You are not your losses (or gains)

There will be some of you that need to hear this today. The losses you are seeing are not a measure of who you are as a person, nor do they ultimately define whether you are successful or not.

With such turmoil in the markets, it can be difficult to detach from the idea that our self-worth is somehow tied to our portfolios. We’ve put a lot of time and energy — not to mention money — into the various cryptocurrencies and NFT projects that we feel drawn to. For the most part, we did our research and came to reasonable conclusions about the potential of these investments. We also knew, however, that these are high-risk/high-reward plays.

What we didn’t, perhaps, factor into the equation properly is that, even though crypto has some large institutional players in it, many of the big names we have come to trust are really quite junior companies in the grand scheme of things. Not only that, but many are willing to push legal boundaries to the limit (and beyond) in order to maximise profits. These people walk away with huge personal gains, while the organisations that they run into the ground are left to crumble and their customers suffer accordingly.

We’ve come to learn that not only does crypto have a trust problem (ironically enough), but it also has a competency problem. The space is too new and many of the key players too inexperienced to understand how to plan for five, ten, twenty year business cycles. This is not your fault as a retail investor, particularly when we are being lied to a lot of the time — or having the truth obfuscated behind technical jargon, algorithms, false (or manipulated) data and evasive teams.

It is easy to look at portfolios with huge losses and take on board a sense that we are somehow failing at life. That we’ve made poor decisions, or missed the huge opportunities that were right in front of us. There is an element of truth to this, of course, but it is not the whole story. The whole picture also includes a lot of psychological manipulation and, yes, even fraudulent behaviour from those we believed were in it for the right reasons. We can only act on the information we have in front of us, which we’re quickly finding out how often that is just a mirage.

The other thing we tend to do is place a lot of status and trust in those who have somehow ‘made it’ in this space. Perhaps they mined Bitcoin or Ethereum in the early days, or were around to mint a Bored Ape or receive their CryptoPunks. There are many trendsetters and innovators among these groups of people, but the vast majority of them just got lucky. They ride that luck and the funds it gave them and then, unfortunately, often pivot into insider trading, pump-and-dump alpha groups, and lucrative advisory roles based on little other than the fact that they were present at the right moment.

Nobody deserves status and praise just for holding a winner, just like nobody should feel a failure for being hit by losses in an industry rife with manipulation. You are not your losses or gains. These things bear very little relevance on who you are as a person and what you can offer to the world.

So, if you are feeling down on yourself today just know that you aren’t the only one. But also know that you can find great value in other areas of your life, and also in the non-monetary areas of web3 and the crypto space that speak of higher ideals on how society can function. We learn the lessons from market shocks like we’ve seen these past few days and we adjust how we relate to the space and our role in it.

The totality of who you are as a human being has little to do with the value of your portfolio — there are far more important measures that make a person than that.