018 and the two purchases have, by all accounts, appreciated. tom is not the buyer hoping for a buyer. tom is the buyer everyone else was hoping would arrive.

i am the other guy. i am the room he was hoping to buy from. and i am — and this is where the philosophy gets clean — okay with it. somebody has to hold the mat. somebody has to keep the bulk pretzels at room temperature for a household of one. somebody has to keep the toilet paper roll going UNDER, which is the correct way, and which is also a stance that costs me nothing because no one is buying my toilet paper position from me at a markup.

the bulk membership i bought from a greater fool

two years ago i renewed the bulk place membership for $60 because i thought, again, that the next version of me would use it. the next version of me used it twice. once for paper towels. once for a tray of muffins so large it broke a kitchen drawer. the muffins outlived the drawer. the membership outlived the muffins.

this is not technically the greaterfool theory in its pure form, because nobody bought the membership FROM me. but the spirit applies. i bought the future use of a card from the past version of myself who believed in scale. that past version was the greaterfool who sold me the idea. he, too, is gone. i can no longer reach him. his number rings twice and goes to a voicemail i don’t have a password for.

(books on tape are cheating. i mention this because i listened to a finance audiobook on the walk to the bulk place, which is how i knew the words “asset”, “appreciation”, and “bag holder”, and which is how i convinced myself that the muffins were, in some respect, an investment. they were not. they were muffins. the audiobook was, also, cheating. i stand by both positions.)

the chain of fools, i drew it on a napkin

last thursday i sat at the corner bar and did, on a napkin, with a pen mike loaned me and never asked back, the diagram of my own greaterfool chain. it goes:

• 2021 me — bought yoga mat 1 from a stranger. that stranger is the original greaterfool, possibly fictional.
• 2022 me — bought yoga mat 2, having sold yoga mat 1 to nobody.
• 2023 me — bought yoga mat 3, having sold yoga mat 2 to also nobody.
• 2024 me — looked at the three mats. did not buy a fourth. this is the closest i have come to victory.
• 2026 me — writing this. holds the entire chain. has become, retroactively, every link in it.

mike looked at the napkin. mike said: “you’re all four guys.” i said yes. mike said: “that’s not a chain. that’s a circle.” i said i know. mike has not filed a tax return since the year the second yoga mat shipped, so mike’s authority on chains and circles is mixed, but on this — on the geometry of my mistakes — mike was clear-eyed and correct. the website with the three letters and the bell logo would say it differently, with charts. mike said it with one sentence and a pen.

two months ago a coworker dragged me to a wine tasting and a man named stefan, in a vest, told a room of nodding adults that one of the wines had “notes of forest floor”. i nodded. i was, in that moment, the greaterfool of the wine market. i paid forty dollars for a chair. there was no buyer behind me. stefan kept the forty dollars. the wine kept tasting like wine. the chain ended at me, again. it always ends at me. the chain is, technically, just a hat.

verdict — someone has to be the last fool, i volunteer

slack just buzzed. somebody added me to a channel called “renewal-scratchpad” with no message. i’m not opening it. it can age in the channel list with the other unopened things. i have inventory practice for that.

if you want the longer, more dignified version of all this, the post about fool — a noble tradition is the home of the cluster, and i think it’s the part i’m most fond of. there is also a piece on the motley fool subscription as a modern oath, which is adjacent, and a piece on the dunning-kruger effect which is what makes greaterfool theory so durable in the first place — we keep buying because we keep being, briefly, sure. that’s the engine.

the third yoga mat is, at this moment, almost certainly where i left it. the bulk membership renews automatically in june, which is a separate problem for a separate post. tom, somewhere, is parking his volvo in a garage that closes by remote. i am, at my desk, holding the chain.

↑