The anxiety of Web3 has never been a random negative emotion; it is the underlying logic ingrained in this industry. When you are in it, you enter a casino that never turns off the lights, as well as an extremely cruel human experiment laboratory.
The full text consists of four parts totaling four thousand words. Don't worry, there is no hidden agenda, only my sincerity.
Part One: What are we really anxious about?
1. The endpoint of effort is no longer harvest.
I once had an in-depth conversation with my old boss about this topic. Before entering Web3, he managed a publicly traded company, and every profit he made was tied to tangible products. For him, every bit of effort equated to a bit of harvest, that certainty informed him where the road ahead lay. But in Web3, this causal relationship has broken!
Most people's expectations of returns often hang on a nearly obsessive fixation, or rather, on a grand fantasy of the future. When you interact, research, and review day and night, what you get in the end may not be 'big gains,' but a cold 'witch' mark, or when you expect a certain meme to bring more good news, what you get instead is a big red column. This complete disconnection between effort and feedback is called 'Learned Helplessness' in psychology.
This sense of helplessness will be imprinted in your heart like a brand and is not easy to detect. Over time, even when the next real opportunity is right in front of you, your subconscious will tell you: forget it, it's useless.
2. 7*24H 'Digital Exploitation'
In Web3, almost every practitioner is swept into the torrent of information from the moment they open their eyes.
I have asked many friends around me, and when they are scrolling through group chats or looking at media updates, they involuntarily become highly focused, and their nerves become more and more tense, especially after watching for a while, feeling as if their bodies have become weary again. This is not because you didn't sleep well last night, but because your brain is already 'cognitively overloaded'. When the information received far exceeds the brain's processing limit, one enters a state of 'paralysis'—looking at a full screen of 'opportunities', yet the body feels sealed, unable to take action.
And in order to keep up with Eastern time and guard against sudden market movements in the middle of the night, our biological clock has been torn apart. This long-term 'hyperarousal' state makes your brain like a server that never shuts down, with the CPU heating up. This physiological tension will also involuntarily lead you into a state of anxiety.
3. The Heavy Burden of Survivor Bias: 'Wealth Myths' on Twitter
No matter how bad the market is, as long as you open Twitter, you can always see someone making money and others celebrating.
Many seasoned players will pat their chests and say: 'I am already immune to this kind of thing.' But the fact is, when you scroll through those posts about sudden wealth, your brain has already overridden your will and quietly released stress hormones. This FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) is essentially our instinctive fear of social decline.
Moreover, this psychological state is extremely concealed, as seasoned players are skilled at disguising their feelings. They often convert this anxiety into anger, cursing at the screen: 'Another idiot KOL with edited pictures.'
But the bitterness behind that curse is something only you know. It's a transparent isolation wall; on the other side is the noisy myth of wealth, while this side is you walking a tightrope alone in the dark with anxiety.
Part Two: The Invisible Costs
If the first part discusses the pressure from the environment, then in this part I want to talk about: what exactly has been stolen from us as 'human beings' during this process?
1. The Distortion of Values: The Disappearance of 'Small Certainties'
The transactions we engage in use USD, while the life we live is in RMB. When you make consumption comparisons, you often use USD to compensate for the psychological stress of your RMB consumption, for example, a 70 yuan takeout is just a gas fee for an interaction.
However, within the existing social logic, 70 yuan for takeout is already a significant material reward for many marginalized groups. As an average person, the way of material rewards is actually very limited. If these bottom-tier material rewards cannot satisfy one's spiritual needs, then the pursuit of high material psychological returns will lead one to a comparative mindset. When you feel uncomfortable, you will subconsciously reinforce your cognition, thinking that one day you can also earn hundreds of thousands or millions. We have seen too many myths of sudden wealth, yet we forget the stark reality behind these myths. This pathological elevation of the 'excitement threshold' is essentially a chronic exploitation of one's passion for life; you cease to love life, only loving that fluctuating balance.
2. Emotional Blunting: The Disappearance of Emotions
If you are not into token giveaways but are used to doing MEME or contract trading, you will find that your emotions are slowly disappearing.
I once had an extreme thought: 'If only I were a robot.' Because I know that any decision driven by greed or anger will ultimately result in losses in my account. If you truly enter a so-called flow state, no longer swayed by emotions to gain profits, then bad things will happen.
Because once this reward mechanism is established, the emotion of you as a 'human' will gradually be stripped away. You will fear feeling joy, fear that irrationality will lead you to make incorrect decisions. You will become nihilistic and numb, and it will become difficult to discover surprises in life. Because the rewards trading gives you are high-frequency and stimulating, while in real life—whether it's playing with your child or the mundane daily life with family, that feedback is extremely low-frequency and mundane.
The saddest part is that when you seal away feelings of happiness and joy—emotions that 'might affect transactions'—all you have left are two extreme emotions: anger after losses and regret after missed opportunities.
3. The Island Effect: The Absence of Gaining Feeling
Unlike other industries, if we live in a crypto-unfriendly environment, the money we earn cannot match the sense of gain at the societal level. You dare not let your relatives, friends, or even parents know the industry you are engaged in and the success you have achieved. You fear not being understood, and this lack of societal value will put you in a contradictory state.
You might manage a studio with hundreds of millions in revenue, but you can only engage in retaliatory consumption within your familiar small circle. You may have achieved universal success, yet you can only fill the psychological void through frequent material consumption. That deep sense of loneliness is the most secret nourishment for anxiety.
Part Three: Cognitive Reconstruction
After seeing those 'invisible costs', we must learn to 'self-rescue'. This is not just a repair of the mindset but a complete reconstruction of cognition.
