Not too long ago, I had a post on titled Are You Gonna Pass The Marshmallow Effect?. In that post, I mentioned a long I had on DOGE since it was valued at $0.07 and my plan to hold on to that position until DOGE reaches $1 or so. It's been a few days since I ate the marshmallow.
I grew frustrated seeing my PNL fluctuate so much and not taking profits on the upward moves and re-entering on retracements, so I closed my position. I cashed in $115 in profits on a $178 investment. It's not bad, but the PNL could be double right now had I not closed my position. I failed the delayed gratification test, and I learned a lot from that mistake.
We don't know whether DOGE is going to go way higher from $0.10, where it is currently standing, or if my entry levels are going to be revisited. However, what we can be sure of is that the current society is not much into delayed gratification. The age of speed has made us all fat, lazy, and unhealthy.
These days, you can literally have all sorts of foods delivered to your door, and all you have to do is go open it and take the bag of food full of chemicals and sugars, have a feast, then have a nap, wake up after the nap, watch porn, jerk off, and then take another nap so you can once again wake up refreshed for some video games.
Believe it or not, there are quite a few individuals who are living this way, and if you look at us as a species, we were not born to be living such purposeless lives. We used to get out and hunt, defend our countries, defend our families, and hustle for more. Men, in the majority, were men, and women were women.
Availability has turned us into such pussies. But you know what? The grass is way greener on the other side of instant gratification.
The problem with instant gratification is that it offers an instant dopamine shot at pretty low costs and almost effortlessly. Buying fast food and eating that junk isn't costly at all; watching porn and masturbating is completely free; watching Netflix and playing video games doesn't require much cash either. But cooking food, getting out and meeting people, reading books, or doing anything creative and productive requires effort.
Holding onto a position in crypto requires effort too, mental effort, as all sorts come to your mind, whether you should be pulling out the profits or HODL more. Crypto is not a straight-line race, and from bottom to top, although from a macro view HODLing seems easy, in reality, there are many twists and turns and ups and downs.
The same goes for getting fit and anything that involves delayed gratification. I'm not saying one should not eat the cookie. We definitely deserve to eat a cookie once in a while, but when we treat ourselves too often, we clearly fall into a "deprivation mode." Crypto has taught me a lot in the past six years or so since I got into it.
There are times of putting skin in the game and times of covering the skin with expensive clothes, but what's in between is a war of patience, contradictory emotions, financial restraints, and so on and so forth. Society wants us to be dumb and highly indulged in instant gratification.
These so-called world leaders don't want us to be financially independent, healthy, educated, and able to put in the effort in almost everything we set our minds on. They could not rule over us anymore if that were the case. The society (our leaders actually) want us fat, lazy, tired, and unhealthy.
If the opposite were true, there would be no junk food advertising anywhere; they would actually ban it, no free porn, no bullshit television and thrive-killing social media and all sorts of other factors that make us the deteriorating species that we currently are. It's not all doom and gloom though.
If I managed to hit the gym for two years constantly, so can you; if managed to turn $10,000 into $1,000,000 in the previous bull market, so can you. If your neighbor managed to get to the point of having a great and happy family, so can you. We don't necessarily have to replicate what others do, but we can learn from them and put the lessons we learned into action in whatever we are passionate or eager about.
Delayed gratification is highly undervalued and overlooked lately, but when you look at it and try to find its place in the grand scheme of things in modern society, you will realize that it is a habit worth hustling for. Have a great day, peeps, and see you next time.
Thanks for your attention,
Adrian