This is the way

Reminiscences or rambling thoughts of my old self, that I never had the time to get out of my system.

The year was 2020, I had just recently graduated and got my first job. I counted myself lucky for getting hire during those gloomy times. We were around three months into the pandemic and it was wrecking havoc all around the globe. There was panic and uncertainty everywhere, but not for me. The future looked bright and stable. I pride myself for managing to do the impossible during those times, get not just a whatever job, but one that had the three characteristics I was looking out the most for in a job: a good salary (I know this is subjective, but basically I could buy unnecessary things and still manage to have some spare money for savings), it was 100% traveling (I am part of that generation who was embedded the idea that they need to travel in order to be happy), and it was outside my country, because you know traveling feels better when it isn’t in your own country.

Now, fast forward 6 months into the job and I hated it. There was nothing about it that I enjoyed. At first it was the traveling part that got me all excited about that job, but after a while it just became tiresome, especially on COVID times with all the restrictions.

My job felt like a cage and with every passing day it was becoming harder to break out of it. I remember stumbling upon this quote from Taleb on one of his books that I was reading at the time and I understood why I felt that way “The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.” The false safety that having a monthly salary gave me was making me feel comfortable and turning me into a lazy person. My job didn’t feel fulfilling at all and I wasn’t interested in what I could learnt from it ether. I was just there for the money.

It was around that time too that I started reading about crypto, Web 3.0, NFTs, DeFi, etc. There’s something that I have to tell you about myself, I’ve never been genuinely interested in anything. Every subject in high school felt lame and boring for me; the only exception being History, I used to love and still love to learn about the past events of our world. In college it was the same. I chose mechatronics engineering as my major just because people told me that it was one of the most difficult careers and hey if it is difficult this means that when I am done with it I am going to be one of the smartest guys in the world and earn a lot of money right? Right?

Now here I was reading on the internet about this new class of assets and how this was the future. I started reading about bitcoin first to understand how it worked and what was the purpose of it. Then, after I was done with Bitcoin, I started reading about Ethereum and WOW, Ethereum was in a whole different level. Bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency and is definitely the most famous one, but there is not much you can do with. On the other hand, what you could do with the Ethereum blockchain was limitless, bounded only by our imagination as I see it; LP provider, ask for loans, yield farming, crypto gaming, NFTs, etc. I was hooked after this, I went down the rabbit hole and developed an addiction to reading about crypto and watching the price charts every single day. Every day that I didn’t read about some new project on twitter or discovered some new token felt like I was wasting my time. Crypto was the first topic in my whole life that I felt like genuinely interested in learning more about it. It was the first time that I was curious and wanted to learn more and more just for the sake of it, nothing like school where you are solely motivated or constrained by the need to have good grades, because in my case that was the only motive for me; I had to get good grades so that I could keep my scholarship. It was never for my own self interest.

From what I’ve learnt in this space and life generally, there is not just one way to make it. By making it I mean having enough money to have the freedom to do the things that you enjoy the most. The most obvious way to make it in crypto is probably buying a coin or token and getting a 100x or 1000x. So I started buying different tokens and coins from different blockchains, trying to keep up with the narratives that were out there and doing my best to rotate in time before everyone else dumped on old little me, this was the hardest thing to do. A free for all market it was and now I was part of it. Reminiscing about the past what hurt me the most during this past cycle was my greediness and not having a system to take profits. The culture of hodling my bag and never taking profits hold me back from making more money that I could. In hindsight it all makes sense; you need to take profits on the way up and not get too greedy, but when you some money in there and you see it double or triple in less than a week you star to feel all sort of emotions that blind your process of thought. That’s the reason why it is important to have a profits taking system, something I am aware of now and working towards developing.

Anyways, I did have a good run and manage to get enough money to get the courage to leave my old job, but it wasn’t without some struggle, specially mental struggle. It was around December 2021 when I finally gather the necessary courage to put myself through that conversation with my manager which, by the way, I was looking forward since the day I started my crypto journey. After all was said and done I felt free, finally I was going to have all the time in the world to put it into something that I enjoyed learning about. Little did I know that my happiness wouldn’t las forever.

After some relationship and personal problems I was left in a bad state of mind. I had many unresolved issues, traumas, that have to been deal with but couldn’t at the past because I wasn’t entirely aware of them. I never really put any thought to try to understand myself and what my triggers where, why I behaved it the way I did. That’s as far as I will go with this topic. Crypto didn’t help much with my state of mind either; the markets just started dumping and being the hopeless optimistic that I was at the time I didn’t sell any of my bags until my net worth was less than the half of what it was at its highest. Those were the darkest months of my life, never had I lost so much money in so small span of time. Well, to date I am still losing money, because I tried to trade every day just to get some of that money back. Whether I will lose it all or make it back is something that the future will tell. If I am being honest with myself I should stop now, I am no expert and what is most likely to happen is that I will lose it all. Things don’t look that good. It is now mid June and I’ve been gambling a lot lately with the money I was left with. I’ve also been a little bit reckless with my money. I’ve been spending more money that I should lately.

The thing that hits me the most is that I have no job right now and making my way out in crypto is not going to be a walk in the park. At the moment I am trying to motivate myself to learn new skills like writing, learning SQL and going through discords in order to get involved in projects, but it is something that I’ve never done before, so it’s been a little hard for me. At the same time I’ve been traveling a lot to get my mind off all this stress that is being cause by the uncertainty that I am experience.

I am just 26 years old and I shouldn’t stress, because stress does nobody any good, but sometimes it is so hard to keep myself calm and try to convince myself that better times will come, that after the rain the sun always shine. I am being a little dramatic, am I not? I know Life isn’t supposed to be easy at the end, those times when you are down give more meaning and make you appreciate more the good moments in life

Now, here I am 6 months after quitting my job and losing most of the money I’ve made in crypto. It’s been a hell of a ride, but I am aware that I am just getting started and every single thing that I’ve been through until now was either a lesson that I had to learn or an experience which I need to go through to set me up for the next chapter of my life.

I’d like to end with some parting thoughts. This article was never meant to be published, it was just to prove myself that I am also capable of writing and what is easier to write about than myself, because there is nobody that can do this better. I get scared because I want to be an analyst and being an analyst means putting your thoughts out there for people to read out loud and judge. They are going to judge every single detail of the research I’ll do and I am fine with it. This will help me become better every day. I know I can, I know I will.