What being suspended from Twitter taught me about life

Why I've been quiet lately due to an accidental TikTok audio copyright issue

It’s weird to be gone away from Twitter due to a DMCA takedown notice of an accidental TikTok video I posted on Twitter.

The positive side of all this is that I’ve had time to reflect on things.

It’s really weird living in these times. COVID-19 really gave like a fast-forward scenario of society 10+ years from now.

I see more people talk about VR/AR and crypto at a far mainstream level than 5+ years ago, but at the same time….

Isn’t the point of all these technological productivity gains to be able to have more time for leisure, as work becomes more productive?

There’s a very inherent contradiction with the “creator economy” that I see wrong. And being away from Twitter really helped reinforced this -

The inherent contradiction I’ve seen in the NFT space for example is that it seems like a 24/7 lifestyle. Community management, art gallery events, Clubhouse/Discord, Twitter - its arguably requiring too much work on a highly “uncurated space".

It’s like treadmill, but the difference is that it’s not of physical labor but rather relies heavily on mental emotion and artificial scarcity to get by.

And this is why, while I was walking around the San Francisco Bay Area, that I started to realize that I preferred the more older model of subscriptions/tokens on a monthly basis (10-20 people), where people consume art for arts sake,

Rather than get lost inside a treadmill that leads to really … what?

Psychology is really interesting. It’s like observing a person hyper-focus wealth generation and status signaling up to age 50-60, and then they wake up one day and realize, what this is all for?

Yes, the freedom to retire and get away from the drudgery of white collar work.

But what about inner peace?

Be very careful of letting artificial scarcity distract you from what you need, vs what you want.

I want to leave with a final note from the WeChat product manager Allen Zhang - he once said that the goal of WeChat is to help optimize productivity in life so you can focus on the things outside of tech, like leisure, as fast as possible.

The NFT, VR/AR and crypto spaces are blurring these lines lately, where the digital and the physical become hybrid.

This leads to very uncharted territories - does the maxim of “focusing on things outside of tech, like leisure, as as possible” still stand?