No loss, no gain

Today is one of those days when my idle mind is experiencing a self-administered overdose of vague, cynical philosophy on a sleepless midnight. The devil in the idle mind thinks:

Life is pretty much like the stock market: When you invest time/effort/emotions or anything that means something to you, just as you invest money in a stock market, you may gain/lose possession of knowledge/money/people/repute, just as you gain/lose possession of your stocks in the stock market.

However one big difference between life as a birth-to-death game and the stock market as an entry-to-exit game is: There is a net gain/loss of money that you make in the stock market between the time you begin to build your portfolio of stocks and the time when you wind up your trading and sell out all your stocks. In life, however, there's no net gain/loss of ANYTHING at all...because, no matter how much knowledge/money/people/repute you win/lose between your birth and death, the truth - the blatant truth remains that you brought nothing with you when you were born into this world, you're gonna take nothing upon your demise - so there's ZERO net gain/net loss. Safer game compared to the stock market, I say!