Crypto collapse or wombats, cuddles are the answer

I was being chauffeured around town the other day when I heard a sob story on The Boss’s car radio about an older couple who had lost most of their life savings investing in crypto currency — the stuff that kicked off with Bitcoins a few years ago.

They told the interviewer that they had done their research and found a reliable crypto currency trading house that would take away all the risk and still deliver stellar returns — as if — but they went broke.

The Boss only grunted, but I know what he was thinking.

It’s along the lines of, “How could they be so stupid?”

The Boss reckons the proverb “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket” came out of the Spanish novel Don Quixote, which Cervantes published in 1615. Some people take a while to catch on.

Although, he says, the US steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, who made a huge fortune and then gave it all away (including funding the famous Carnegie Hall in New York) said you could put all your eggs in one basket — “but watch that basket!”

Anyway, it turns out that the stupid gene is not restricted to a few greedy older Australians who ought to have had more sense — it has cut a swathe through younger folk whose hopes are tied to the shares of their tech company employers in Silicon Valley.

They have faced the double whammy of watching their crypto currency investments collapse while the value of their share options has taken a similar path. Living in the home of flower power, it is no surprise to me that they are casting about for therapies of various kinds — and I am thinking along similar lines.

My Californian Chessie friends — who are routinely allowed to sleep on or beside their boss’s beds, I might say — tell me that, in San Francisco, requests for psychedelic therapy, equine therapy (that’s communing with horses to lower anxiety), laughter therapy and cuddle therapy have taken off, in addition to demand for conventional talk therapy.

I’ve tried eating mushrooms myself, but it didn’t do much for me. The Boss says Americans like to combine compassion with a business solution where possible, so the Bay Area has more than 60 ketamine clinics offering a psychedelic experience to stressed tech workers. Ketamine is an anaesthetic for humans and horses, but apparently produces a high for the believers. It’s illegal here.

Naturally, it was the explosion in cuddle therapy that pricked my attention: I’m a little stressed myself, with the wattles coming out and the days getting longer — not to mention the incursion of more wombats into my territory.

The Boss offered to sign me up to Cuddlist.com, which supplies professional cuddlers to stressed tech workers for a minimum of $60 a session, but I’d need to fund it myself. And move to San Fran.

He is obviously keen to see me out of here and tells me there is nothing sexual about it — as if I’d care — and assures me the professionally trained cuddlers turn up with cushions and blankets to hug and caress you for an hour or so.

Of course, The Boss could provide this kind of treatment free of charge, between bones and things. But I guess it isn’t going to happen. Woof!