What's up crypto fam. This is the second part of a two-part series and you can find the first article here. This article will pick up right where that article left off. Except we're gonna do a little rewind to tell a bit of the backstory that is necessary for the story to continue. Enjoy.

Prelude/Backstory

In order to truly understand why the crypto life chose me you need to actually have some sense of who the "me" is in that statement. So I'll try not to make it too wordy and boring.

At age fourteen I moved from my regular highschool to essentially a fucking school-house with about 20 people. I was getting depressed and anxious as fuck and didn't want to be around anybody. At age seventeen I started doing cocaine a little too regularly. I wasn't Rick James, bitch, but that glorious track by Eric Clapton was pretty much spot on. At the age of nineteen I went off to university and literally did so on the other side of the country; moving from the rocky mountains in BC to the college town of London, Ontario in Canada. All I really wanted to do was join a fraternity and have the college experience that I saw in all the movies.

So I got it but also dropped out of university after one year, and then a college in the same town (so I could stay in the fraternity of course) a year and a half after that because I wasn't there for school. As Mark Twain once said, "Don't ever let your schooling get in the way of your education." Or some shit like that. Anyways, after that time I moved back home with my parents. I started working at a sawmill, with no real direction in life. So I moved to Vancouver to take a film course. After two weeks I dropped out of that too, because I could have taught the whole thing it was so basic. After all of these academic strike-outs I had to get on my finances and get a job, as a mentor of mine told me at the time. So I worked at a flotation centre for 3 years and during the first year (2016) I had the best year of my life and so did my friend Molly.

During this time I knew I needed to level up financially as I was making just enough to get by. So I got an over-the-phone sales job at a startup selling things like diet pills and skin cream. Insecurity products. That was awesome, and I recommend everybody do sales at some point, but unfortunately that little startup went under after I had worked there for only two months. This was during the crazy crypto bullrun of late 2017. At this point in time, the hero of our story was rather frustrated with everything and discouraged beyond belief. Remember that depression I mentioned during the high school section? Yeah imagine that combined with a few years of drug use and three failed post-secondary attempts. Not good. So I literally spent the majority of 2018 lying on the couch in my jail cell sized apartment in Vancouver crying, convincing myself that I needed to go out and get groceries, and reading books.

At this point I had given up on any type of informational/education non-fiction book even remotely related to self-help. I had read it all and it didn't 'work' so fuck off with that nonsense. I threw the metaphorical table in the air and everything fell all over the floor and even the overhead light-bulb burnt out. Until at the end of the year I went to a going away party for one of my friends. During this party I was chatting with one of my homies and we got to talking about cryptocurrency. I told him that I was intrigued by it and said that I liked that kind of speculative shit but I had no idea where to start with crypto. And then he told me I could pretty much figure anything out by watching videos on YouTube. Suddenly, that light-bulb started to flicker back on. This is about where the previous article and part one of the story finished.

Pre-End Pt. 2

So needless to say my life felt pretty shitty at this time. 2018 was the worst year of my life, and because of how many times I tried to make things work and failed I decided to say fuck it for real and officially give up with the whole nonsense. But like the angel I am, I promised my Mom that I wouldn't kill myself while she's still alive so I guess I had to keep going but it was definitely a pathetic and apathetic time. My whole life before this (that is, after my first psychedelic experience in December of 2012 #Nostradamus) was entirely based on making my life better. I didn't want to feel so shitty all the time so I tried everything in the "Let's Beat Depression" handbook and I even wrote a few fucking chapters myself. And as you can probably assume by now, nothing really seemed to "work" for me. Everything was temporary and as soon as I stopped doing this or that external thing I was basically back down to zero pretty damn quickly.

Considering all I ever did before this time was self-development related shit, after I essentially "gave up" I really didn't know what to do. Like I literally didn't know what I enjoyed doing and what kinds of things interested me outside of my own development and self-actualization which my life revolved around before. First world problems are hilarious right. I should also add at this point that I started taking anti-depressants and anxiety medication near the end of 2018 because that was fairly significant in getting out of my desperate stupor. Talk to your doctor if you need some help.

It was around this time that I decided to give my Dad another phone call. The idea of cryptocurrency was starting to become more attainable because of what my friend had told me, and I wanted my Dad's opinion once again. But probably more accurately I should say, I wanted my Dad's opinion of cryptocurrency to change so I could have his approval in pursuing this thing that intrigued me so much - making deals over the phone, the big payouts, the risk of losing everything on one stock/coin, and the general "Fuck You" Wall Street attitude. But unfortunately my Dad's mind had not changed. This meme isn't really related but I just thought it was hilarious.

Pre-End Pt. 3

But shit I didn't know what else to do and I knew that I had to make money somehow because you bet your ass the rent cost for a one-bedroom apartment near the beach in Vancouver wasn't cheap. Thankfully my Dad payed for it the whole time I was depressed and lying on the couch in 2018. So I felt an inner responsibility to pay him back. And because I was still anxious as a motherfucker, sometimes having partial panic attacks by simply doing laundry in my building. Fucking laundry. That and getting groceries are like the worst things in the world for people with mental health problems. The necessities. Oh yeah that and working. Like, going to a physical location and interacting with other people in a professional manner. Yikes.

So when I started diving deeper into cryptocurrency I realized that I could do fucking everything from behind my laptop. I was behind the thing all day anyways listening to music and not sarcastically watching porn all day. So I made my first purchase. After a few weeks I even convinced my Dad to get a position in bitcoin which was pretty awesome I thought.

