The chilling in the basement, ordering everything online, gaming, trading, gambling, streaming and trolling on social media, is this generations opium den
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Discussion
An upgraded "high" compared to old school opium, in that the flavour of the dream/euphoria can now be effectively directed and melded by the central scrutinisers.
Absolutely, you can mix and match your preffered method of dopamine, little bit of hyper palatable food substitutes, a little onlyfans here and there, some outlet for your anger online and slowly but surely you add more things or increase the dosages, the self medicated opium den is a prison of your own design
For me, I fell into the Linkedin, hustle grind, career, work my ass off crack, while I still suffer from it to an extent, with Bitcoin at least I have a measuring stick and a goal I can focus on instead of just trying to keep pace with fiat devaluation
I'm interested in that part about the corn being somewhat of a valve to relieve some pressure on the urgency of the grind. But.......my day to day living is all old school bank a/c and cash so my corn remains, I don't know, kind of ethereal/psychological. Sure I can appreciate the value protecting me from the inflation but it's a hodl and unless I can really put the corn to work it seems possible, and I ponder that part, that there's this "old miser counting $ in his a/c" who just watches it and never upgrades life quality and when the reaper comes it's a regret. Maybe each individual's age will change that dynamic but I'm Gen X so it's something I think about. Meanwhile, the grind grinds on!
Same here, work and live in fiat, and I keep a buffer of fiat for expenses, while my corn is my savings, retirement, emergency fund, medical fund and I hope I don't need to tap into it anytime soon, but glad that I have the option
I don't see the point of relying on my fiat pension stuff, that's all going to zero before I reach retirement age, so I consider it 0 already. So the corn kinda puts me at ease mentally, because I worried about it a lot
I don't mind the grind, I am happy to work, I enjoy it, I just want to know that its all for something in the end, when I look at my peers consuming today getting the nice car, the glam vacay I don't feel bad anymore, I want to have more options than 2 weeks off and working until im 65 or longer
I guess the tapping into the capital is the hard part now because the opportunity cost is so high, you forgo those future gains and pay today's taxes on it.
I don't keep any fiat at all. Not even for the daily expense. Anytime I earn any fiat, I convert it into bitcoin at once not even looking at the charts.
When I am spending, if BTC is up from my last purchase - I spend that. If it is down - I spend the BTC that I bought at 20k. That one is still up 😁.
I have no on/off ramp. An issue I hope won't matter when BTC is more widely accepted.
In El Salvador no need to offramp, in Europe there are crypto.com and safepal Visa cards (check if they supply your tx data to your tax authorities), in Lithuania you can buy/sell for cash at skelbiu.lt . The rest of the world - don't know.
It would seem sad. Andrew Tate would certainly have some harsh words about it. But I am not sure if people are really capable of any better. When before the touchscreens, for decades, centuries and millenniums they did go out, they weren't any smarter, it's just that then they were harming each other and others, sowing hatred and excessive competition all around. Hopefully bitcoin fixes this. But until then, I am glad everyone's in a basement scrolling.
I'd be inclined to say people like Andrew have created opium dens of their very own.
Maybe, but it does seem like people are starting to radicalise more and more as they come together online and clash, maybe its just a subset of the loud minority I don't know
I do hope that better wealth distribution, helps reduce the feeling of dread and black pilling creeping across people, only time will tell I supose
More fair wealth distribution - yes, this is what I hope bitcoin will belp with because of its inconfiscatability and immutability. Just whenever we talk about wealth distribution we need to be careful not to confuse it with any subset of communism and stateism. The bottom line is that there is no such thing as wealth. By wealth we refer to money, monetary value. And money is just a quantifier and proof of society's debt to the money holder. So your wealth equals society's debt to you.
So as long as every person receives money only for the services he personally provides to the society - that is fair. In other words, if someone willingly and not under any mass psyop gave you the money - you are the rightious owner. When somebody does not provide the service, but still receives the money - that is not fair. And this fairness is all we need to worry about. Whether there are very "rich" and cery "poor" people - does not matter. Everyone has what he deserves as long as there is no way to steal, confiscate and counterfate money.
And a way to stay out of mass psyops is to stay away from centralization of anything. I.e. no ownership rights nor any rights whatsoever for legal entities. No ownership of anything for states and companies. Everything must be private, i.e. personal. You can give names for groups of people for simplicity sake, but nothing legal about it.
If the two of us are producing a car, I am producing plastics,and you - metals, then plastics are mine and metals are yours all the time, until we sell it and each get paid directly. Then the entire car is customer's. Seems crazy, but it is possible. And fair.
Then, at least statistically, there will not be much unfairness.