I don't get overly affected by price, but what I do notice when it goes up or down, that my thoughts drift a bit more into what I might do with it if heading up, or what I won't do with it if on the way down. I am guessing I am not the only one that does this from time to time at least, especially if we have things that we are continually putting off due to the price.

Next week we are having some birch trees cut down in our yard, which we will then turn into firewood and store in our garage for the coming years. We can't put it into the fireplace for about two years, as it has to dry first, but there will be plenty. Because of this, we are going to have the neighbors come and help us cut it up and then they can take some for their fireplaces also.

We have been postponing cutting down the trees because when the neighbor had his done (a few months before he died), my wife asked the people how much it would cost and by their estimate, it was 1000€ a tree. And that was just to do the basic work cutting them into very large pieces. As a result, we never got it done, even though we know that the trees will have to come down.

However, we also have an acquaintance who is a lumberjack, and after two years of asking my wife to contact him, she finally did and he came to have a look. For the three trees, he estimated about 500€ in total, which includes cutting them up into smaller pieces (we will still have to cut them for burning), or taking it all away completely. There is a little "mates rates" in there, but not that much. Essentially, the other group were just looking to price gouge on convenience.

I am not using crypto for this.

I don't know why, but I feel that when I do eventually use crypto for something, it has to be something significant, something meaningful. I think it might be because since early on, I recognized the opportunity there was in it to make a difference in our lives, so this became the guiding force of investing time, effort and money into crypto. Significant change.

But what does significant change look like?

This is going to obviously depend on many factors for each individual, but I wonder if there are some common threads in our experience that overlap. For instance, debt-free, own house, car, opportunity to travel occasionally, cover costs without too much effort, and the ability to choose what kind of work. That last one is a big one for me, as while I feel like retiring would be awesome sometimes, it is more that being able to retire is what I am actually after. I want to be able to keep working, but not have to work in order to cover expenses. A lot of work that seems undesirable, isn't that bad unless forced by circumstances to do it.

Any overlap?

And then, I also consider how I would feel about what I spend crypto on and how I might feel about it later. For instance, if I were to sell to improve my life when the markets were up and Bitcoin was around 100K, how would I feel about the life changes if in five years the markets were reflecting Bitcoin at a million?

Would I still be happy?

At least for me, this is an interesting question to consider, because I think that this is something that is somewhat common for crypto traders, as there is so much volatility, and so much upside potential. In a decade or so, two pizzas were worth 600 million, and people don't forget this. And for most, they have experienced a taste of that volatility first hand, seeing tokens go to extreme highs, 100x or more in the space of months.

Life-changing means different things to different people, but I think that when we are questioning our place in the world, it isn't a bad idea to consider what it means to us. Are we setting our goals too high, too low, or is what we consider life changing, really what we want as an outcome at all. Once we work that out, even if we don't have investments in hand, at least we can start working out the direction we want to take and start investing into what we actually want.

Start planting trees.

But in order to build a decent garden, we have to also be prepared to change what is there, and take down what needs to be removed, to make way for something better, something healthier. Once we have removed the dying and rotting, then we are able to start building - but before we start building, we need to have some plans of what we want the result to look like.

So, what are your plans?

What are you going to knock down, what are you going to plant, what are you going to trim, what are you going to care for?

Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]