Before I start - shameless self promo! I’m dropping a piece on Nifty Gateway today!
Do it, click the link. Yeah. OK, onto this week’s topic
Lots of change this season - feels like more than usual. When I started writing this article on Monday, Nov. 7th, FTX had not entirely eaten shit yet. Reviewing it at the end of the week, I find it ironic that the title is even more relevant than when I first came up with it. I ended up editing what I originally wrote to match the current phase of the crypto-pocalypse folks are experiencing, because holy shit talk about change.
Cycles
Those that have been through crypto cycles already know how this goes; shit dips, it sucks, then it gets better a while later. Some folks leave, others dish out unsolicited advice, and healthy communities stay intact and focused. Dark humor and memes carry us through the bullshit.
This is also true of life in general, and we don’t need to focus on the misery that comes with a bunch of your financial assets at the crypto-casino tanking (or being entirely unavailable suddenly, because centralized finance is a dumpster fire). Throughout our lives, we tend to experience all manner of uncertainty and conflict. Sometimes this looks like depression and anxiety, and other times it is sheer frustration and confusion. Whatever these “dips” in our mental health and life circumstances look like, there tends to be an upswing that follows, and we get better at the cycles.
It helps when we have a support system, and community to help get us through these down-bad periods. I’ve found this time and time again in different forms with different communities. From body suspension connections to artist DAOs, various folks have been there to keep me off ledges, and help keep things on track. Change is much easier when you’re not facing it alone.
I think that as humans, we reinvent ourselves all the time. You get good at things, and let it define you a little. Sometimes an epiphany changes your entire philosophy. Some folks find gods, others let them go. Many fight inner demons, and that becomes their outward personality. Somewhere between it all, we go through various personality shifts, and in some cases, create entire brands around our online personalities.
Responsibility
Capitalist society holds up a mirror when we examine our spending habits. Our media subscriptions and fashion choices frame who we are not just to ourselves, but also signal to others that we are similar. As we engage IRL and through social media, we subconsciously set up plays that will help our next phase of change, and our finances tend to determine what these changes will look like.
Unlike the traditional financial model of having your financial worth and assets in the hands of a bunch of faceless banks and agencies, decentralization is about taking responsibility for your own finances, and subsequently your life decisions. Risk is in everything: do you trust yourself to make these changes? I will argue that decentralization isn’t just about money, but a philosophy that is dedicated to taking agency over multiple facets of your life.
Body suspension is, in many ways, the most decentralized thing you can do to your body and mind. While you are putting your trust in somebody like me to facilitate a safe experience, and be vulnerable in front of, you are entirely responsible for this decision you are making, and committing to.
You are the doyen of your own mind
Similarly, interacting with a decentralized ecosystem with a non-custodial wallet means you are entirely responsible for your decisions when interacting with, and transacting with other parties or contracts. In some cases, it is entirely wack, because it is not easy to identify the bad players/entities if you haven’t been here before. And even if you have, scammers still trick us sometimes.
There be dragons here.
Transitions
As the end of the year draws nearer, a number of objective and subjective facets of our lives also rapidly approach:
Taxes
Family time for holidays if you’re living in Judeo-Christian cultures
Uptick in web usage in the Northern hemisphere (it’s cold out)
The ethereal whooshing associated with the Gregorian calendar ending a cycle
They cancelled West World
MAYBE HOPEFULLY YOU’RE DONE USING CENTRALIZED EXCHANGES FINALLY
Google Universal Analytics
Existential Dread (haha just kidding it never really ends)
The trick is managing to transition gently, and without damage. Unfortunately, thanks to recent events like pandemics and fiscal policies that fucked most of us royally, pain and damage seem to be mandatory. We just have to reduce them as best we can. As with all things, we must learn to adjust, and shift through things with some modicum of elegance - or just plow through them with zero fucks given. Survival is a weird thing.
As a person who is intimately familiar with physical pain, trust me when I say financial pain can hurt a lot more than some temporary bouts of corporeal ouch. Suspension teaches us that overcoming pain leads to euphoria. This is the same with financial pain, in that once you make enough mistakes, you can hopefully get on a sustainable path to financial comfort. The uncomfortable truth many have to face and accept is that we live in a society wherein money solves a lot of problems. I’m not talking about luxuries here; being out of debt, and being able to cover medical costs without trouble is exhilarating to those that are used to being buried under financial stress.
We have to do the work to get to these happier states, and that is the pain sometimes.
If you’re an artist at heart, oftentimes it’s not about getting rich. It’s about being able to buy time, to do and create the things you want to. Being a starving artist sucks. I would very much appreciate it if influencers on dingusgram could stop glorifying it now, thanks. Show me an artist who would prefer a tiny home on wheels over a fully stocked 1000 sqft. studio.
So how do we get there? You can sit there and “manifest” shit with your mind all you want, but it’s the action you take that follows your manifestgasms that will yield actual results. And the first step to that is identifying your goals, and your assets.
What are your mechanisms for change? What tools do you have at your disposal? Are you coping or dealing with your problems? Financial decisions or social decisions? What are your vices? How about your virtues?
Can you loosely transition through the change, or are you just counting the loose change left over from past cycles over and over again?
Here’s the biggest question though: what are you willing to sacrifice, and what is the fear you’ve absolutely got to confront and lean into, in order to get through to the other side of all this pain?
These questions might actually answer a different question: who are you becoming?
Some notes for today; I have an art drop with my family over at SidewaysDAO today, over on Nifty Gateway!
Drop is at 6:11PM ET || 11:11 PM UTC. Open Edition, $50, available for 11:11 hours only.
Link to collective drop: https://www.niftygateway.com/collections/1111sideways
With the title of your article i was expecting some kind of technical insight into 9/11 🤣
Change, it is inevitable, and paradoxically constant. Who are you at the orgy? When the mystery finger gets pushed up against your butthole? Do you recoil because you don't know the hand the finger is attached to? Or do you lean on in? Sometimes the only way out of something is through it, you are right!
I think any change that is necessary begats some kind of pain. The financial pains are necessarily the worst, because they are slow burning and long lasting. However I can see how they begat a set of conditions for freeing us from centralisation and Elite rule. However, that is collectively.... Individually, however, you could just be fucked; Damn if your just a cog in the future's enlightenment. I guess that's kind of the next step from realizing man's folly: Having to believe.
Stay tuned.