If the recent events in the crypto world are having you re-consider all your life decisions, you're not alone. Even the most well trained crypto traders doubt themselves sometimes. But why is buying low and selling high easier said than done?
Turns out this is a part of our nature. Our ancestors developed a instinctive behavior to act and behave like our peers. The psychological word for this phenomenon is herd mentality or mob mentality, depending on if you watched the Sopranos or not. Having this mentality was actually extremely beneficial and important for almost all aspects of human life back then and now. If an early human didn't work with other humans to hunt and gather then it would have been extremely difficult to survive in the wild alone, or reproduce. The outliers who didn't follow the herd died off, and now we have a bunch of people following a flaming hot cheeto because their friends were sharing his rhetoric on facebook (sorry Trump).
All jokes aside this psychological trait is actually a survival trait, its the reason why if you see a crowd running out of a building you have an extreme urge to get away from that building. "If a lot of people know something I don't know then I must follow to survive" is what you subconscious tells you. Unfortunately no matter how hard we try to turn this little voice off it will never go away.
This is the exact reason why we feel so much self doubt when a price fluctuates or when we see the entire crypto market cap drop, we think "Oh shit this was a bad idea I better sell to save my losses". They must know something I don't and therefore must be right is the general conclusion we subconsciously conclude no matter how well trained we are to turn it off.
Studying behavior for my entire life I do not see an end to cryptocurrency within the next 5-7 years, my word of advice is to stay calm and hodl on!
In my next post I will talk about how cryptocurrencies are a bubble that will be hard to burst (mainly from its global adoption) because of the different mentalities that are investing in it.