Castles in the Air: Speculation and the Imagination

Every one of us owns at least one castle, and it is never made of stone. Mine went up on a Tuesday morning, somewhere between the second cup of coffee and the first email, when a headline announced that a man in Ohio had turned four hundred dollars of digital coin into a lakeside house. By the time the kettle boiled I had spent his money twice over. I had paid off the car, astonished my brother-in-law, and retired eleven years early, and I had done it all without moving from the kitchen table. That is the trouble with castles in the air. The land is free, the permits are instant, and the mortgage is collected later, in the real world, by a lender who does not accept imagination as payment.

"Wealth gotten by vanity shall be diminished: but he that gathereth by labour shall increase."

Proverbs 13:11 (KJV)

I want to persuade you of something slightly unusual: that speculation, the get-rich-quick kind that Scripture warns against with such remarkable consistency, is not first a sin of greed. Greed arrives at the party, certainly, but it rarely sends the invitation. Speculation is first a misuse of the imagination, that good and God-given faculty by which we picture what does not yet exist. And because the disease begins in the imagination, the cure must reach the imagination too. Arithmetic alone will not save a daydreamer. I know this because I have done the arithmetic in the middle of a daydream and gone on dreaming.

What I Mean by Speculation, and What I Do Not

Definitions are unfashionable, but let us have one anyway, because the word gets thrown at everything from a savings bond to a slot machine, and a word that means everything means nothing. When you invest, you buy a share of patient, productive work. Buy a piece of a bakery and you own ovens, flour contracts, and a baker's five o'clock mornings. Your return, if it comes, comes out of bread actually baked and actually sold to people who were actually hungry. When you speculate, you buy none of that. You buy a story about tomorrow's price. The asset may bake nothing, rent nothing, earn nothing, and pay nothing; your entire hope is that another person, six weeks from now, will imagine an even higher price than the one you imagined. Speculation is imagination trading with imagination, and the last imagination left holding the parcel pays for everyone's party.

Notice carefully what this definition does not say. It does not say that risk is speculation. The farmer risks his seed against the weather, the shopkeeper risks her savings against the neighborhood's appetite, and every honest business ever founded was a wager of sorts. Nor does the definition say that stocks are speculation while so-called safe things are not. A share of a real company held for twenty years is ownership of real work, while a private scheme promising a guaranteed four percent a month is a fantasy wearing a cardigan. The test is never the wrapper. The test is the engine. Ask one question of anything you are about to buy: where is the return supposed to come from? If the answer is from the thing working, you are investing. If the answer is from the price going up because everyone can feel that it will, you are speculating, whatever the brochure calls it.

And the stakes stopped being theoretical some time ago. In 2024, Americans reported 12.5 billion dollars lost to fraud, according to the Federal Trade Commission, a jump of 25 percent in a single year, and the largest category by far was investment scams at 5.7 billion dollars. Read that number slowly. It counts only the outright frauds that victims reported. It does not count the perfectly legal speculations that simply evaporated, the sums nobody files a complaint about because there is no one to complain to except the mirror.

The Imagination Is Not the Villain

Having accused the imagination, I must now defend it, because it stands trial for a crime committed while it was away from its proper post. God made the imagination. It is the faculty by which a builder sees the house before the foundation is dug, by which a mother sees the man her small son might become, by which anyone saves anything at all, since saving is nothing but taking tomorrow seriously today. Scripture does not ask us to amputate this faculty. Scripture puts it to work, and the Lord Jesus told us exactly where:

"For which of you, intending to build a tower, sitteth not down first, and counteth the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish it?"

Luke 14:28 (KJV)

Look closely at what the tower-builder does, because he is the quiet hero of this whole essay. He imagines twice. First he imagines the finished tower, gleaming on its hill, and there is no harm in that; nobody builds anything without a picture of it. But then he sits down, which is the crucial verb, and imagines the middle: the stones, the wages, the rain delays, the long unphotogenic months between the first trench and the last tile. The speculator imagines only the ending. His picture contains a lakeside house but no lake of process to cross, no cost, no time, no ten thousand ordinary Tuesdays. Counting the cost is imagination in harness. The castle in the air is imagination on holiday, with your wallet in its pocket.

