For a few years my income has been abysmally small. This is due to studying and trying to earn a living as a masseur. Right after school I started my own practice solo. I knew it wouldn't be easy. But the amount of stress due to financial uncertainty, despite having some buffer, caught me off guard. So I changed doing massage as a subcontractor after I ran out of kickstarter money from government and not making enough from business on my own. Though the problem still remains: not enough clients. Maybe I chose the wrong firm or it just might take a lot of time. Also, having talked someone who lives outside of Helsinki metropolitan area, it seems like the competition in Helsinki is much harder.
Either way, I got a part-time job in a cheap store chain and I'm doing massage on the side – this actually is for the best anyway because I've realized how physical massage actually is. At least for me, because all my clients like high pressure and firm grip, haha. So I wouldn't be able to do massage full time without some physical problems, even just about 10-20 clients a week has been hitting tough on my forearms.
Although the plan was to have 3 days of job and 2 days of massage, It's more like full time job because late autumn/Christmas season and having to learn new stuff that requires 4-5 days a week. On top of it I have 12 hours a week of subcontractor work and as a cherry on top of a cake I have a gig at a architect office bi-weekly. Obviously my plate is quite full. It'll get easier after new year though when I'm able to work 3 days a week.
My income from the last 2 months of the year will probably be as much as I've earned the whole year until now. I don't know whether that tells about how little I've earned or how much I'm working now.
Now, this is not a way to live for life, and I indeed would be depressed if I had no hope other than being stuck in a job for the rest of my life – which basically since becoming an adult has been my worst fear. Though I have an escape plan, and that is called: bitcoin. Living the prune lifestyle I have, but with the bump for my income and the current bear market, it'll make for an excellent time to euro-cost-average into bitcoin.
It might sound like a reckless plan, and it definitely would be, if I didn't understand bitcoin. Though this year I've made the full circle back into bitcoin and personally I think it has the biggest asymmetric risk profile to the upside probably from any other asset at the current point of history, hence why I'm prioritizing stacking sats atm. This is the result I've come after hundreds of hours of research. You only need to observe the adoption trend of bitcoin to think of it at least somewhat possible that it's not going away - on software level it is a cockroach that'll be almost impossible to kill with incentives aligned for the good of the network. And it's evolving despite its static image: lightning network is steadily growing into a global payment network on top of the bitcoin network allowing instant native bitcoin transactions for smaller fees than what credit card companies can provide. Really underhyped. Even though I've "been into crypto" for 5 years it's mind blowing how little I actually knew about bitcoin. Thus, having gone through the rabbit hole, my 2 satoshis is: don't over-estimate how well you understand bitcoin just because you're in crypto.
Unfortunately, here on Hive too I see lots of comparison which seems to be based on the categorical error of comparing Hive to Bitcoin. Hive is filling a different need – free speech by allowing you to permissionessly add text to a distributed database. Well there's other things too, here, but I believe the emphasis should not be trying to compete with bitcoin's store of value proposition, but rather on the free speech department own your data department.
It's not the most eloquent solution, but the best I know of solving the problem of censorship on social media. Yes, you might be censored on a community level, but you always have the freedom to make your own if an existing one's rules doesn't satisfy you. And if an app censors you, you can make your own front-end for the community. I remain agnostic about all the NFT stuff long-term. But on its bare bones I think it's safe to say Hive solves an actual problem – contrary to the most cryptos which are trying to come up with the problem as an afterthought really.
This really went all over the place...
One thing I wanted to talk about: the psychological benefit of a long-term goal. Now that I actually have a road map that'll get me to a financial position I aspire, I actually have some visions for that future, and that is what keeps me going with the amount of work I have currently. Without a long term goal and clear road map, I would be crushed. For the first time in my life I have a long-term goal towards which I'm moving with confidence.
The impact of this shift for the better cannot be emphasized enough.
And I wonder, when people don't have a simple savings vehicle, what are the psychological implications? Yes, you can work your way up with wages, but with deprecating value of fiat currency, it is an uphill battle for the rest of your life to try provide for your future. No matter how much you stack, it'll melt away given enough time. Yes, you can invest into stocks or something else, but that is another hurdle and friction point. But what if you aren't interested or just don't have the time to figure out the game of money? Should you be required to be a part-time economist/investor to be able to preserve purchasing power of the money that you already worked for? Or should the money itself allow for a person to be able to provide for their own future? You could focus on your profession, be the most productive member of society you can, save and provide for your future without needing to commit mental energy on figuring out where you need to gamble it in the financial markets to maintain purchasing power. This for me is the ultimate goal I wish to see with bitcoin: allowing to free up attention and resources to more meaningful activities than just keeping up with the rat race.
We as a society are punishing the prune and "sound" saving advice from the past by melting the value of money away. And all this is justified with the need of cheap capital via inflation to enable faster innovation – I went indepth into this argument here, so I won't go about it in detail anymore. But I would summarize the case like this: it's a bit of a questionable claim to make that innovation would not happen without cheap capital and expansionary monetary policy. You can actually make a case that we're largely piggybagging with the innovations that started in the 19th and early 20th century. Also, what no one seems to weigh, is the cost of this cheap capital, or the effect it has for the economy. Also, what kind of innovation are we achieving with it?
What if the cost is psychological ill with aimless short term orientation due to added friction to provide for your future? What if it causes the rising time preference on individual and corporational level, causing the consumerist lifestyle we find ourselves in, because with rising time preference we discount the future and make everything less future proof? Then resulting with people trying to destroy the vehicle that achieved their standard of living – capitalism – when the blame is on the monetary policy.
Modern monetary schemes make it seem like there would be a free lunch.
When in fact there's not.
