I hate the whole publicly traded model of companies. I hate capitalism. But have to engage in trading stocks (I mostly do Mutual Funds and a small quantity of direct stocks) so that my money doesn't lose value by sitting in a bank or cash.
Same thing with credit cards, don't like taking loans and getting marked on a centralised list for that but it's a safer option than using your own money.
Fortunately I don't do crypto so that's a plus.
A lot of normal workers here have 401ks and other retirement plans, and usually that involves stock trading, either by the worker or by the company holding the money. Hell, even banks gamble with your money when it sits in their accounts. And the HYSAs are high yield because some poor guy got finessed by the interest rates. And more than likely, that money is going to a bunch of weapons companies while sitting around.
Maybe I’m just coping because I have some money invested in ETFs and some of the larger percentages go to shit like Lockheed and I don’t want to think of myself as bad. But I don’t know. I don’t touch those ETFs once I buy them so they function no different than a bank account. Maybe even worse because there are penalties for selling.
The only thing that will redeem me is if my retirement money in the ETFs tank significantly. It will be fully deserved for willingly giving my money to Silicon Valley and weapons companies that enable genocide.
The other option is to manually choose the stocks, but would that be worse? You would become obsessed with stock performance and constantly checking the news and potentially becoming reactionary when your value goes down. At least with ETFs I buy and forget and can focus on the real world and try to negate my contribution to evil.