Here is the subtle danger, and I ask you to test it against your own experience rather than take my word for it. The castle costs nothing to build, and that is precisely what makes it expensive. A daydream is the one purchase with no price tag, so we carry home a dozen a week. But every castle quietly rearranges the furniture of the heart. The salary that felt adequate on Monday feels like an insult by Friday, not because anything changed at work, but because you have spent the week living, imaginatively, at a much better address. The faithful monthly transfer to the retirement account begins to look timid, even faintly ridiculous, the way a bicycle looks ridiculous to a man who has been picturing himself in a jet. We call the hours spent scrolling price charts research. It is not research. It is redecorating a house we do not own.

The Arithmetic of Haste

Solomon watched money move through Jerusalem for a lifetime, and of all the ways it misbehaves, haste seems to have alarmed him most. "A faithful man shall abound with blessings: but he that maketh haste to be rich shall not be innocent" (Proverbs 28:20, KJV). Two verses later he presses the point home: "He that hasteth to be rich hath an evil eye, and considereth not that poverty shall come upon him" (Proverbs 28:22, KJV). Notice the diagnosis buried in that second verse. The hasty man's failure is that he "considereth not." His first sin is not wickedness but inattention. He has stopped counting, and the numbers he refuses to count are cruel in one particular way that every would-be speculator ought to have framed above his desk.

Gains and losses are not symmetric. They sound symmetric, which is the trap. Lose 50 percent of your money and you must then gain 100 percent, a full doubling, merely to walk back through the door you left. Put 10,000 dollars into a hot coin that falls 80 percent, which such coins routinely do, and you hold 2,000 dollars that must now multiply fivefold before you have accomplished nothing at all. The hole is always steeper on the way out than it looked on the way in.

The purest castles in the air come with printed odds. A Powerball jackpot ticket carries a chance of one in 292,201,338, published by the lottery itself, which means a faithful weekly player should expect to win the jackpot roughly once every five and a half million years. Nobody buys the ticket because of that number. They buy the two days of imagining before the drawing, which may honestly be the most accurately priced daydream in America, though it makes a poor retirement plan. The speculator in coins and meme stocks is playing the same game with less honesty about it, sacrificing his settled position for a brilliancy he has seen only in his mind, like a chess player who gives up both rooks for an attack that exists nowhere on the actual board. Solomon totaled this ledger three thousand years ago: "The thoughts of the diligent tend only to plenteousness; but of every one that is hasty only to want" (Proverbs 21:5, KJV).

The Slow Miracle of Boring Money

Now turn the anchor verse over and look at its second half, which is a promise of process rather than a promise of luck: he that gathereth by labour shall increase. Gathering is a wonderfully unglamorous verb. Hens gather. Gleaners gather. Nobody makes a film about gathering. And yet the arithmetic of gathering is the closest thing to magic that honest money ever performs, because compounding is growth that itself begins to grow, interest earning interest, the way a hedge planted as a row of bare sticks one spring becomes, a decade of unwatched seasons later, a wall of green you could lose a football in.

Put plain numbers on it. Suppose a household gathers 500 dollars a month into broad, low-cost ownership of productive companies, and suppose the long run treats them roughly as the American stock market has treated patient owners historically, call it seven percent a year on average. After ten years they have put in 60,000 dollars and hold about 86,000. Unremarkable. After twenty years they have put in 120,000 and hold about 260,000. Interesting. After thirty years they have put in 180,000 dollars and hold a little over 610,000, of which more than 430,000 is growth, most of it arriving in the final decade, when the hedge had finally grown tall enough to do its own growing. The last ten years do the heavy lifting, which is exactly why the hasty man never sees a dime of them.

Honesty requires two footnotes here, and I will not hide them in small print. First, seven percent is a long historical average, not a covenant. Markets fall, sometimes sickeningly, sometimes for years together, and God has nowhere promised His people smooth returns. Scripture is full of faithful men and women in famine, and a Christian's hope was never indexed to any market. The claim being made is smaller and sturdier: patient ownership of real work has, over long stretches, rewarded patience, and the counsel of Scripture leans the same direction as the evidence. Second, patience is not the same as concentration. The old Preacher's investment advice is startlingly modern: "Give a portion to seven, and also to eight; for thou knowest not what evil shall be upon the earth" (Ecclesiastes 11:2, KJV). Spread the seed, he says, precisely because you cannot see the future. Mark that reasoning well. Diversification is built on the confession that tomorrow is hidden, while every speculation is built on the pretense that, for you alone, it is not.

