2022 is over and I don't miss it at all

This article was written on 2022.12.30

I haven't written something like this for a long time. Since I entered the industry in 2017, the theme every year seems to be anxiety. When I don't make money, I want to make money. When I make money, I wonder why I make so little. It's not that I'm not anxious this year, but 2022 seems to be worse than any year in the past, but I can inexplicably feel some endogenous changes and forces happening. Today I suddenly thought, if I die in 2023, I hope people can see what I was thinking at the age of 31. So I started writing.

Since I can remember, no year seems to have passed as fast as this year. I don’t know how people who write history will close the coffin in 2022. At least to me, it is like a vacuum year. It is not like the student days, where every day is so similar, and the rare emotions outside the classroom are so profound and affect future life. It’s not like the first two years when I started working as a consultant. Everything was full of freshness and curiosity. Some small, wonderful, and awkward things made people remember them and miss them. It's even less like the two years when I first entered the industry, when I saw the vast world outside myself every day, spent all my time staring at all the new happenings, and anxiously got to know everyone and participate in every activity. This bear market is not like the last bear market. I go in and out of the office every day, and I am happy even if I don’t have so many things to do. I am a thinker who is doing research and is happy even if I don’t have much to do. It's not like the bull market that lasted for more than 20 months. The drastic changes in wealth made me excited every day, and I was happily happy with what I thought was a small success. And 2022, it is empty, I can't even find a suitable footnote to describe it. After the New Year, when I thought the world was going to be symmetrically improving, our side chose to tilt, so there was a two-month lockdown, a battle that was impossible to win, but it kept me awake at night. In two months, I studied almost all the immigration policies of various countries. I still follow them to this day, and I am still able to give immigration suggestions to different people. Then, I heard the sad news about a young elder, a senior whom I respected, who passed away suddenly. Then, I went to the microcosm and felt from east to west how huge the gap in the Crypto world has been formed between China and the United States during the three years of the epidemic. Then, from 3AC to LUNA to FTX, all promising methods were like a dream. And then the asymmetrical world seems to never come together. One end of the world is witnessing Ragnarok in Qatar and the crowning of the king, while the other end of the world is suffering from the shortcomings that other parts of the world have experienced in the past year or so. pain. Then, today, I think back on the vacuum of this year.

I have been thinking recently, if the glorious peak of this world had happened in the past, would our generation be happy or unhappy? After all, the world’s per capita GDP did not change much from prehistory until the Industrial Revolution. The wave of globalization after World War II benefited from the Atlantic Charter of the United Kingdom and the United States. Over the past eighty years, the trend of representative democracy has swept the world. , Democracy in some areas has also become shoddy, such as democratic dictatorship countries with characteristic socialism. When Sweden began to guard against the dualization of culture, when South America faked democratic revolutions one after another, when the Eastern powers revised their charters three times, and when the world police decided not to pursue liberal hegemony, financial practitioners benefited from this. I always want to ask, will the world be okay? If the turning point occurs not far away in 2018 or 2019, will the bear market at that time still be painful for us?

For unknown reasons, I was lazy this year. I chose a simple way to reconcile with the fact that I can't make money. I am not anxious or anxious. However, this year is the year with the biggest loss in the five years since I started working. If I could go back to the crazy ICO period at the end of 2017 and tell myself at that time that I could lose so much money in 2022. I guess I would say at that time, "Fuck, brother, I don't lack money to spend. I can buy whatever I like. Why do I need a bicycle?" So I guess this is why I can face it relatively calmly now. After all, I always feel that I have a desire for money but not that much. I am a person who pays more attention to my inner feelings. The fortune teller said that I have limited wealth in the past few years. Money is wealth, and women are wealth. If you take care of one, you will lose the other. In a marriage relationship between two people, I believe that I have experienced a long period of darkness in the year of the seven-year itch. In the relatively independent period of marriage, I have experienced pain, stubbornness, disappointment and hope, and repetition. Until much later, I suddenly realized that there is no real intimacy in this world. No matter how close you are, the ultimate way to get along is to face yourself. Making yourself happy in the present is the most meaningful. Then I realized that demanding and expecting too much from others is just abuse to myself. At the end of the relationship, the best thing is to have someone who is willing to talk to you peacefully, and you are willing to listen to me and I am willing to talk to you.

Thinking of this, 2022 seems to have passed in a vacuum, but the feelings have not. For example, in the most familiar season in Qingdao, I took a walk with friends I hadn't seen for nearly ten years, chatted, talked about these years, and talked about you, me, him, her, and them. When I met my friend in the cafe that afternoon, my friend was concentrating on writing. I sat in the back for a long time. When I was discovered, the first sentence my friend said was "You haven't changed at all", and then we talked like we did several years ago, and then I listened to Zeng Yike for several days. For example, I ran to Hunan to attend a friend's wedding. Although Hunan gave me a red code and finally fled in a hurry, we talked all night the night before, and we hadn't seen each other for 6 years. We didn't even hug each other. When we saw each other, we just said "Are you here?" and handed over a cigarette. Then we talked like we did several years ago, and then I flipped through college photos for a long time. These feelings are very real and warm people. They are not vacuums. Instead, they stabilize the chaos that has grown exclusively because of this market in recent years. Think about it, this is also good.

Finally, let's talk about something related to work. In fact, I have been speculating in cryptocurrencies for more than five years. I have experienced all kinds of angles of cutting, and I have been cut in various ways for so long. To this day, I still don't know how to answer when someone asks "what do you do". When I meet someone who doesn't want to chat, I say I do pyramid selling. When I meet someone who wants to chat, I tell people that I am a slacker: I do everything, brag when I need to brag, lick the project party when I need to give money, lick my friends when I need to do some work, and open Binance when I need to lose money. Five years have passed. In addition to a certain degree of material improvement, more importantly, as a person with an ordinary family, poor education, and poor image. It is difficult to meet so many excellent people in other industries, and to update my understanding and knowledge so quickly. Therefore, I am extremely grateful to Satoshi Nakamoto. Because of him, there is Vitalik, and my belief in Ethereum. Just like the motto of the sign hung on the door of the cowshed by the old cow, "Thank you Satoshi, Whoever you are."

There are so many absurd things on the screen, but there is actually no central idea. I still remember that at the end of 2018, I wrote a summary of Neo's ecology called "Darkest Hour, Before Dawn". In fact, in the last cycle, the end of 2018 was not the arrival of dawn, but the real darkest time was 2019. In the countless days when you can buy BTC for three or four thousand US dollars, the major fundamentals of DeFI Summer were born: Compound/Uniswap/Balancer, etc. Although 2023 is likely to be a difficult year, I hope everyone will live well and see ETH10K and BTC100K. I also hope that the best of the world will not be yesterday but tomorrow. I also hope that we can take good care of the people and kittens around us.

I’ll end with a photo of my desktop at this moment. Come on, 2023.