How Should I Have Spent My Time?

I've established a good habit of getting up early each day before 6am to check the online job listings. I've also looked into getting a "project management" certification in order to make myself more useful to prospective employers. In the mean time, I've done some volunteer work, and talked to people about doing more volunteer work in the near future. I figure it's a way to make more connections and possibly open some doors that I don't even know exist yet.

That's a satisfying set of respectable and socially useful activities. I'm not writing this to blow my own horn though, but to contrast this to an alternative activity I could have spent my time on.

I'm not a stock market expert, but I did suspect that Citigroup and AIG stock, which both dipped below $1 on fears of going bankrupt, were undervalued because the government would not let them go bankrupt. If I studied this a little more and convinced myself that it was worth the risk of investing my severance pay on these stocks, I could have made over $100,000 in the last two weeks as these stocks shot up. I didn't make that investment out of fear that I could have lost a good portion of my severance pay if I was wrong, and my family needed that money to survive on until I find my next job.

Does this seem wrong to anyone else? An economic system that rewards stock speculation so much more than socially useful efforts seems broken. Maybe we accepted this in the past, but perhaps now the problems this leads to have become all too painfully apparent. Perhaps the economy won't fully recover until this situation fundamentally changes. As long as the most economically profitable thing to do involves financial speculation, we can't consider ourselves to be on the road to creating a reasonable and sustainable economy for the 21st century. Just some speculation, and I don't know if it's more wishful thinking than reality yet.