Last night whilst talking with a friend, we were discussing what would happen if we lost our jobs. As both of us are foreign, it is a little bit different for us, as we are not quite as employable as Finns, though as he speaks the language, he is more employable that I am. However, he also earns a fair amount and he is concerned that there would be nothing else available in that range for him. I have much the same concern, even though at a lower amount.
However, it all depends on current needs, and while at the moment the needs are high, I could potentially reduce needs a lot if for instance, I was able to lower the cost of living. Of course, the major costs for us as a family are our debts, our mortgage. If we didn't have a mortgage, we would be in a far better position, like most people who have a mortgage.
Currently, we have a collar on our interest rate for another eight years or so, and that has kept our repayments manageable, even though interest rates have increased globally, but we are hoping to pay it off before it ends. This means over doubling our repayments each month, which isn't likely given the current economy, but adding in a bit extra to chip away at it and hope for something more of a lump sum down the road, is.
A lump sum.
Pretty much, the only place a lump sum amount is going to come from is from the lottery or from crypto - and we don't play the lottery. So, for us, crypto is the opportunity.
In the past bull, it would have been wiser to take out enough to pay off the mortgage and then we would have had far less stress at these times and, I wouldn't be as concerned about job loss. However, since I didn't do this, I can really only look toward the next bull market and consider what that means for me and most importantly, for my family.
I have a fair amount of HIVE that I have earned and bought over the years, but I also have other crypto investments here and there, holding a little bit of BTC and some random ALTs, as well as Splinterlands holdings in the form of cards and SPS. In the advent of a bull market, a rising tide lifts all ships and my hope is that each of the assets I hold goes high enough to reach a point that I can skim off some gains from each.
This way, I will lower my exposure to the bull and inevitable bear to follow, reduce daily real life debts by clearing mortgage (or reducing a lot) and be able to breathe a little easier in terms of my employment status. I plan on always working, but since the stroke, I am more sensitive to the need for security for my family, since I am constantly aware of my mortality.
Since the stroke, there is a continual voice in my head reminding me of my failures and shortcomings. Even when I dream.
We could all die at any minute, but for me at least, the thought isn't allowed to leave my awareness for some reason. However, because of this, I want to try my best to ensure that if that happens, my wife and daughter are able to cope financially, so that they for a time at least, don't need to worry about how to pay the bills, while they rearrange their life.
This is selfish of me, because I feel better having tried for them, than dying and having failed them. However, I also would prefer it that however painful my death might be for them, they remember me, not the struggle they faced after I passed because they lost the income I provide.
I assume many other people feel similarly.
However, this puts me in a tough place, because ultimately, I want to be more in crypto and increasingly less in fiat than I am. However, I also understand that it is a process that isn't going to happen over night, where crypto becomes the dominant economy. It is going to take time and part of that means to invest more than money, but also invest time and skills into building the economy. However, to do that requires not needing to invest time and skills into the fiat economy as much, which is what the current jobs are doing, in order to pay the bills.
To build a robust crypto economy, it is going to take the development of industries to build the infrastructure and business models that incorporate blockchain into them. This happens in degrees, but in time the use cases grow and the potential of the shadow economy are so strong, more mainstream adoption takes place, pulling in more mainstream business.
For instance, I believe that within the next ten years, the company I work for now will be incorporating blockchain into their product offering for customers, but they aren't even looking in that direction yet. In time, my role there might be vastly different than it is from today, doing more of what I want to be doing, which is building bridges between the traditional economy and the Web 3 economy to marry them together, increasing transparency and slowly decentralizing wealth and power globally.
This is participation.
I am very confident in the future of crypto and HIVE, even though there is going to be a lot of FUD around them for years to come, because ultimately, it is inevitable. The traditional economy is just not sustainable and no matter how they try to salvage it, the centralization of power will continually tear it apart, which is also inevitable and has been proven for thousands of years throughout our history of economics. No centralized power survives.
And we are seeing how fragile the economy is after those centralized powers have mismanaged it time and time again, with increasing frequency, as they grab for their wealth and more control. It is because of this that people have to be concerned for their jobs, because even when there is a need for the work to be done, the economy just can't support it, whilst some sectors are enjoying astronomical wealth growth.
As I see it, the current economy is about increasing centralized wealth, but the decentralized economy is about improving daily lives. While governments worry about GDP which is becoming increasingly irrelevant as an indicator of citizen wellbeing, crypto is looking at distribution of wealth and building mechanisms for more people to work to earn and, most importantly, own. The traditional economy is attempting to get us all to become forever renters, leaving ownership to the centralized few. The alternative economy is attempting to get us to take ownership and there responsibility for our existence.
There is a lot of work to be done, but how much of the early work is going to be paid as well as it is in the traditional economy? People still have bills to pay, loans to service and families to feed, so unless there is a catastrophic event, climbing the mountain is going to be done in a billion baby steps, not a fell swoop.
At least for the early adopters.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
