In 2020, I was a politically active liberal. Now, I’m a pseudonymous Bitcoin maximalist.

I should not have been reachable by Bitcoin, its tech or its ethos.

Last year, I was participating in BLM protests, repeating what I was supposed to say, staying silent when it wasn’t my turn to speak.

I graduated college with a literature degree and had no plans beyond that. I became radicalized by postmodern instruction. I decided I was bisexual. I made friends in the local art scene. I hated rich people and spoke of capitalism (and men) as the source of all evil in the world. My friends agreed.

I write poems, make art, and read novels. I know next to nothing about computers, encryption, investing, and wealth. How did Bitcoin appeal to me?

My story is bigger than what I can cover with one article, and besides that, I’m still processing all the changes I’ve gone through. I have been struggling to find a way to share it, to grasp the shape that it takes when told. The difference between who I was before and who I am now is disorienting, and much of the pieces of my past I have forgotten on purpose.

But because I went to Bitcoin Twitter early on in my journey to meet fellow plebs, I have a trail of ideas leading up to now. I will use a thread of my earliest tweets to start to piece together an explanation of how a few realizations led me to Bitcoin and down the rabbit hole.

By sharing this, I want to show how powerful narratives are starting to erode, and as they become weaker, people are waking up. I should not have been one of those people, but the pandemic threw me out of my ecosystem to a place where I was vulnerable. Fortunately, I have always been obsessed with truth, and in my searching I have found Bitcoin to be a historic, important technology.

The world that I grew up knowing is no longer the world I live in

I had the normal suburban American youth. I was raised by good, hard-working parents who instilled strong family values in my siblings and me. I worked hard and always received top grades. When it came time for me to graduate and move on, there was no question that college was next. Everyone in my family had earned a college degree. I chose the college that my brother, mother and grandfather had attended. It was the easiest choice I could have made. There was no question of the success I would have and the stability of my prospects in the professional world beyond. 

It all made sense. I knew what was expected of me, and I met those expectations. I was bright, and so was my future. But here I am, in the future, and nothing makes sense.

I have been blessed to avoid many mistakes, however, when college was over and I tried to begin my life, I realized I was severely ill-equipped and unprepared. The guidance that was handed down to me did not even map onto the world I found myself in.

I started paying attention in 2020. The global pandemic had a way of snapping my head up out of the sand where my misery was only mine. It has spun me out of a web I can now recognize as deceit and lies. I am without a narrative, I am a person without a history. The events that have taken place since March of last year have tested everything I claimed as true, and I cannot deny that I was wrong, even misled. It is painful to realize your map is wrong, and no one has a better one.

The modern way of living is unsatisfying and wasteful. It atrophies every natural human inclination

The sense that things are really wrong with our world is not uncommon, nor difficult to discover. Before the pandemic, I was following the crowd, outsourcing the blame for all the problems we face onto faceless corporate entities or ideologies.

I had a narrative hierarchy of fault to focus my anger on for all things, from feeling unsafe walking alone at night, to the unstoppable reality of climate change. I accepted a pattern of beliefs about the world and why it was so wrong, and how it should be changed, although none of these were personal to me.

My emotions would only be stirred if I spent a considerable amount of time on Instagram, which I did, where I was told how to feel. I struggled heavily with nihilism, or existential dread, whatever phrase fits for the feeling of being useless and having no anchor.

This sense that everything is wrong was extraordinarily amplified by the local and global response to the spread of the virus. I realized how ridiculously reliant I am on the supply chain. I started paying attention to how food made me feel, mostly bad.

As I started to look for work after college, it became clear that there was no growing business that wants to invest in my growth in order for me to produce anything meaningful. I tried to come up with a definition of “meaningful,” but got confused and tired.

My friends were shirking off their genders and looking for confusing dating relationships, exploring polyamory and despising monogamy, and spending most of their time desperate and unhappy. I began to identify a disgust with social media, directed at myself for using it to control my image, which means nothing, and directed at the general population who does the same. Yet I still felt trapped by the social game of it all.

I probed these feelings and realized that the actual reasons for my numbness, demotivation, confusion, disgust and horror were incentivized and encouraged by the life I live, a life that is disconnected.

No one is coming to save me

A number of things happened in 2020 to make me start to look past the narrative I had about the world and confront myself, make meaning of my own thoughts.

