EMBRACING THE MEANINGLESS OF IT ALL
It’s hard these days to believe in anything. God is famously dead, as Nietzsche proclaimed in the 19th century. Since then, we’ve witnessed world wars, the rise of populism, and the internet. None of the new Gods we erected, neither Satoshi Nakamoto nor GDP Growth, have been able to fill the void.
Working in crypto does little to help my search for meaning. We set out to empower individuals to bank the so-called unbanked, allow creators to be fairly rewarded in the digital economy, and many other lofty goals.
Looking at the state of affairs today, it’s not great. We’ve often succeeded more at unbanking banked people, removed royalties for artists, and overall created an ecosystem where it does not matter if you make the right decisions — sometimes, all that matters is that you buy a racist memecoin early.
Despite our intentions of making opportunities more broadly available, ever since ICOs have died, there isn’t much chance for retail to get in early either. It’s all just VCs and angels who’ll later use us as exit liquidity.
Quite depressing, isn’t it?
In that status quo, is it a surprise that people have adopted gambling as their coping mechanism?
Travis Kling and others behind the theory of financial nihilism argue that it’s the only logical reaction.
But before we get into financial nihilism, here is a quick intro to nihilism in general — so you won’t embarrass yourself at the next dinner party.
Nihilism
Nihilism comes from the Latin “nihil,” which means nothing. It also features in the word annihilate, another way to point out to someone that they got crazy ratio-d (or otherwise crushed and destroyed).
It’s a belief that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated. People often associate it with extreme pessimism and radical skepticism. A true nihilist believes nothing, has no loyalties, and has no purpose except for, maybe, destroying.
“Every belief, every considering something true is necessarily false, because there is simply no true world.” — Friedrich Nietzsche
Nietzsche is the poster boy for Nihilism, but the term was popularized before his time by the Russian Author Ivan Turgenev in his Novel Father and Sons — in which he used the word to describe the rebellious youth rejecting the idealism and optimism of the Russian establishment.
Since then, we’ve seen the emergence of different branches of nihilism, from political nihilism, which wants the destruction of all political, social, and religious order, to the best-known form of it: existential nihilism.
Existential nihilists think that life is meaningless, and it doesn’t matter if you are active or passive — existence is senseless. Something already figured out by Shakespeare. who writes in Macbeth:
“Out, out, brief candle.
Life is but a walking shadow,
A poor player that struts
And frets his hour upon the stage.
And then is heard no more;
It is a tale told by an idiot,
Full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”
A few centuries later, the French author Albert Camus observed that the best metaphor for human existence is that of Sisyphus, pushing a rock up the hill forever and ever.
If you look at the paradigm under which our current young generation lives, that’s an accurate description of living paycheck to paycheck while working a bullshit job.
Except, there is also looming debt and the outlook of never being able to afford a home, all of which contribute to the rise of Financial Nihilism.
Financial Nihilism
Financial nihilism is probably downstream of a more general nihilist attitude to life — since it’s not a philosophy you’d adopt just for one domain of your life.
And the prime place we can observe it is the US, thanks to its unhealthy mix of grappling with student debt, inflation, and the lost American dream.
The aggregate student debt in the US is now higher than Australia’s GDP, pushing many into a Sisyphean effort to pay it off — yet never succeeding.
Studies found that the higher your debt, the more you get comfortably numb with major purchases. You adopt a f*ck it attitude. If you’re already forever in debt, and will never be able to have a home nor make it with the traditional means, then you might as well gamble.
For Travis Kling, the main culprit of the rise in financial nihilism is “the chart of median home prices to median household income.”
As humans, we want some sort of reassurance that making the right decisions still matters and that hard work pays off. But it doesn’t. We see the rich getting richer, and the top and bottom drift further apart.
Since there’s nothing worth believing in, might as well “amuse ourselves to death”, as Neil Postman would say.
And what better way to embrace meaninglessness and the lack of opportunity elsewhere than with crypto? After all, crypto is a populist counterculture — and the only place where there is a price on memes.
Memes
Memecoins are the only place left for retail investors to have a chance at generational wealth. To be early and secure a big enough bag to escape the 9-to-5, you spray and pray that one of your investments will afford at least a lambo.
If the central banks can be irresponsible, why shouldn’t I?
Why shouldn’t I buy a coin for the culture whose only utility is having a cute icon and a bunch of people in a telegram group posting memes? Looking at memecoins that way, they’re not much different from 90% of NFT projects anyway.
And if there’s one thing we can all understand in this world of amusing ourselves to death, it’s the power of memes.
“If money is ordered to nothing else, then it becomes ordered to itself — to its own propagation and self-replication. And that is the definition of a meme. That is why we have a meme market and meme economy”.
— Luke Burgis
Written by Near Intern / @NEAR_intern
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