A quadrillion reasons

When I "got in" on crypto, times were hard, really hard. At the time it seemed like there was just going to be no respite and we struggled through financial hardship, but it was health issues that plagued all three of us that delivered the worst blows. During those times and for near on a year, I was doing the best I could to meet responsibilities of work and family and was surviving off around three hours of broken sleep a night and if I could manage it, a nap after I got home from work.

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I felt like a mindless zombie from the walking dead, but I look back at those times and hold them dear, as I learned a lot about myself during those weeks that turned into months that drew out into years. I have shared some of the journey through my writing, but I will never likely publish it all.

As said, it was during this time that I got into crypto through writing, a way to make a few much needed dollars that never eventuated into dollars at all - that crypto is still crypto. There is a reason for this that I was trying to explain to a colleague today.

While I needed the money, the getting in set me on a path of learning and opened me up to areas of life that I hadn't really considered before. I started to change my perspective on the world, started to see weaknesses in myself and others and the direction society is taking. I had looked at much of this before, but there was something about entering into a social platform with an economy attached that shone a spotlight on aspects of the world.

I was trying to explain to a colleague today who a few months ago bought his first Bitcoin, that the reason to get into the scene isn't because of the potential for profits, it is for where it all leads. Making "money" is one aspect of it and it is highly compelling and evokes strong emotion as it could relieve one of our major pain points in life, but I believe that lasting relief will come through the personal shift in perspective that happens for most people who get into crypto and start to explore past the token price and into what it can mean from a community perspective.

Of course, I don't just mean the Hive community here, I mean the global community, one that is consistently failing to manage itself in a way that enriches the lives of us all. Yes, we are living longer - but are we living better?

Part of the problem is that as a collective, we have a very low imagination and we adhere quite strongly to our conditioning, which makes us believe that the way things are is the way they must be, even though they haven't always been this way. The outlier who believe different are dismissed as crazy, because the fact of the matter is, most are.

Having ideas different to the collective has nothing to do with the idea being good. If what we need is a radical shift in direction to be able to deal with societal aspects like economic failure and extreme disparity, environmental change and social disillusionment and the increasing violence - we need ideas. But radical shifts often take radical ideas and for a radical idea to be implemented, it has to also be supported. Most people don't support radical ideas, unless conditioned, and that conditioning takes time.

But, if we are looking at outlier ideas, we need to have a lot of ideas as most will not be far enough away from the mean to make a difference, at least half of them are going to be genuinely bad.

Bad ideas tend to get support too, as often there is an incentive for one group or another to support any idea. but, due to the ambiguity, ideas for the common good struggle to gather support.

The thing is that no societal paradigm shift is going to happen en masse toward a common good, unless there is an incentive to do so. And, since most people will not support anything far from their personal average, it is going to be a progression of incremental changes that will lead to somewhere better. For example, the concept of "tax is theft" being driven may be doing far more harm then good, as while it might attract a few outliers, it will increase the resistance in the far greater percentage of people, as they do not have the imagination to see much other than what they know.

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The End