While we are coming toward the end of the year, I get the feeling that 2022 is already ramping up for me, as most of January is already booked for work, and I am still in the running for a new position. If I get it, it would mean that I would have to have a handover phase of what I am currently on and, I will likely keep some of my current tasks anyway - so hopefully it comes with a little more salary - if I take the job.
Next week I will have a "control MRI" to see if the artery in my neck that caused the stroke has healed. I suspect it has, but I still get pain and headaches often, so not everything is as it should be. The impact this all has had on my life has been immense and I am going to have to adjust my "expectations" on life quite heavily, including what I do for work.
But on this note, who knows, perhaps the crypto markets will have had enough of going sideways and start this run into a massive bull spike, in which case, I could choose to retire from employed work and return to being a sole proprietor only again. I wouldn't mind this, but I over the last three years of work (my 3rd anniversary is in January), I have enjoyed having colleagues to talk with, however the last two years of Corona has killed a lot of the benefits of this anyway, and it doesn't look like it is going to subside anytime soon.
Soon.
The eternal crypto catchphrase for when we are all going to be independently wealthy and collectively empowered within the economy. I am not sure if "soon2 will be soon enough for us though, as whoever is in control now is putting in their best effort to take away chance at every turn and corner.
The last couple years has seen the fastest transfer of wealth from poor to rich in the history of the world and not only that, it has been doubled-down on by the collection of valuable assets in real estate, business and investment that can generate income by the same group. The average person is far poorer than earlier, but they don't notice it because the governments keep pouring money onto them to spend and consume more.
That ends eventually and we are seeing the result of it in the speeding inflation rate across the globe, where the price of everything meaningful is going up. But, this doesn't matter if you are an asset owner, does it? It only matters for those who are at the mercy of someone else for a wage. The corporations can just keep raising prices and enjoying the gains, regardless of the rates. They will beat the inflation rate, for sure.
Wages won't though, not that it matters because even if wages rise, it just increases the demand and prices further anyway, so any meaningful wage increase is quickly absorbed by the inflation rate, one way or another. It really is a system where the richest among us cannot really lose on average, as the wealth keeps pouring into their peaks and even when there is individual failure, that gets absorbed at the top without leakage down onto the rungs below.
This economy is a losing game for anyone who is not an owner, and in all likelihood, all economies are going to be oppressive for non-owners, at some point. The reason is that when non-owners don't have much to bargain with, especially if the skills they hold are ubiquitous making the competition high. Negotiating from a position of desperation is always going to see the desperate make concessions and the counterpart additional gains - -lower salaries, less holidays, work on Saturdays - whatever it is, with nothing to trade, we become beggars.
This is why what actually needs to happen is for the negotiating to stop from the non-owner-sided, a reevaluation and definition of what is valuable and then, a way to build ownership in asset classes that aren't already owned. Essentially, it is like building a new industry or finding a new precious metal that is not yet known, and then building mines and markets around it.
The trick is though, that to "own" it can't only be buy with fiat, otherwise the same people who own the current assets, end up owning the new assets too. This is why it has been so interesting on Hive for example, as the early mine (contentious for sure) wasn't mined by billionaire mining magnates, it was done by people with some Amazon servers. This is the same with Bitcoin with the early miners on PCs who pulled millions of BTC out on personal computers. Nobodies.
And this is where the future of NFTs and web 3.0 and all the tokenization to come will lead, because once something is "commandeered" by the centralized wealthy to the point they are benefiting the most, the communities will move to something where the distribution model is healthier and real people have a chance to build ownership.
Corporations don't like making activity, they just like making money. We can see this through something like Facebook that does nothing but provide a platform for people to do everything else. They are the mine where untold riches are buried and they are using us as the tools to extract it. The irony is in this case, is that we are also the untold wealth in the mine too, meaning that our activity is mining ourselves for the profit of the platform.
But, with all of the potential of tokenized experiences, this model can change so that it will require our activity to take ownership of the assets within the mine, meaning that even as we mine ourselves, we also own the platform and value flows, choosing how the distribution of wealth happens and, where it pools. Due to incentives, we will most likely all choose to take at least some level of ownership, rather than being encouraged to be solely renters.
And I think this is what we have to think about as economic individuals going forward - do we want to forever be slaves to a wage, or do we want to have alternative income streams that are generated by our assets?
For me, this is obvious, as while I don't mind actively working for a salary or income, I do not want to only have an income in this way. As the world is geared to keep the dream of ownership alive, but the possibility of it very slim, I am going to have to get some of these "redefined" assets that require more than money to buy and need a wide distribution to hold value. This means that there is a safety net to centralization built in, because once a tokenized experience centralizes too much and starts to benefit too heavily, users will abandon it, leaving the "biggest owners" holding the bags - quite the opposite of what normally happens in the stock markets.
Well, I am looking forward to a time that I don't have to think or worry much about anything regarding the economy at all, but I don't see that happening soon, as it is such a clusterfuck of a mess and, we are all affected by it. Some people get lucky and buy walls to protect them from the rest, but that essentially leaves them living in a golden prison too. Better conditions, yet still a slave.
There's a lot of work to do, before soon saves us totally.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]