Tired
Three Things #137: September 22, 2024
It took a long time to decide what to write about this week. I usually have some idea what I want to write about ahead of time, and I usually spend very little time deciding. This week is different because of travel: I just returned from Burning Man and barely had time to settle in before setting off for another big trip. This week I’m writing about how I feel: tired. Here are three things I’m really tired of.
Thing #1: Travel 🧳
I love travel. I’d go so far as to list it as one of my top passions. But not all travel is created equal, and you can have too much of a good thing.
My favorite sort of travel is long, slow, and meandering. I like showing up somewhere new where I know almost nobody, with close to zero plans. I like to figure it out as I go and to leave plenty of room for serendipity: to have the time and space to go wherever my curiosity leads me (or, more often, where new friends take me). I like to avoid the common tourist spots and focus instead on meeting locals. I have warm memories of doing this in a number of places when I was younger. And the extreme example of this is a gap year, which I was able to do once.
The opposite of meandering is an “in and out” business trip: if you’re lucky, you fly in one day before a conference or meeting starts (and if you’re unlucky you fly in the same morning). You’re super busy for three or four days, often not leaving your hotel or its immediate vicinity. Then you fly home without having actually experienced any local culture. These are the Monday to Friday “road warrior” trips that so many businesspeople are familiar with.
This sort of travel is horrendous. You never have time to get over jet lag, so you barely sleep and you’re in a stupor the entire time. If you’re really lucky, you might escape the hotel or conference center once or twice for an hour or two, to experience a local restaurant or bar, and you have no opportunity to really meet or get to know any locals.
What’s more, business hotels are depressingly generic. They look the same everywhere, and sometimes you literally forget which country you’re in (this is by design). You try to glamorize the experience to yourself and your social media followers by posting a stock selfie in front of a famous monument, but the lie convinces no one. Your diet sucks and you don’t work out. You get a few low-quality hours of face time with your team or counterparties, accomplish basically nothing, and then fly home.
I always try to turn business trips into something that resembles the former more than the latter, but these days it isn’t easy. For one thing, I have a family. I can’t disappear for weeks at a time because it’s hard on them when I’m away. I want to spend weekends at home with my family. For another thing, unlike before, I now have a real job with real deliverables and real people counting on me. I used to delude myself into thinking that I could be productive on the road, but I now understand that the max capacity I can achieve on the road is about 20% of what I can accomplish at home in the same amount of time, so for the sake of productivity I need to be at home most of the time.
I don’t have to travel for work, and I certainly don’t have to travel as much as I do. I recognize that it’s a choice, and I feel grateful that I have the choice. Because, as frustrating as travel can be, it’s still a gift, and the alternative would be worse.
As sad as these business trips are, they’re still necessary. Even low quality, half-awake time with friends, colleagues, and counterparties is better than no face time at all (and it’s a lot better than Zoom). It’s the only way lasting, trusted relationships are built. And there is a middle ground: arrive a day or two early, stay a day or two late, turn the four day sleepy marathon into a seven- or nine-day trip, and things become considerably better. You have a little time to recover before the madness starts, and a couple of days at the tail end to explore.
We’re not quite there yet, but I’m hopeful that these short trips will be made unnecessary by better remote conferencing experiences soon, so that when we do have to travel, it can be especially focused and meaningful. And better remote work and school options will also make it easier to travel with the entire family.
Until then, back to the road warrior grind.
Thing #2: Politics 📢
I find politics both exciting and important. It’s important because at a high level it’s how decisions are made (i.e., governance), and those decisions impact everyone, even people who don’t feel that they’re interested in politics or who feel that politics isn’t worth their time. And it’s exciting because those decisions are high stakes, the way they’re made is fascinating, and the downstream consequences of the decisions are large.
I used to follow politics closely, both at home and abroad. I found the structure of political parties and their coalitions interesting, and I was always keen to study a party’s platform. I liked comparing international political and governance systems, comparing and contrasting the various strengths and weaknesses. I listened to politicians’ stump speeches and was keen to discuss an election with friends.
I volunteered to help out with an election. I joined rallies and demonstrations. I almost went to school to study governance and political theory. I toyed with the idea of running for office myself. And I always voted. I considered myself quite politically engaged and informed.
All of that has changed over the past few years and I find it sad and tragic—not because of me specifically but because of the many millions of other people who must feel as jaded, disenfranchised, and exhausted as I feel. Most of all, though, I find it exhausting.
In a world where basically everyone is lying to you basically all the time, most of all politicians, it’s truly exhausting trying to understand what’s true. It’s exhausting to rehash and debate the same issues forever (immigration, abortion, gun rights, economic policy, defense) again and again over decades and make basically no progress. It’s exhausting to watch an endless parade of terrible politicians who are terrible people with terrible morals and values lie and make promises they can’t and don’t intend to keep, and make the same mistakes over and over again on the world stage. And they really do seem to be getting worse each election cycle.
It’s exhausting to watch forever wars play out, and new ones begin. It’s exhausting to see so many lives and so many trillions of dollars wasted on needless conflict.
