TLDR: Bitcoin prolongs time preferences. Fiat mine (job) is short time preference. Bitcoin class of 2018+ have experienced Bitcoin, and what it leads to – peer to peer instead of hierarchy, decentralization, becoming ourselves. Now it’s time to take away the mental fog of fiat mine, step out and take one summer to think about our lives via the lens of decades, assert ourselves, tune in and possibly drop out to the parallel orange world. For details, read on!
Announcing Orange summer! In the late 60’s, hippies listened to Timothy Leary, who told them to turn on, tune in, and drop out. They turned on their consciousness, tuned in to themselves, and got off the corporate grinder. This time it will be a bit different, but I’m watching this trend around me, and especially among Bitcoiners. Mainly the class of 2018-2023. First we’ll talk about what happened and then I’ll give you a suggestion on how it might work.
We’re experiencing a Bitcoin bull market. Inflation around the world is reaching record levels – lately I feel like it’s no longer worth it to have less than a hundred dollar bill in my wallet, because with smaller bills, I can buy maybe a bus ticket. At the same time, something feels very odd about going daily to a corporation for eight hours, earning fiat, often by doing a lot of meaningless work (bullshit jobs, paper pushing). People no longer believe that a comfortable retirement awaits them at the end of their shift in a fiat mine. That’s why it’s better to live their whole life every day. Each day, we should learn something (education does not end at school), produce something, and experience something (mini retirement).
A couple of years ago, I created an entrepreneurship challenge (not in English sadly), which was about tweaking the “produce something” part – away from the fiat mine, towards non-hierarchical, peer to peer production. I’m writing books to contribute to the “learn something” part.
The main point of the entrepreneurship challenge was, that we can produce the same amount of money usually in much less time and we can enjoy life more. There’s no point in going to an office, when you really produce something for 1-2 hours per day. Paper pushing, meetings, social media, is not production, it is often wasted time, “pretend work”.
I think that an orange summer is a way to reflect on our lives. We have learnt something, we shift the way we produce and we can experience life to its fullest, way sooner than the “retirement”. Note, that retirement is life-threatning – people often die soon after they retire, regardless what the retirement age is. They start feeling useless. Instead of wasting life in a fiat mine with hope of retirement, why not do the experiencing today?
Orange summer is a space – a space to search within ourselves, what we want to do with our lives, experience life outside of the fiat mine and figure out what’s really important in our lives.
A suggestion for how to do it looks like this:
Turn on
The first step is to turn on our consciousness. In inertia set by our daily routine, we rarely have the space to reflect on whether we are actually doing what we want in life, whether we are living it the way we want to live it, or whether we should make some changes.
This form of thinking requires our attention, which is consumed by the latest FUD on social media, and we fall for it everytime. It is not the fault of the social media, it’s on us. Our attention is something that we fully control, but turning on is scary. So we rather divert it somewhere else.
The first step to getting turned on is awareness, a deep breath and a plan. However, to truly turn on, we will need the space we create in the next steps – the reason I write about the orange summer at the beginning of spring is so that we have time to prepare for it.
Tune in
When someone talks about tuning in to the vibrations of the world, we picture hippies in batik T-shirts cleaning their chakras and talking to astral entities. I mean something much more practical and general – human interactions (interpersonal “vibrations”) and the overall setting of the world create emergent phenomena, which are what we tune into. Think of it like listening to the resonance of a multitude of sounds.
There are a number of significant things going on in society that are emergent (and thus bottom up). Many people are waking up as if from a fever dream, and if we get it right, we might be entering a summer of humanity.. It’s not esoteric – people are realizing what value is, they are noticing that going to a fiat mine (“job”) is not a good deal for them because they are losing the most valuable thing they have for a few paper bills that someone is cheaply producing on a proverbial money printer, go brrrrrrrrr.
Getting out of the fiat mine is not so much about whether we’re getting paper printed by a central bank or Bitcoin, but the nature of those relationships – what’s going on in that fiat mine? Are we generating enough value for society? Where did that money come from, was it printed, was it taken from someone by force, or did it come from people who also contributed something to the world? Bitcoin tilts the odds of source of money to the good side, although it is still a heuristic (you can end up working for a ransomware gang).
At the same time, bitcoin shifts are time preferences, by using it and living with it, our time preferences tend to be longer. People suddenly don’t want to mindlessly spend the money they earned to protect it from inflation, they can put it in Bitcoin and shift towards medium and long term thinking.
This tectonic time shift (I am not using AI to write this) opens up an amazing space for them to explore. Many of us, for the first time in years, have looked five years to a decade into the past and the future and thought about whether what we want to do is sustainable and consistent with staying integrated. Many have yet to take that look, but long time preferences are a gateway to gaining perspective on our lives.
Image: I am talking about this, but with time instead of space – instead of Earth, we see our lives: The overview effect is a cognitive shift reported by some astronauts while viewing the Earth from space. Researchers have characterized the effect as “a state of awe with self-transcendent qualities, precipitated by a particularly striking visual stimulus”. The most prominent common aspects of personally experiencing the Earth from space are appreciation and perception of beauty, unexpected and even overwhelming emotion, and an increased sense of connection to other people and the Earth as a whole. The effect can cause changes in the observer’s self concept and value system, and can be transformative. (Source: Wikipedia)
The elites have failed many and are failing in virtually every significant way. Today’s world is characterized by the absence of a positive vision of the future. And we know that we will not get it from the elites – and if they were willing to deliver it, we would refuse. Instead of looking for new elites with visions, many of us have chosen to look inward and choose our visions that are tailored and literally envisioned by us and for us. Creating our own vision may contribute to the contours of the vision of the future that emerges from our separate visions, it will become a blurry but emergent shape of things to come – for those of us, that choose to walk the orange way. This orange way of thinking is not about following, but about co-creating. We are all Satoshi(*).
