The real world is becoming irrelevant

Buying my kids two cryptokitties from which we hope to breed actual money via a complicated medium of ether (AKA digital silver), attributes (brisk vs sluggish) and gas (payment for the processing power), is not the maddest thing I’ve ever done. But it is symptomatic of a world gone fucking googaa. With wages for real world endeavour growing evermore depressed, people are starting to jump on a virtual bandwagon I leapt onto off the back of the last financial crisis – digital currencies, which, back then, seemed like a better investment vehicle than the government’s lottery, NS&I, which had netted me little more than the odd £50 here and there, and with interest rates tanking, had all but dried up altogether. It’s true, I *could* have won a million quid by now. But it’s highly unlikely. Whether my £1000 Bitcoin investment offers the same potential, remains to be seen. The naysayers are out in force. But there are plenty who think the opposite. One thing’s for sure, it’s turning out to be an exciting ride.

It was an investment that’s, especially in the last week, already made me rather richer, at least on paper – or rather, the fluctuating vacillations of digits and pixels that make up my online cryptocurrency portfolio. It’s also, among the faithful, put my name in the history books. As a victim of the Mt Gox bitcoin heist back in the deep and misty annals of 2013, I am looked on by new coverts as something of legend, despite the odds of getting back much more than I lost being against me, for all bitcoin’s extraordinary rise in the years since.

We may never see that original investment return what it ought (if it did, I’d be very rich indeed, at least by my own standards). But at least we had the nouse to shrug off the #tulipwankers, and our losses and reinvest while the price was low. We’ve recouped our investment 30 times over and can only hope that our original bitcoins, bought with said languishing premium bond at low odds and depreciating value, are in something akin to cold storage.

In any case, until we actually extract any value out of them in pounds and pence (despite the fact that investing in alternative currencies effectively shorts fiat) it’s largely worthless anyway. It goes up and down as fast as Harvey Weinstein’s trousers, so we’re hedging our bets on investments with more solid underpinning- yet with the amount of investment being poured into digital infrastructure, whilst real world capital grows ever more unsustainably priced, what could be more of the zeitgeist than speculating on, as I’ve previously termed it, little more than the emperor’s new clothes.

It concerns me, somewhat, that, back in the real world, cryptocurrency mining uses more energy than fracking, and as out poor little planet goes to pot, us humans are trying to make a fast buck on what precious little’s left of fresh air. But then, like all rat races, we all know where this one’s gonna end. But we’re all too afraid to step off the hamster wheel.

After a day spent watching my paltry investment, made when I was genuinely poor, make and lose thousands every few minutes, I was so emotionally fraught that I was barely able to cope when big school rang and told me Jonah’d had a meltdown of his own. A minor incident had been escalated beyond all proportion, and he’d flipped his lid- and a table- and walked out of a detention for tapping his foot.

This pressure cooker environment we’ve created for ourselves is not healthy for anyone, and we’re all on a knife edge when it comes to our emotions- when something so intangible can cause so much stress both to ourselves and to world we live in, it’s surely time to take a good hard look at ourselves, and go and don a more sensible outfit than the elegant hairshirt of digitisation- one that simultaneously conceals our social awkwardness while keeping our fingers itching for the next dopamine hit that real life so often fails to provide, now we’re so often siloed behind our screens.

Having no relationship with the teacher who’s called me up thrice in three weeks to tell me about a situation that’s, in my opinion, escalated too quickly, means we’re dehumanised and detached. Her upset and my frustration that I was called at work, meant that our conversation was unproductive, with her using loaded words like “aggressive” and “unacceptable” while I, knowing full well how antagonistic Jonah can appear, felt cross that he’d essentially been detained for stimming.

When I finally got hold of the boy by text (for that is often the most non threatening medium by which to approach him when he’s in a post- meltdown fug) he was in the playground on his own, having head-banged a wall out of frustration. It felt unfair that he then had to pick up his sister because Tom and I were due to see our couple’s therapist that evening. But then Jonah’s not the only one who struggles to keep a lid in his feelings, and if we can’t model appropriate relationships and behaviour (and given the rollercoaster we’ve been on, often we can’t) then what hope does he have?

Unlike talking my son down by text, a strongly worded email is no substitute for actually talking to people face to face, though it certainly smoothed things over, with Jonah’s teacher meeting him first thing next day, and suggesting he bring a stress ball to school. But perhaps what we all need is not a ball, but less stress. A world with a more human way of interacting, where value is attributed to labour and productivity, not GDP based on wild speculation, as is the wont of modern madness.

In other news, our kitties have bred, but the cost of gas (necessary to help them breed) is (typically) exorbitant, so with ether following bitcoin into a bubble it seems unwise to squander it on cartoon cats- and yet, now Tom has picked up an ultra rare on the cheap, they too could start creating value, with rare cats already changing hands for silly money. But yet again, it’s something else to worry about that, perhaps, after all, shouldn’t matter that much in reality. But where cold hard cash is at stake, it’s crazy what you’ll start to care about, however ridiculous it may be in reality, when all around us the world and his cat are going to hell in a handcart.