Most of all it’s exhausting to see ordinary people around the world continue to suffer needlessly in a thousand different ways because of poor governance, bad politicians, wrong incentives, bad policies and decision making, and corruption. We should know better by now. In many cases and many ways we do know better. But the incentives aren’t there for those in power to fix the issues. In other words, the world is full of collective action problems.
And then we get to US politics. I’m old enough to remember when the two parties weren’t so far apart on most issues, and when politicians from both sides of the aisle respected one another and maintained a certain degree of decorum. I never liked politicians, but I tolerated them. And I had a strong sense that, whomever I voted for, things would turn out alright.
I’m still optimistic—this country has a remarkable way of reinventing itself and pulling back from extremes, and as bad as things are, I see no reason that won’t happen this time, too. But, again, it’s exhausting. I watched about five minutes of the recent Trump-Harris debate and felt so tired, so depressed, and so disappointed, that I had to stop watching. I read some commentary in active chat groups and was amazed to see how divided the groups are, and how sure each side is of their opinion and of the fact that their candidate is amazing and the other one is evil.
Americans obviously disagree about a lot, and opinion is divided as usual between the two parties, but pretty much everyone agrees on one thing: it’s embarrassing that this is the best we can do. We all deserve so much better.
It’s sad and tragic to see an entire generation of young people growing up in the richest (for now), greatest big country in the world, in a free democracy—something that their parents and their parents’ parents paid for in blood, sweat, and treasure—feeling desolate, depressed, and anxious. What’s worse: feeling like capitalism and even democracy itself have failed them.
It’s sad and tragic to see this great country decline so rapidly. I see with my own eyes and hear directly from conversations around the world that US decline is very real and very present. Our infrastructure is literally crumbling. Our education system is a laughingstock. Our medical system is collapsing due to cost and an ever-growing disease burden. Our economic policy is pure insanity. And our military and industrial capacity are in poor shape. All of this would be bad enough in isolation; when the comparison and competition is unfree places like Singapore, Dubai, and China, it adds insult to injury.
As I said, this country has reinvented itself multiple times before and it’s recovered from worse. Our unique diversity is our great strength, and I think we’ll be fine. But it will take time to turn things around, and thinking about all of the hard changes that need to be made is also exhausting. I think and believe I’m right, but I could be wrong, and things very well could get worse before they get better. Only time will tell.
Thing #3: Infrastructure 🏗️
Prior to joining the blockchain industry, I was an application developer. I worked on a number of web and mobile consumer applications. My biggest project was a healthcare technology startup where we worked closely with doctors, nurses, and other clinicians. We quite literally put our application into their hands and saw how it made their work and their lives easier, and helped them provide better care for their patients.
When I joined the blockchain industry seven years ago, I initially planned to continue to build applications. I began pursuing several ideas including a decentralized ridesharing service. But I quickly realized that it was impossible to build the sort of applications I wanted to build. At the time it was impossible to build user-friendly apps of the sort that consumers were used to because the infrastructure was so immature. So I decided to start building infrastructure instead, as a way of learning new skills, but more importantly, to fill in some of the missing pieces so that I could get back to building apps. I always felt like just over the next hill I could get back to building usable consumer-facing applications.
Fast-forward seven years and, while the infrastructure has improved a lot, crypto still lacks usable applications. There are a bunch of reasons for this; I wrote about some of them recently. Among them are that most crypto builders are infrastructure engineers and protocol designers, and lack the skills, experience, and inclination to build user friendly apps. Also, as with everything in crypto, the incentives are all wrong: it’s easy to raise money for infrastructure because it’s more or less immediately monetizable and because that’s what’s made investors money up to now. It’s much more difficult to raise money to build apps, largely because there are no users (and there are no users because building user friendly apps is so expensive, so it’s a catch-22).
But after seven years, I’m tired of infrastructure, and I think this sentiment has become more common throughout the industry. It’s a refrain I heard again and again this week at conferences and events. Building infrastructure is all well and good, but eventually it needs to serve a use case: i.e., an application.
I still love infrastructure. I still find it important, challenging, and deeply intellectually stimulating. And there’s still a lot of important infrastructure to build. But I’m tired of building infrastructure that isn’t getting used. What’s the point of building software—any software, frontend or backend—if no one ever uses it or builds on it? I’m also tired of the proliferation of infrastructure solutions in search of use cases. In my opinion what we need is not another L1, nor another L2, not another token, rollup, DEX, bridge, or even zkVM. The infrastructure we have today is imperfect but it isn’t bad and it’s sufficient to build good applications. What we need today is applications and users, and entrepreneurs and builders who know how to build applications and attract users.
I’m tired of scams. I’m tired of DeFi, NFTs, DAOs, and memecoins. I’m tired of shitcoin casinos. I’m tired of being embarrassed that I can’t name any meaningful applications that everyday people are using today, and that are creating value for everyday people. None of these bode well for my industry.
But, more than all of that, I feel that mainstream software is still hopelessly broken. I’m tired of the fact that basically all of the applications I use on a day to day basis are still centralized and unaccountable, and are run by companies that care a lot more about their profits than they do about my needs: messaging, email, productivity tools, you name it. The infrastructure we’re building is essential and, sooner or later, someone will figure out how to build good applications on top of it and begin fixing some of what’s wrong with modern software.