How to Tell Which One You Are Holding

James watched the confident merchants of his day stride through their plans, and he put his finger on the exact nerve:

"Go to now, ye that say, To day or to morrow we will go into such a city, and continue there a year, and buy and sell, and get gain: Whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away."

James 4:13-14 (KJV)

Note that James does not scold them for commerce. Buying and selling are honest work, and Scripture honors honest work from its first pages. What he condemns is the certainty, a planned future spoken of as a possessed one. The speculator's characteristic sentence is always in the wrong tense: when this doubles, never if. So audit your own holdings, not with a formula but with a handful of honest questions, and let each answer sort the asset into its true pile.

One question on that list deserves a second look, because it is the quiet giveaway. Ask what a 30 percent price drop would mean to you. If you own a productive thing you understand, a drop is a sale, unpleasant but survivable, since the ovens are still baking and the rents still arrive. If price was the only story you ever had, then a drop is the story ending, and you will feel it in your stomach at two in the morning. The asset did not change at that lower price. It was revealed.

A Garden Wall for the Daydreamer

What then shall we do, we who cannot stop imagining? A garden without a wall is soon not a garden; it is simply a place where the countryside comes and goes as it pleases. The wall does not hate the countryside. It merely insists on where the garden is. Paul builds the same wall in a single sentence, and it is worth quoting exactly, because people remember it wrongly as a warning about money when it is a warning about momentum:

"But they that will be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition."

1 Timothy 6:9 (KJV)

They that will be rich. Not they that are rich, and not they that would mildly prefer it. The warning falls on the set will, the aimed determination, the man already leaning out over the water before anything has drowned him. The wall, then, must be built before the leaning starts, in cold blood, on an ordinary afternoon when no opportunity is glittering at you. Here is a wall that has held for many households, five stones high.

The foundation stone matters most, so weigh it properly. In the Federal Reserve's latest survey of household well-being, nearly four adults in ten could not cover a 400 dollar surprise from cash on hand. A household in that position has no business funding anyone's castle, including its own; every spare dollar already has a God-given assignment called the roof, the brakes, and the electric bill. Clear the expensive debt, bank three to six months of expenses, automate the boring engine, and only then, if the itch remains, fence off a small paddock for it: at most five percent of your investments, an amount you could lose entirely without changing your family's life, marked honestly in your own mind as a wager and never as a plan. Then impose the seventy-two hour rule on everything that arrives breathless. Urgency is the con man's oxygen and the algorithm's business model, and I have yet to hear of a genuine opportunity that died because a man prayed about it from Friday to Monday. Last, and hardest, tell one honest friend. Castles in the air are built in secret, and most of them cannot survive being described, out loud, to somebody unimpressed.

The Better Castle

I promised at the start that the cure would have to reach the imagination, and so it must, because the imagination will not consent to be idle. Starve it of coins and it will dream of lottery numbers; starve it of those and it will dream of the neighbor's kitchen renovation. The faculty is not to be shut down. It is to be aimed. And the Lord Jesus, who told us to count costs, also told us where the counting house should stand:

"Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also."

Matthew 6:19-21 (KJV)

Where the treasure goes, the heart follows, and the imagination trots faithfully behind the heart like a dog behind its owner. That is why the practical machinery of this essay, the automated transfer, the diversified gathering, the fenced paddock, the seventy-two hours of waiting, is quietly a spiritual machinery as well. Every boring contribution is a small vote about which future you actually believe in. "Boast not thyself of to morrow; for thou knowest not what a day may bring forth" (Proverbs 27:1, KJV) is not a curse on planning. It is the death of pretending, and pretending was the speculator's entire inventory.

So by all means keep your Tuesday mornings and your second cup of coffee. But when the next headline offers you a stranger's lakeside house, you may notice, mid-daydream, that you were built for something better than a castle with no floor. Abraham noticed it long ago: "For he looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God" (Hebrews 11:10, KJV). A city with foundations at the end of the road, and until then a garden with a wall: slow money gathered by labor, a fence around the daydreams, and a heart whose treasure already sits where no market can reach it. It is a smaller picture than the castle, I grant you. It has the single advantage of being real.