At this initial phase in my cryptocurrency journey I was trading on Binance and really enjoying drawing lines on charts all day. I was fairly good at it, plus beginners luck was on my side. So after a few weeks I realized I was missing something. More capital. Sure making a 40% trade was nice and all, but when you only had $100 in there to begin with? Pretty much fucking nothing. So cryptocurrency got me off the couch after one year of suffering through a dark depressive slump and motivated me to get one of those job things you might have heard the older generations talking about from time to time. I got myself a landscaping job with the City of Vancouver and was making a really solid wage. But like I mentioned, rent in Vancouver still wasn't very friendly. Working full time and after covering all of my expenses I could have about $100 at the end of the month for extra shit aka crypto trading.

So I did this for the entire 2018 summer and into the fall. As you might know by now, I don't like to fuck around; so every coffee break or lunch hour was spent absorbing cryptocurrency knowledge, trading strategies, and trying to come up with other ways to increase my capital so that I could put it into crypto. Time is money, ladies and gentlemen, and you're either spending it or you're making it. That right there is a quote by me so fucking patent pending everybody copyright, trademark, royalties, all that shit.

Halfway through the summer I started selling used books on Amazon FBA. Crypto also inspired me to get a "side-hustle" as all the cool kids are calling it these days. Eventually I started writing a book during my lunch breaks at work as well - which might eventually grace the pages of The Daily Peel so stay tuned for that. My optimism was beaming and my mind was fucking tunnel-vision focused baby. But the looming end of my seasonal working contract became increasingly more visible. When this end finally came I decided to go back home for the winter so that I could snowboard. Maybe by that time I could make enough money trading crypto and selling used books on Amazon so that I wouldn't have to get a real job the following summer?

Almost The End

As many of you should know by now, crypto isn't a super easy or quick way to make money. The one fucking thing YouTube didn't tell me. Those bastards. So as the days and weeks went on during the winter I realized I needed to create another income source. And I needed to do it fast so that I could set it on autopilot during the summer while I worked a "real job." Well as time went on, my procrastination and self-doubt started to intensify at the idea of having to start a business. Any fucking online business. I looked into everything and only felt more and more discouraged as I went on. The prospect of me starting something that would take so much time, energy, and effort was just crippling. I mean I was already pretty much balls deep in crypto which I actually enjoyed but I still needed more capital if anything significant was going to come out of this hobby-disguised obsession.

The time was getting closer when I would have to move back to Vancouver for the summer and start looking for a job. And the closer that time came the more likely I was to feel deflated and depressed as a mufucka as a result. So naturally I went on a little vacation with my Mom and Brother to Hawaii. It was during this time that the crypto flash crash of March 12th happened. Yet another indication that I needed to hurry the fuck up and get another stream of income A$AP. Simply doubling down on faucets, airdrops, and leverage trading a few ETH here and there simply wasn't going to do it.

And then Queen Corona came into town and basically fucked up everybody's everything. Oh great, now I HAVE to get another source of income because there ain't no chance in hell an 'uneducated' man like myself was going to get a "real job." Fuck. Again the more I pursued different ideas the more I would cower away from the whole ordeal of starting up an online business of any kind. But it absolutely had to be done now because of the global circumstances and especially considering everything I had learned about finance from the last year which basically forewarned me that a huge economic fallout of some capacity was bound to happen and it felt like it might have been happening now.

End.

Now here I sit typing on my trusty chromebook. Have I started that online source of income yet? What the fuck do you think. Last week I uploaded the first item into my Amazon drop-shipping store considering I already have a decent amount of experience selling on Amazon. But literally the other day amazon also hopped on that product which basically means I am no longer able to drop-ship it. Fuuuck.

I spend all my fucking time on crypto partly because I enjoy the shit out of it and it has really become a passion of mine over the last year. But also because it's a way for me to avoid the hard work that would be involved with starting a more serious online business. I spent approximately 6 hours writing this article and if I'm lucky and the algorithms side with me that day, I might get $10 in crypto for those hours of work. Would you accept a job that might pay you $2 an hour?

Well that's what I have chosen to do right now. The prospect of starting my own online business is so intimidating and daunting that I would rather spend my time potentially making $2 per hour than really buckling down and working harder to create something that would take more time and effort but would pay off more in the long-run. But the fantasy of crypto, right? It has me by the balls. For over a month now I have told myself that I need to put crypto on the back burner and really focus on building something significant that will become an active stream of wealth in my life. But nah bro fucking moon lambos and crypto's next four-year-cycle and lines on charts and shit. ...Right?

Conclusion

When everything is said and done I really do love cryptocurrency, the idea of decentralization, the technological possibilities and what it all means for humanity, and I even love reading and writing articles here on Publish0x. Cryptocurrency has become a passion for me over the last year that I've been involved with it. I have never been so stoked on something so consistently for such a long period of time, without giving up on it and trying something else. So I am very grateful to have found crypto and to be part of the community.

So maybe this is telling me that starting some sort of online business isn't the right thing for me right now? Maybe trying to start another online business venture might end up being another failure for the sob story that I'm destined to tell my non-existent children one day while we're eating fucking potatoes in a roofless shed in the forest because I wasn't able to make anything of myself and it turned out that bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies did not, in fact, moon. Only time will tell I guess.

Whatever the case may be, it's about that time when I finally and directly answered the question that we're all here for: "Why did the crypto life choose me?"

The crypto life chose me because I am too apathetic to build another solid stream of income like an online business and I would rather spend my time throwing what little money I have into magical internet money with the hopes that I can experience the same kinds of unrealistic and speculative profits that I missed out on in late 2017.

What a sad fucking story. Thanks for reading.