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It’s funny, this morning @teamhumble and I had a conversation about money, fear and our value relationship with funds and how crypto is really forcing us to acknowledge that (sometimes unhealthy) relationship we can have with money.
Money is something I’ve always wished never existed. I remember working my first retail job in the grocery store as a teenager exclaiming “I wouldn’t have to be here if we would just go back to an agrarian barter society!!!” Yeah, I was a weird kid. But I’ve always preferred trades of agreed value or services direct for something needed, rather than the middle man of money, and the countless middle-middle men of banks, cards, and verifications that money invites into the picture. You know it's bad when your middle men have middle men. Yuck.
Barter is always best, except when a potential client says they want to pay you with “Exposure” because 1000% fuck off. As a close friend of mine always used to say… “When I can pay rent with “exposure” then we can talk.
I’m realizing that I've got a lot of fear attached to money. I come from a family where both my parents were the first generation born into the US and so their parent’s immigrant stuff-the-money-under-the-mattress-and-just-work-until-you-die mentality subconsciously transferred to them, and then to me.
It’s what makes me a shit trader, (that and my brain's natural aversion to numbers) and it’s why I’ve probably left money on the table not doing smart trades of crypto, because I feel like if everything goes tits-up, and I lose all my clients, and I’m out on my ass on the streets… I’m going to need that little stash, that I can’t AFFORD to lose it.
If you can believe it, this is what my physical wallet is down to, a block of glow resin with two bands around it. That's all I need to carry a little cash and vital IDs. Everything else is digital.
But I’m starting to believe I can’t afford not to make some moves here and there in order to take care of future Dayle. (God I hope future Dayle has rocket boots and a pet Mars-Dog)
I know FULL WELL that my days making money as an online freelancer with clients are numbered. When AI comes online and social fully implodes on itself (the way we all know it will) I’ll have no place in the working world.
I hope by now we can all acknowledge that geotagged panda face filters and cat videos are only going to carry us so far on the attention- span economy, can’t we? Sooner or later, value will be fully tied to attention and attention will demand SUBSTANCE. Unfortunately, for the get-rich-quick social media gurus, influencers and marketers, substance takes time, care and stories requireLEGACY.
We can’t slap a flower-crown face filter on this one folks. The ugly reality is that the world is changing, and my little old Italian-lady methods of managing funds isn’t going to carry me through that ai and digital working TRULY location independent storm.
This morning, as I was contemplating these feelings and thoughts, two pretty huge things happened in our little world in the van… that REALLY changed the game….
The first, one of my best clients got back to me and let me know they wanted to have me on a monthly contract for content creation, in ADDITION to my hourlies for design. It’s something we’ve been talking about being able to work on together and it’s going to be big help in our “baseline” that we need to keep up and running in the short term.
Residuals man, I’ve wanted to have them up and running for awhile, and I’m getting there slowly with Steemit and a few other small projects, but this one means we can rely on a certain number coming in each month. And even though that number is pretty humble, it’s steady. And that’s a HUGE bonus.
The second rad thing, that happened almost immediately after, is APPLE PAY CASH decided to show the heck up and I was able to send funds… FEE FREE to @teamhumble as a little test.
The little apple pay cash card is now in my wallet and having that extra redundancy of being able to access and send funds is HUGE for someone like me who spends 6 months at a time on the other side of the world. If I lose a card, if something gets shut down, or an atm eats my card or doesn’t work or I need cash or ANYTHING, I’ve got another little escape route, another way to get a little cash and make a move if I absolutely need to.
Maybe my Italian Grandma-immigrant mentalities aren’t ALL bad. ;)
Crypto, FIAT and the working world of freelance forces you to be a bit of a time traveler, having to cover the immediate while toggling the allocation of brain cycles to also be providing for the next month and the next 6 months can become overwhelming. I’m finally realizing that that’s what that term “having your money work FOR you” means. It’s a saying I’ve always tied to feelings of greed and everything I hated about capitalism, but now I’m realizing having my money work for me, means it’s working for future Rocket-Booster Space-Dog me. Because once this freelance work dries up, I’m going to need some way to pay for little Sufjan's space puppy-chow. ;)
Thanks for listening!
<3 Dayle
