How Bitcoin Can Enrich Our Lives – Bitcoin Magazine
This is an opinion editorial by Logan Bolinger, an attorney and the author of a free weekly newsletter on the intersection of Bitcoin, macroeconomics, geopolitics, and the law.
“I’m more interested in asking the question, is the world we want to live in one where we need to hyper-finance every aspect of an individual’s life because macro-level economic conditions are such that you have to finance your whole being in order to keep up or move on? Is that really a victory for democracy and for the kind of psycho-spiritual well-being for all of us and the lives we want to live? Unlike something like Bitcoin, it’s a defunding force that basically says that because we believe a world might be better where you can actually save money and you don’t just have to spend it or invest or speculate on some things. unlock ways for you to feel more fulfilled or satisfied as a person and would you then be able to pursue other things? I think ultimately the end of Bitcoin is that we all think less about money and more about other things we’re interested in.”
I made these statements on a recent episode of the “What Bitcoin Did” podcast in a discussion about Bitcoin and the ways I believe it can catalyze positive change in our inner lives, as opposed to the modern Web 3 state.
We often discuss and theorize the ways Bitcoin can reshape or reconfigure our external realities, be they political, monetary, legislative, etc. But I don’t think enough attention is paid to how Bitcoin can initiate a similarly monumental reshaping of our internal ones life, a process which, taken together, can lead to a trickle up of priorities and values.
I want to talk about two different conceptions of freedom to illustrate why I think we fixate so much on one of them. When people describe themselves as “liberty maximalists”, they are primarily referring to the idea of negative freedom, a freedom from intrusive external constraints. This kind of freedom is obviously of fundamental, overriding importance. Without freedom from certain external constraints, meaningful pursuit of self-realization, what we will refer to as positive freedom, is difficult, if not impossible to pursue.
We tend to get so focused on the negative freedom aspects of Bitcoin that we don’t fully appreciate the positive freedom that Bitcoin facilitates. That is, we become so fixated on the ways in which Bitcoin excludes external intrusions or limitations (freedom from) that we don’t explore the ways Bitcoin can create an environment that allows us to more rigorously pursue the fullest expression of ourselves (freedom to).
[N.B. for my humanities/philosophy friends: Yes, I am drawing on the work of Isaiah Berlin with these positive/negative freedom terms]
I would argue that freedom maximalism is not sustainable fulfillment in the long term, because it is not really an end state. It is a necessary liminal attitude, a means of achieving a particular environment in which positive freedom can be productively exercised. But negative freedom without positive freedom is like having an infinite number of TV channels but no idea what you want to watch. It’s like having the freedom to pursue anything you want without any way to decide what you actually want to pursue or what’s worth pursuing.
Americans are particularly attuned to ideas of negative liberty, but not particularly adept when it comes to positive liberty. We can see this everywhere, including in the Bitcoin space. If one makes a living, builds a following, or creates an entire identity around being a “liberty maximalist,” one’s livelihood and sense of self depend on the continued existence of external constraints for one to deny. One can unconsciously (and largely unconsciously) become the bird that has grown to love its cage, as the writer Lewis Hyde once wrote about irony.
So while freedom maximalism (negative freedom) is vital, we should also pursue and prioritize what my wife has aptly created intentionality maximalism (positive freedom), which is a perspective and a way of living in our inner lives. Bitcoin doesn’t get enough credit for its ability and potential to promote this kind of inward-looking change.
What does intentional maximalism look like in our everyday experience of life? A prominent example is our relationship with the rampant consumerism endemic in a fiat money system.
Allow me to share some statistics that illustrate how skewed this relationship has become:
According to the Los Angeles Times, there are 300,000 items in the average American home.
Per NPR, the average size of the American home has nearly tripled in size over the past 50 years.
Yet one in ten Americans rents off-site storage, the fastest-growing segment of the commercial real estate industry over the past four decades.
British research found that the average 10-year-old owns 238 toys, but plays with just 12 daily.
The average American family spends $1,700 on clothing annually, while throwing away an average of 65 pounds of clothing per year.
You get the idea. There is virtually no end to the data showing the absurd amount of crap we own and the growing space (physical and mental) that this crap occupies.
Americans are consuming more than ever.