1. Honestly Embrace 'Luck'
Old followers know that I used to enjoy reflecting on past experiences. Whether it was winning a prize in a token giveaway or hitting a double on a new investment, I was accustomed to deconstructing the past from a 'god's-eye view', trying to find a set of flawless arguments for my success.
But the later me was not feeling well at all. Because I realized that my so-called logic was largely just a way to compensate for the psychological pressure brought by the randomness of 'luck'. This kind of success manifests differently for everyone, but it can basically be categorized into three states: one is to reduce the internal aggression towards this wealth through consumption, the second is to alleviate this psychological unease through donations, and the last is someone like me, trying to grasp this success through logical reasoning. But the reality is, when you try to package randomness as inevitability, you will fall into a fixation of wanting to 'control everything'. In Web3, this obsession is the greatest breeding ground for anxiety. So later on, I wrote very few teachings on 'how to succeed' and instead focused on reviewing my own journey.
Admitting that you are just an ordinary person and calmly embracing that uncertain luck. This is also the original intention of my community's name. When you no longer have to take responsibility for 'luck,' your heart is truly free.
2. Separate 'Account Balance' from 'Self-Worth'
This is perhaps the hardest lesson to learn in this industry. Because almost everyone's ultimate goal in entering the circle is the growth of their balance. We learned various skills along the way to make that number grow, enduring various pressures. But have you ever thought: the accumulation of wealth should be a process in your life, not your endpoint.
If you fully tie your self-worth to wealth, then when the market fluctuates, your personality will also 'shrink' accordingly. We should try to find joy in other areas of success: cooking a meal, engaging in a vigorous workout, or going on an impromptu trip with friends.
You must remember that the beauty of this world is meaningful because of your existence. Your value should be composed of those things that 'can never fall away'. The other day at dinner, I heard an interesting point: love yourself first. I think this is connected; when you can see your own value, you will understand the meaning of the phrase 'love yourself first.'
3. Recognizing Unlimited Opportunities
In Twitter or group chats, we can always see many people achieving great success, which makes us feel that the 'opportunity cost' is frighteningly high. But in fact, in this industry, the opportunity cost is the lowest; the most expensive is the 'time cost' that you are most likely to ignore.
Looking back, even in the most tedious market conditions, opportunities have never been absent. If so, why regret so much over a missed sale or an empty position? If you can genuinely acknowledge 'unlimited opportunities' from the bottom of your heart, you can step out of the project itself and see the human frenzy and despair behind it. When you see others going crazy, and you can calmly sell, that 'freedom from participation' is the ultimate sense of control.
Someone once told me that he 'only earns money in his own time zone'. I didn't understand before, but now I do—it's a high acknowledgment of unlimited opportunities, and it allows oneself to escape a state of high sensitivity and act freely.
4. Establish 'Process-Oriented' Incentive Mechanisms
This is a proposition against instinct.
As East Asians, we have grown up in a world where results matter. We are used to using periodic exams to assess a student's learning progress, and this results-oriented reward mechanism has been ingrained in our DNA. But in Web3, results are often uncontrollable.
Therefore, we should try to reward the 'process'. Even if I haven't seen any results today, if I completed interactions with 50 accounts, that's a form of discipline worth rewarding; even if I lost money buying MEME today, I entered the market after rationally analyzing the narrative, rather than being swept in by emotions, which is a cognitive improvement. We need to learn to use these 'small certainties' to counteract those 'huge volatilities'. When your mental state gradually stabilizes, you will have more energy to cope with the fluctuations and uncertainties of this industry.
Part Four: Turning Off the Lights for Yourself
In fact, everything that needs to be said has already been said. But if you ask me: since you feel Web3 is a breeding ground for anxiety, why not leave?
I once thought about withdrawing, but I felt that such an approach was too extreme. So now I am trying to forcibly draw a boundary in this never-ending casino—turning off the lights for myself once in the midst of the noisy midnight!
I paused here for a long time, some words seemed to be begging to be said, yet they seemed to have dissipated in the wind. So I will no longer list those cold psychological arguments, but want to invite you to look back with me: where exactly was the starting point when you first stepped into this wasteland?
Let me first talk about myself. I entered the circle during my student days, with a pure intention like a blank sheet of paper: to earn some extra money and improve my life. However, later, the more drinking parties I attended, the more lavish the myths of sudden wealth became, and my mindset quietly fractured. Gradually, I became quite awkward, constantly chasing those high-risk excess returns, especially during that period of rapid wealth growth, I was always afraid of missing out on the 'big opportunity,' and I began to frantically pursue 'success' that did not belong to me.
Until a certain moment, I suddenly learned to turn off the lights for myself, which might also be a positive change brought by my body's reminders. I found that I no longer frequently searched for echoes in the Twitter feed, nor did I regret missing a certain wealth code. I finally realized that true Alpha is not on that flickering screen, but in that one-year-and-three-month-old child who is busy 'dismantling the house', in the aroma of steaming hot meals in the kitchen when I wake up.
This 'sense of exiting' does not mean retiring. It is more like what was mentioned above, a deep acknowledgment of 'unlimited opportunities'. When you can calmly face each 'miss', when you can sleep soundly at the right time in the bustling night, you have already won the hardest round in this human experiment.
Perhaps at this moment, you may not fully understand these words above, and that's okay. If one day in the future, when you feel overwhelmed again, if you can remember this passage that once brushed past your fingertips, that would be enough.
After all, this article is also a self-rescue letter I wrote to myself.
