You Should Be Sad
Today’s title has been stolen from one of my favorite songs. Halsey has long been a go to when I don’t feel 100%. I have always found music to be a good outlet for my depression, as it can serve as a reminder that I’m hardly the only person who has ever experienced what I am experiencing in that moment.
I am writing an update today because I don’t feel well mentally and I want to get some of the things I’m carrying out. I don’t feel quite poorly enough for a Medium article, which is where you can find all the deepest depression writing I’ve done. I would suggest being in good head space before wandering there. It’s pretty dark.
Let’s start with DepressiveHacks. I envisioned 2025 going a lot differently than it has. Sure, legal clarity for crypto is in the works, but it’s slow going. In the interim, we’re seeing a lot more nonsense on the immutable ledger because people feel they won’t be held responsible. I find that disheartening. While the industry and the market is maturing, it is happening slower than I expected, which was probably foolish of me in hindsight for thinking legal clarity would happen in under a year.
Web3 as a whole has really been bumming me out to end Q3. People seem to be happy because they think there’s money to be made over the next twelve months, but I’m not as convinced that we should be so optimistic. I do think that there’s opportunity over the next year, but I also think that the current winning narratives of perps, prediction markets, and pumpfun are creating even more of a hypergambling meta than there’s ever been. Supporting real innovation with real builders creating real products that become a real business has never felt further away. Yes, I understand that perp products and prediction markets do have more product-market fit (PMF) than pumpfun memecoins, and that they can actually generate revenue as a business, but the money they generate is being made off the backs of their customers.
I came here years ago and loved the idea of customers winning with a company. That’s why I found digital asset holders to be such an intriguing new addition to the stakeholder matrix of a company. More and more, digital asset holders are simply being defined as customers, and I think that sells the potential of the technology short. This makes me feel that I’ve wasted a lot of time here, dreaming of a future that will be overtaken by greed.
Outside of this, my personal life is in a weird place. I’ve spent the year waiting to hear about a new role at my job. The company that acquired the company I had been working my second job for let us all go back in March and has since gone out of business themselves. On one hand, it’s been a transition of a year. On the other hand, the transition that I’d like to make into a new role has been so delayed and I have so little tangible evidence of that changing that I can’t help but feel discouraged.
I don’t want to only complain. It’s been a blessing to be able to start doing work for Vault12. I wish it was easier to find new opportunities and grow DepressiveHacks, but I am very grateful for the opportunities that I have been presented and don’t want to sound ungrateful for what 2025 has brought me in Web3. I have long suffered from doing a bad job of celebrating process in exchange for continuing to fall short of new, updated goals. I simply move the goal posts in a way that I’m always behind.
Alright, well, thank you all for following along. If you missed it, I recently launched a Substack for DepressiveHacks. I’m trying to really broaden the places that you can find DepressiveHacks online. The more discoverability, the better. Someday, if I ever can get this thing generating revenue, I will do real marketing with a real budget and get my website updated by someone who knows how to make this shit prettier than I do, but alas.
As always, thank you for being here. Until the next one.