What I started to grapple with was that the picture I had was so much smaller and surprisingly much more violent than I previously believed. I found out that my map of good and evil was screwed, that my trust was in a facade.

As the false characterization of my reality fell away, I no longer saw politics in blue or red. I stopped sharing opinions with my friends. I identified the vast gaps in my education of history and science.

I knew I couldn’t expect anyone else to make sense of the coronavirus, the election, China, sexuality, family, taxes, philosophy, or inflation for me. I saw all of the noise that fills each and every one of my days on earth for what it is, only noise.

I began to feel strongly that there is no one in charge of what’s happening here, there’s no one who really has a superior understanding of all this, whose work isn’t compromised by corrupt incentives. 

Life seems to happen to me, I am tossed by the harsh waves of reality, and I do not have a raft

Immediately after college, I found myself entering the adult world entirely alone, with a staggering abundance of freedom and little meaningful opportunity.

I couldn’t think about the future, much less make plans for it. I had enough money for every month, often more than I needed, but not by much. I wasn’t sure what to do with the excess, or where to put it, so I did nothing.

I thought I liked being able to have as much differentiation in each passing day as possible, until I understood the connection between my inability to finish things I wanted to do with my inability to stick to a routine. 

I quickly found out that my education was bunk. My skills are not needed, and underdeveloped at that.

My government does not serve me.

Too much of my time was sunk into applications that prey on my personal data.

Concerning the endless cycles of mainstream media: everything is true at once, and yet there’s little truth to be found in anything. It appeared as though I could not make anything happen in the world, going the way I was going, with my small, insignificant map of the world. 

However, I do not accept the powerlessness that is prescribed to me

My outlook began to change when I realized that I have a choice, that I have sovereignty over myself.

When I started paying attention in 2020, one major shift in my thinking was zooming out of my own head, out of the story I endlessly construct of my own experience, and observing more blatantly the institutions, ideologies and trends of the day that have control over me and everyone I know.

I saw myself as a puppet mastered by narrative, as an addict surviving off of my daily doses of entertainment, leisure, and mass-produced social stimulant.

I understood how little trust I should place in any source for how nefarious the aims of those sources can be. I was playing into the role I was designed for: the unmotivated, confused, easily-coerced cog of the machine.

It was the perfect storm. The pandemic made me aware of the fragility and vulnerability of this thing I think is civilization. The violent and confusing rhetoric power of social justice made me aware that what I thought was true and real was actually fabricated and manipulative. The breakdown of life as I knew it made me aware that I exercise none of my own will, but I have an infinite amount of that resource inside me.

I do not accept that this situation is a result of my carelessness, because I am choosing to fight against it

I started paying attention. I stopped reacting. I stopped following. I stopped being outraged by whatever my feed told me to be outraged about.

I unplugged and spent more time alone. This is what allowed me to get my own senses back. 

I take my pursuit of truth seriously. After having everything I believed completely shatter, I am building, piece by piece, a new understanding, deliberately, carefully.

I fight back against the constant noise of the world because I know now that I don’t have to participate in it.

I am committed to seeking the brightest ideas that blink against the backdrop of a paling gloom

I know I am not the only one who has started paying attention. I know there are others with the skills and grit to make better things happen in this world. Since coming out of the cave of fake truth and addictive lies, I have committed to being imaginative about the future, seeing opportunity, understanding the power we have to change it. 

By cancelling the noise, I find great teachers and thinkers signalling truth and making sense. If there was no one else, if I was alone in this, then I would have to despair, there would be nowhere to go beyond these realizations I had. Fortunately, this is not the case.

One of those ideas, in this world, for this time, is Bitcoin

The transformation in my thinking that I am describing in this article would not have happened if I hadn’t been exposed to the mind virus that is Bitcoin as a store of value, Bitcoin as a distributed network protocol, and Bitcoin as a sound money standard.

How does this have anything to do with the experiences I’ve just described? I’m not exactly sure, but what I can say is that by learning about an alternative to the systems and structures that keep me dumb and numb, I started to believe that the future was possible. 

I want to keep writing my story. My transformation is still taking place and there’s so much to share. I am doing things I never thought I would do. I think I am becoming someone. I hope to continue writing as btc_cassandra.

Cassandra was the mythological priestess “cursed to utter true prophecies, but never to be believed.” Through this name, I’m hoping to share my imaginations of a Bitcoin standard future as I continue my personal renaissance.