I was once sitting in a coffee shop when I overheard a conversation between a couple of men in suits that surprised me.

“Did you read those books I gave you?” one asked the other.

“Yeah,” said the second man. “I think I’m really starting to understand the Tao, to connect to it.”

“Over time, you really develop an intuitive feel for it,” said the first man. “You start to sense when the Tao is about to jump.”

Just as I was about to mentally commend these two expensively-clad spiritual warriors – hey, you can’t judge a book by its cover, right? – I realized that they were talking about the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

That pretty much sums up my whole relationship with the stock market. I’m not even sure why it’s there. And now we’re being told that it’s whipsawing wildly again like a snake with its tail caught in a mangle trap and oh, God, what does this mean?

To me and countless others, it means pretty much nothing. Just that those wild-eyed, screaming men in the godawful sport coats are right on the verge of putting the economy in the ditch again. Oh, hurrah. Didn’t we just do this?

I grew up on the low end of middle-class. I went to a state college on scholarships and pursued a life in the creative arts after graduation. In other words, I spent more than a decade asking people if they want whipped cream on that mocha.

For me, a hot stock tip is boiling raw veggies in your ramen noodle broth for 4 to 6 minutes before you add the noodles. Insider info is when the sales clerk at J Crew gives me that almost imperceptible shake of the head that says: “Come back tomorrow and that blue sweater will cost half as much.”

The $600 currently languishing in my checking account will be worth roughly the same amount tomorrow as it is today. I don’t have a retirement portfolio. I’ve never knowingly fondled a complex financial instrument in my life.

And yet, I have to think that I would be more competent at handling my own and thousands of other people’s financial well-being than the current batch of clowns who seem hell-bent on crashing the planet every eight years or so.

They’re like an army of tiny, raging Donald Trumps – the billionaire would probably have more money now if he’d just locked up his inheritance in investment trusts and walked away. Instead, he rode decades of boom and bust wheeling and dealing like a rodeo bull, racking up multiple bankruptcies and a slew of business debacles. The guy’s still rich, but kind of in spite of himself.

The screaming men on the trading floor presumably spent exorbitant amounts of money on education and training to learn to work with money, and yet they clearly can’t even do that. I think if (heaven forbid) I was ever allowed to address the floor at the New York Stock Exchange, I would say: “You idiots have one job. Why are you so bad at it?”

We’ve been told repeatedly that all of the factors that led to the 2008 financial collapse are still in place. Could we maybe do something to fix that, get some people in here who can see more than eight seconds into the future and who are a little less excitable and who have a little more foresight and level-headedness than a colony of particularly stupid streptococcus bacteria?

Failing that, is there any way for the rest of us to climb off the roller-coaster and not be economically beholden to people whose decision-making skills echo the ganglia-driven reflex responses of cockroaches more than they do the actual nuts-and-bolts work of cognition?

Even elementary physics lessons show us that a universe built on constant expansion is unsustainable. An amateur electrician knows the “Keep one hand in your pocket” rule to avoid electrocuting yourself. Why is it that the people in charge of our planet’s economic destiny aren’t sharp enough to grasp basic concepts like not sawing off the branch you’re sitting on?

Maybe they need to read some books on the Tao.