Choices Made From Fear
I recently realized something about my own life that should have been obvious much earlier: I did not go to university because I wanted to. I went because I was told to. I did not choose the major I was actually interested in — I chose the one that felt safest, because I was afraid of being poor and jobless. I worked not because I wanted to work, but because I was afraid of looking useless to other people.
Run the audit on almost any major decision and the same engine shows up underneath: fear of what society expects. Every choice made from fear has a certain flavor — defensive, joyless, provisional — and stacked together they produce a life that feels like it belongs to someone else.
So I quit. I left the mundane job I had landed. I started saying no to people I had no respect for. I became, deliberately and uncomfortably, unemployed, trying to break free from everything that had been making me miserable.
Then came the harder question, which I now ask myself every day: if money were not an issue, what would I actually do? Three months in, I still have no answer. I try asking what I value most, and I draw another blank. I understand, intellectually, that value and meaning are subjective human constructions — but knowing that does not hand you any. So now I am circling in a different kind of misery: not the misery of doing what others want, but the misery of not knowing what I want at all.
Somewhere in that circling I stumbled into a strange thought experiment. I noticed a project where people tokenize their time and attention, and it struck me: everything seems tokenizable these days. What if someone created a token backed by my misery?
The joke writes itself — the supply would be infinite, so the price would be zero. But then again, we live in an era of speculation where people can long or short anything. My misery could fluctuate. Maybe I could manage it, keep it scarce, so only the meaningful, valuable misery survives in circulation. Perhaps it could even appreciate.
And here is where the metaphor stops being a joke. If traders shorted my misery down toward nothing — if they bet against its existence — what would they actually get in return? Because I can promise them one thing: this misery has real value behind it. It will not go to zero. It will not become void.
That is the position I have arrived at: I must choose to hold valuable misery and exchange away the worthless kind. Suffering is not uniform. Some of it — the struggle of building something, of choosing your own constraints — is productive and even beautiful. Some of it — fear dressed up as prudence, compliance disguised as responsibility — is pure dead weight. Treat them as different assets.
My misery is dynamic. It is a struggle. It has its own strange beauty. And maybe that is what I want a permanent record of: proof, tracked somewhere durable in this digital world, that I carried misery that was worth something — and traded up.
Drafted with AI assistance from my personal journal (2024-06-08), then edited by me. See On AI Assistance.