I’ve been sick all week.

It knocked me out cold—forced me to hit the brakes.

And as miserable as it feels, there’s something good about being forced to slow down.

In the slow, boring fog of it… a truth sneaked in:

Ninety percent of what feels “critical” and “urgent” evaporates when you’re flat on your back.

(Yes, this has everything to do with crypto… and where it’s headed.)

TikTok, Brain Rot

For years now we’ve been told that the modern world is stealing our attention.

TikTok is rewiring our brains. Short-form videos are turning us all into goldfish with thumbs. Silicon Valley has mastered the dark magic of distraction.

For the record… I don’t buy it.

In fact, for as long as we’ve had records, people have been complaining about our shrinking attention spans.

Plato said 6,000 years ago minds were becoming too lazy. Seneca said the same thing 3,000 years ago.

Medieval monks scribbled complaints that the “modern” monks couldn’t focus.

Enlightenment thinkers blamed newspapers for ruining concentration. Victorians said trains and telegraphs would collapse deep thinking.

Early 20th-century critics blamed cinema, telephones, and mass advertising.

And in 1933, French philosopher Simone Weil finally hit the truth: distraction isn’t a new crisis—it’s the human condition.

“Attention,” she said, “comes at the price of suspending our natural impulses.”

“Attention,” she wrote, “is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”

And, finally, my favorite…

“Something in our soul rejects true attention more violently than flesh shrinks from physical fatigue.”

This was all before TikTok. Before smartphones. Before the internet.

And Weil didn’t just nail the problem. She nailed the solution, too.

The Weilian Antidote

Weil believed that “forces of the world” had a single mission: to turn living people into objects. Into cogs. Into predictable units.

Attention, she said, is the only antidote.

In her time, the great threat was industrial bureaucracy. Today it’s the algorithm.

But the mechanism is the same: When you stop directing your attention, someone else directs it for you.

Markets drown you in fast answers—price targets, predictions, hopium, doom.

The internet immerses you in a vast, humming engine of news cycles, notifications, and impatient crowds—eager to feed on every flicker of your uncertainty.

Weil’s solution? Seek problems, not quick answers; cultivate attention as openness; hold a question patiently instead of rushing to solve it.

And that’s exactly how you win (and, according to Weil, become spiritually enlightened too).

Signals in the Noise

Right now, everyone (in crypto especially) is chasing the short, emotional, dopamine hits.

“What’s the top?”

“What’s the bottom?”

“Should I buy now? What about now?

“Should I sell?”

Like all markets…

The distractible get farmed. The answer-seekers get chopped. The impatient get liquidated. The anxious sell early. The reactive buy tops.

Meanwhile, the real opportunities come from focusing on problems—the long arcs of infrastructure, energy, liquidity, regulation, compute, and demand that nobody wants to sit with.

Because if you seek problems, you’ll notice something else entirely:

Problem: Moving money across borders is slow, expensive, and controlled by a handful of intermediaries.

Problem: Every country, bank, platform, and institution operates in isolated liquidity pools. (ledger → intermediary → ledger → intermediary → ledger ad infinitum)

Problem: Nobody trusts institutions, governments, banks, or corporations anymore.

Problem: Institutions, governments, banks, and corporations don’t trust each other (or you) anymore.

Problem: Every existing global settlement system is political. There’s no formal way to settle credibly neutral transactions around the world.

Problem: Billions live under failing currencies (Turkey, Argentina, Nigeria, Lebanon, etc.). Billions more live on borrowed time.

Problem: Digital-native generations all around the world feel abandoned by legacy finance—seeking financial independence online.

Problem: Coordination on energy, compute, data, and resources is becoming too complicated in slow, bureaucratic structures.

Problem: Big Tech extracts data from users with no compensation.

Problem: AI models are becoming censored, closed, and propagandized.

Problem: Every new digital system requires massive capex (servers, security, coordination).

Problem: Stranded and wasted energy is lost every day.

Problem: Gamers spend BILLIONS on items they don’t truly own.

Problem: Traditional finance can’t handle tiny transactions—fees destroy the model.

Problem: Proving solvency, reserves, compliance, or risk is slow and trust-based.

Problem: Financial systems (bank accounts, databases, governments) can be altered or censored.

Problem: Every digital identity system leaks personal data.

Problem: The cost of downtime is becoming exponentially more dangerous, expensive, and unacceptable.

If crypto can help solve just any three of these problems for 1 billion people, the asymmetric upside is still tremendous. (I, for one, think it can tackle all of them for many more billions.)

In a down market, people simply stop paying attention to this. They focus on price candles instead of structural shifts.

Answers instead of problems.

But answers are just positions. Positions freeze the mind.

Weil’s solution? Teach the mind to hold a question without rushing to solve it.

And in the age of instant answers? That’s the ultimate edge.

Same as it always was.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION ON THIS MATTER.