Ok gloomer
I’m 26 and Feel Too Old to Bother Learning About Crypto
A quarter-life crisis courtesy of the blockchain.
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I feel old for crypto. This video of a 3-year-old being blockchain-savvy might’ve contributed:
At that age, I was lousily erecting sandcastles and beginning to understand the function of my tiny membrum virile (it has since grown considerably, and by that I mean my understanding).
If only my parents had put me through that kind of exploitative childhood perhaps I would have a seat in Jeff Bezos’ space rocket by now.
But no — they gave me a Game Boy Advance and now I’m just a normie
Meanwhile, I see these 12-year-old brokers trading crypto coins like it’s simpler than operating a Tamagotchi, and something inside me prays for a meteor impact just so we can go back to trading chickens.
The FOMO should be eating my insides by now.
Instead, I feel detached, defeated, disappointed by my own indifference. But above all, I feel all whenever I think about crypto.
And that’s saying something considering I once lost bladder control long enough to qualify for an adult diaper during certain medical intervention.
I know this is just old people thinking
I’ve done the loose skin test. I’ve plunged into the bathtub and carefully measured how far my scrotum floats away from me.
According to the results, I’m still young and full of vigour.
But every time I see something about crypto and react with tired apathy, I feel the urge to do something youthful before I lose my sex drive and start opening sentences with “Back in my day…”
I know I had that juvenile stamina at some point. I mean, if I told my 12-year-old self that he could mint his GBA Pokémon into NFTs and flip them for profit, I’m sure he’d suit up, light a fag and start making phone calls.
But honestly, that’s not the reason why my indifference worries me
My only worry is, as The New York Times eloquently puts it, that everyone is getting hilariously rich and I’m not.
“Hilariously” being the problem here. I’m a huge fan of jests and will go embarrassingly far just to get a laugh out of anyone — I’d even sign up for a nuclear bombing if there were funny people attending — but whatever comedic value contained in “dogecoin millionaires” is just not enough incentive to get me involved.
What I mean is, I appreciate the memes. But from the bleachers.
Scrutinizing stock charts as I complain about gas fees in a Discord server full of pre-teens with non-fungible profile pics is just not my idea of fun.
This is what boomers must’ve felt when they first listened to grunge rock in the 90s: “How are these people enjoying making a living out of this?”
Moreover, the crypto world is still too primitive for me
Sorry for Jeff Bezoing this article but I have to justify that overly pretentious subheading (no need to watch it; I break it down for you in the lines below).
Bezos basically made the point that the internet’s potential was largely uncapped. That was in 2003.
His foresight was so brilliant the talk could’ve been titled “This Is How I’ll Beat Mr Clean as the Richest Bald Man, and Maybe Buy a Phallus-Shaped Rocket With the Spoils of My Genius.”
Near the end, he says
“We’re very very primitive. And that’s kind of the point.”
I think crypto is in that primitive state right now. It’s just as ugly, convoluted, and unintuitive as the internet was 20 years ago — also, full of people still insisting that the whole thing is a fag.
For that reason, I’m out
I’m convinced the next Jeff Bezos is looking at their framed Cryptopunk hanging above their standing desk and thinking, “Someday I’ll have my own space rocket.”
They will.
I just can’t bring myself to give a f*ck about it.
The crypto world is still too much about itself. Pioneers are still trying to figure it out, so pretty much all the talk is about what we can do about it, not what we can do with it.
When blockchain tech becomes integrated with our daily lives, invisible like the internet or tap water, but powering it in new amazing ways — maybe I’ll give it a closer look.
I just hope I’m not too old for when that happens.
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