Source: PEACE
Despite the fact that their purchasing power is not growing meaningfully.
Source: US Bureau of Labor Statistics
What explains this? One factor is that we measure our financial health by how much we spend, a unique and Keynesian way of measuring economic vitality. Consumer spending is about 70% of GDP. If we spend less, the metric we use to measure financial health goes down.
There’s also the fact that we’re seeing more ads than ever.
But most importantly, there is a widespread holiday preference that, I believe, is part of the very fabric of our culture.
This is where I think Bitcoin comes into play. So much of this rat-race orgy of consumption is holiday preference behavior incentivized by the fiat money system, which ensures that your money loses value over time. Since your purchasing power is sand in an hourglass, and since you’re working harder than ever just to keep up, consumer spending serves both a practical and comforting purpose. In other words, we are motivated to spend because not spending or investing means our money just sits and loses value. And if we work so hard, many of us at jobs we don’t particularly like, just to keep up, shouldn’t we also be buying all the new cool stuff to make us feel like it’s worth it?
If we remove ourselves from some of the rat race, it frees up space for us to think less about money, which means we can be more aware of everything else. Hence the idea of intentionality maximalism. We sort of take back our positive freedom, our freedom to pursue the highest expression of ourselves. Bitcoin, in my opinion, is ultimately about looking for a sustainable alternative to the rat race model.
It really is a contrast of values. Consumerism is a value of the fiat system. It is both literally a value, since we largely measure financial health by measuring consumption, and also an ingrained way of behaving. By discouraging mindless, reflexive consumption and motivating a lower time preference, Bitcoin, if it continues to grow in adoption, offers the promise of a cultural foregrounding of deeper things, such as fulfilling pursuits, relationships, creativity, contribution to community, presence, etc .
In terms of this inner transformation, this intentional maximalism, and the ways Bitcoin is moving us in that direction, I think Bitcoin shares some basic principles with minimalism, a movement that has deep, ancient roots but has gained more popular momentum in the last decade or so. Adherents of minimalism, aware of the limitations unchecked consumerism can place on our lived experience, pursue lives with fewer unused, unnecessary possessions to regain freedom and mastery over one’s life and the space to pursue what is important. That is, the search for a more intentional life.
Joshua Fields Millburn, co-founder of theminimalists.com, describes minimalism as “what gets us past the stuff so we can make room for the important things in life – which aren’t the things at all.”
The promise of Bitcoin, to borrow Millburn’s articulation, is to be the money that, through its solidity, allows us to get past thinking about money all the time, so that we can make room for the important things in life – which tend to get lost , neglected , and/or sacrificed in consumption and the systemically forced pursuit of more and more money.
We spend so much time thinking about money (how to get it, how to get more of it, how to make it grow, how to keep up with inflation, how to invest it, how to spend it, what to spend it on, how get rich quick, how to pay the bills, etc.). And to some extent this will always be true. I am not advocating the Platonic form of communism here.
But when money doesn’t hold its value, when it continually depreciates, when the national debt is so massive it needs to be inflated, and when the economic health of a country is measured by how much it consumes, it creates an environment where money is practically all we think about on.
This is why I have been so critical/skeptical of some of the proposals in other corners of the crypto world, many of which seem to seek to fund every corner of our lives. I think this perpetuates, and perhaps reinforces, our high-time environment.
In contrast, the implications and downstream effects of collectively lowering our time preference, which I believe necessarily implies less consumerism, simply cannot be underestimated. Imagine that an entire population could finally save money and spend more time and energy on the things that matter most to them.
Now, again, I don’t envision a utopian end-state here where we’re all singing songs around the campfire (although I like songs and fires). I’m talking about giving back some headspace and some presence back to people who, out of necessity, have become accustomed to spending every waking moment thinking about money and spending. I’m talking about a transformation of our inner lives, one that frees up space for more intentional living. And I think an underrated aspect of Bitcoin is its potential to catalyze such a transformation.
So be a freedom maximalist, because it’s important. But don’t stop there, because that alone won’t keep you full in the long run. Be an intentionality maximalist too.
Many people live lives like this – forced, limited and unintended in a fiat system:
Happiness
I think Bitcoin is about escaping this.
This is a guest post by Logan Bolinger. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of BTC Inc. or Bitcoin Magazine.
