One Million Dollars!

almost 3 years ago

The Unit-Bias is Real.

The obsession with this number has been pervasive for decades. Funny, because decades ago a million dollars was worth a lot more than it is now.

_{Creepy garbage movie is creepy.}

Haven't you heard?

All you need is money and you'll get everything you want, no matter how much of a spoiled piece of shit you are! Magic magic money masters! Full grown adult women making out with twelve year olds because they have a bank account? Meh, I wouldn't worry about it. Business as usual. What's that called? A reverse sugar daddy?

My girlfriend is a fan of the Survivor series. I watched a few seasons with her even though I've always hated the show up until recently. I never understood the point of it. Back in the day, the thought of a show about surviving in the wilderness, only to be undercut by social dynamics and voted off the island no matter how good you were at "surviving"... seemed really dumb to me. Turns out that's kind of the entire point of the show.

Again, in Survivor, everyone is playing for a million dollars and they mention it constantly. I'm constantly making 'jokes' while I watch it like "Oh shit how much money are they playing for again?" I swear they mention the million dollars in every episode.

"How much Bitcoin is that?"
_{-- @edicted watching survivor}

This show has been around over 20 years and aired in 2000. Obviously, a million dollars was worth significantly more in 2000 then it is today but that doesn't matter. What matters is the number. No longer thousands; seven figures. It tickles a part of the brain and piques our interest in a very weird way.

1 million 1 million 1 million!

Seriously think about how weird it is: this obsession with a million dollars. It's totally rooted in scarcity, competition, and pure luck. Maybe if we're lucky, one day we'll have a million dollars as well! Wouldn't that be swell?

And the crazy part is that the people who actually get the million dollars end up, more often than not, spending it in really stupid ways. Easy come, easy go. Who doesn't love watching a famous rapper fall off the stage and go broke due to their ridiculous lifestyle? Misery loves company. The rich fall harder when placed on a tall pedestal.

NO DEAL!

Deal or No Deal is hilarious. They always get compulsive gamblers up there that never take the deal no matter how good it is. Gotta get that million! NO DEAL!

I see a lot of NO DEALS in crypto as well. We all could have taken gains at $60k but instead we said NO DEAL IM GONNA GO FOR THE MILLION, ALEX! lol, silly. We need to learn how to play it safe and lower risk, not increase it like maniacs on a bender in Vegas.

How much is enough?

You know back in April I was looking at my finances and I was like, "Wow, I have enough money to cash out a huge chuck and still have a ton left over. I could buy out enough runway to make it years into the future and still have plenty of crypto left."

In hindsight after a crash, it's easy to see that cashing out a bit during the peak would have been an awesome play. Did I do it? Nope. Why not?

2021 Mega-bubble year.

I still have it in my head that BTC is gonna go x10 the doubling curve. That's $250k BTC at the end of the year. I've been waiting for this event for over 3.5 years now, so cashing out right before it happened just seemed like a super weak play. How could I justify it?

But perhaps that's just a mindset rooted in greed. I had plenty of money right there in my hands just ready to be realized. Moral of the story? Maybe if you can afford to give yourself multiple years of salary all at once after a lifetime of living in scarcity... maybe take the deal. Just sayin.

Clearly, financial responsibly is the hardest part of this arena. I'm good with money and I've still been struggling with it for years. We are so obsessed with getting rich that we often don't even consider the safer play. Ironically enough, taking the safer path will often lead to more wealth generation over time anyway. Crypto is already plenty risky. No need to pile on even more risk than necessary.

Conclusion

The unit-bias obsession with a million dollars has been pervasive for generations, and is often times downright creepy. Greed has a certain ugliness and weirdness to it. It's a train wreck that we just can't seem to look away from.

To the vast majority of the population, this is an unattainable amount of money that they could only dream of acquiring. That is pretty sad considering how technologically advanced we've become combined with the dollar's devaluation over time. When you actually think about it, it really shouldn't be that hard to acquire a million dollars this day in age.

Still, I believe that many of us will control this level of wealth as soon as the end of the year. The Mega-Bull run is still on the table, no matter what the cowering mob on crypto Twitter has to say about it. The question is: how are we going to handle that responsibility? History definitively shows that this new transference of wealth will be managed extremely poorly. All we can do is try not to get sucked into the blackhole of foolishness and immaturity.