taking a serious step back from crypto is realising just how all-consuming an obsession it has become over the last 4-5 years.
working out, hiking, gardening, reading, picking up new skills, watching films i've not got round to seeing, picking up old hobbies, reconnecting with people - all of this has been good for me - but i have realised that doing this so intensively for so long has done something profound to my neurochemistry.
the absolutely insane cognitive demands of trading all day every day, prioritising everything about learning how to get better onchain, markets, wallets, TA, FA, liquidity, studying trends, researching narratives, endless exhaustive discussion of the above with my trading circles etc. etc. - it feels like i've blasted my brain with so much dopamine and cortisol from the myriad highs and lows over this market cycle, that it has become quite hard to actually experience anything 'normal' with a true sense of presence and engagement like i used to. you become so used to constantly running numbers over in your head, calculating projections, assessing mistakes and trying to plan out a refined approach to do it better next time, even when you're not sat in front of a chart or a terminal - that when you aren't looking at anything at all, you start to remember what it's like to do anything else with full, unmitigated attention.
i generally feel quite blank, albeit neutral in my engagement with my day-to-day life as i further detach myself from this space, and ramping up the intensity of what i'm doing doesn't seem to have much proportionate effect. the truth is that not many other things come close (certainly in my life) to that cognitive demand in terms of how obsessive and all-consuming it eventually became for me. i'm sure many of you can relate to this, but how many of you truly 'switch off' from crypto in any absolute way for a longer period of time? i have literally zero idea what price bitcoin is right now, what value my portfolio is - and the truth is, it feels really good to not know any of this, despite the underlying knowledge that my networth is cooked, bull run failed once again etc.
i will have to return to trading at some point as i can't live off the money i have forever, and i still have some big financial goals that i am not willing to give up on yet. but this time away has really highlighted for me just how much it took out of me, or rather, how much it fundamentally changed me as a person, to put myself in a position to make life-changing money.