(*) Except for Craig Wright
Drop out
If you’re already turned on and tuned in, you can drop out of the fiat mine. For many of you, just walking away would be enough. The mental fog of the everyday will dissipate. Ironing shirts, waiting in traffic jams, open space with halogen lights will be replaced with the morning sun (as decentralized medicine teaches) and fresh air. It will feel almost alien at first, but getting to know ourselves, we soon realize that most of the time we spent in the mine was wasted – our creativity is enough to both enjoy our lives and produce what we need, without the stress of fiat’s value evaporation. There’s no more need to play status games and deal with the hierarchy.
Some of us will tune in during April, give their two weeks (or two months notice) and are out of the hamster wheel by July, with a couple of months ahead, during which we get our lives straightened out, really look into the longer term and think about what’s next. Many of us will want to get involved in the Bitcoin economy, but there’s no need to – after years in the fiat mine, we can enjoy a few weeks of orange sunshine and a breath of fresh air. Do we return to the fiat mine in the fall, or start living a completely different life? This can be decided during the summer, but not rushed. Spoiler alert: You will probably not go back.
Questions…
What do I have to figure out? What should I do?
Image: Alice’s conversation with the Cheshire Cat. Lewis Carroll – Alice in Wonderland.
Every person is different. I have no idea. Maybe you’ll go back to the fiat mine. Maybe you’ll try your small business venture. Maybe you’ll discover something interesting during these weeks – maybe you’ll meet people to take on a new project with. Maybe you’ll find that now is the time to be with the kids. Maybe you’ll overhaul your whole life, maybe you’ll change little things or even nothing. The bottom line is that it will be conscious. The overview effect on your life as the subject.
The goal of the exercise is to figure out where you want to get to. In order to do it, no complicated deliberation is needed – it will come to you, the emptied mind will be filled with thoughts. Only then is it a good idea to figure out which direction to take.
I don’t have enough sats to be able to afford to quit my job
Even during the Summer of Love, not everyone was immediately “dropped-out” from school and work. Someone found space over the weekends, while still doing what they have to do. It doesn’t matter how you find that space, but you have to start looking for it. Maybe you can’t afford – or don’t want – to quit your job, but maybe it’s a good idea to either take a vacation (paid or unpaid). And if not physically from work, at least mentally.
There are many ways to experience the orange summer. Find yours and tell us!
With whom? Where?
The Orange Summer is not a festival, nor is it a group run through an orange meadow. You enter the Orange Summer first and foremost alone. It’s about waking up from the everyday and experiencing the possibilities.
If you share your life with someone – your family – it’s a good idea to invite them in – in whatever way is acceptable to them. You can pack up the whole family, rent an RV and travel around the world. If they’re not ready for that, it can be completely different, or you can reserve that space strictly for yourself. You know what’s good for you, I don’t.
Is this an escape?
Orange summer is not an escape, quite the opposite. It’s about discovering and becoming yourself, the phase of life you are in, tasting your vision and goals, materializing your dreams and moving something in your lives forward. It’s waking up from the mental fog of the fiat mine, towards ourselves – getting clarity. We are not so much running from somewhere as we are running towards something. The first step is to figure out where we are going to.
How can I get involved?
An orange summer is something that happens or doesn’t happen depending on you. Share in any form, modify as you see fit.
What gave you the idea?
I observe around me that this is happening. A huge amount of people have come into Bitcoin in the last five years. They’ve dabbled, they’ve tasted the highs and the lows, and those who have stayed have often found that far more than their Bitcoin wealth changes their thinking.
Concepts like “fiat mine” are emerging, people are realizing time preferences, the importance of the phrase “enter outside” – be it physically, mentally or otherwise. Bitcoin is in their hands, allowing them to participate in something that is “self-generated”, from below, and does not require an authority to bring money down from the sky and “take care of it” for us.
People quit their jobs or make other choices – they don’t want to sell their productivity for fiat, in hierarchical structures where a lot of junk is piled on top of productivity. This junk doesn’t increase the value of what is produced, but instead drags it down. They agonize over the fact that they don’t want to bang their heads against the wall in their offices, stuck in some meaningless corporate processes, using buzzword bingo formulas and going to yet another useless “meeting”.
Orange Summer as a concept is not my invention – I’m observing a trend that’s emerging. I like it, and by pointing it out, I want to help amplify it a bit.
Isn’t it central planning?
Each of us makes our decisions for ourselves. Some are consistent, some are contradictory to the idea of Orange Summer. My goal is to try to amplify the resonance of the emergent phenomenon. How and whether you embrace and implement the idea is entirely up to you. I don’t know how to do it – a particular course of action, even Leary’s “turn on, tune in, drop out” is just a suggestion that can amplify the resonance.
The Orange Summer is an emergent phenomenon of Bitcoin in its current form and strength (and I mean the idea of Bitcoin broadly – Sovereign individual, Nostr, Lightning, peer to peer vs. hierarchical, bottom-up).
The Orange Summer could not have occurred five years ago. And whether it occurs this year, five years from now, or at all is up to you.
Whether it’s just a dream or something that will actually arise isn’t that important. Bitcoin has given us perspective over time, long-term thinking. If you choose to fulfill it, this summer or any other time, it can benefit you. And it will do so even if no one else does it but you.
Is it for everyone?
No. Few things are for everyone. Personally, I think it’s for people who have discovered Bitcoin sometime since 2018 and have had ample time to familiarize themselves with not just the price candles, but the ideas and mindset that Bitcoin leads to.