There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”
For the last 16 months, I’ve observed a variety of crypto/blockchain communities, and what I found is that there is always one constant despite the many variables that make a community different. That constant is the way people think: I am the center of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what determine the project’s priorities. It’s hard not to think this way because we interpret and experience everything in the world through this lens of self. Everything happens in front or to the left or right of you, through your screens, through your eyes, and so on.
If any of this sounds familiar or identical to you, it’s because I’m simply painting David Foster Wallace’s ideologies over the blockchain community landscape.
Too often, for whatever reason, we automatically are certain that we know what is best for a project because we put our own hard earned money into it, and all we want to see is this token or coin immediately and consistently raise in value because ultimately its our money on the line.
So, on a normal day, you wake up, go to your challenging job, spend the next 8 to 10 hours slaving away, and at the end of the day you come home tired, stressed, and all you want to do is unwind and see good gains on your $ICX that you purchased (I’ll just focus on the ICON’s community because that’s the community I have been most heavily involved in for the last 16 months). Then, you check binance or whatever exchange that you use, and see that the value of ICX has declined due to delays or whatever factor, and then you go to bed somewhat disappointed. You wake up, follow your daily life routine, only to see the value of ICX continue to decline for days after weeks after months. You read the whitepaper, the yellowpaper, media bites, telegram discussions, subreddit threads, etc., and all have indicated that ICON and ICX is the future of cryptocurrency and blockchain, and that ICX will make you wealthy. Then, you hop on the same channels that are now filled with people who all share the same frustration and anger as you — about how useless these moderators are, how ineffective the marketing, communication, and PR from the ICON team all are, the amount of delays the project have had, how the development team has failed to deliver, etc.
This is where the act of choosing how to think comes in: if I don’t make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I’m going to be angry and frustrated every single day because my natural default setting is really all about me — it’s about my time, my money, my life, and my desire to get wealthy, and everyone is just in my way. And, who are these people in my way? The moderators, the ICON team, Min, other community members, bitcoin, and look how useless and how annoying they all are. Look at how deeply and personally unfair this all is to me. Things would be so much better if I made some of these decisions, and I know exactly what to do to get where ICON/ICX needs be.
If I choose to think this way, fine. A lot of us do. Except thinking this way is so easy and automatic, that it doesn’t have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It’s the automatic way I experience the frustrating parts of my personal life when I’m operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what determine the project’s priorities and decisions.
The thing is that there are totally different ways to think about these situations. It’s not impossible that some of these things are due to priority changes and timelines have shifted due to things that can’t or shouldn’t be shared with the public or the leading engineer for an important development lost his or her spouse, or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that some of these people have harder, tedious, and more painful lives than I do. I’m not saying you’re supposed to think this way or anybody expects you to automatically do it because it’s hard and takes will and effort, and if you’re like me, some days you just refuse to do so. But, most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at the moderator who came off as rude and unhelpful. Maybe he or she isn’t normally like this. Maybe he or she patiently have spent hours every day for every day for every week for every month resolving issues that people have been running into. Of course, some of these situations are unlikely, but it’s also not impossible.
The point here is what “how to think” is really supposed to mean: To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.
If you’re automatically sure what reality is, if you want to operate on your default setting, then you won’t consider possibilities that aren’t frustrating and annoying. If you really learn how to think, how to pay attention, you’ll know you have other options, and it will actually be in your power to experience this frustrating and annoying bear market as something more meaningful. The only thing that is true in anything that I’ve said is that you get to decide how you get to see things. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. That is real freedom and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting. Wallace concludes,
What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don’t just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.
The capital-T Truth is about life before death.
It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:
“This is water.”
“This is water.”
