Do not buy SPACs, digital currencies or non fungible tokens sold to you by millionaires and billionaires with your stimulus check.
This is the exact opposite of what’s intended for young people like yourself receiving stimulus checks from the government. These checks are meant to improve your current situation by giving you a chance to purchase things that you need today or pay your bills or pay down debt. Speculating in digital assets is not part of the intent. Buying an online baseball card is not helping you, even if it goes up in price immediately after your having bought it.
The grotesque spectacle of broke twenty-somethings lining up to buy a pointless digital trinket invented out of thin air by the World’s Richest Man prompted this post.
I’m selling this song about NFTs as an NFT pic.twitter.com/B4EZLlesPx
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 15, 2021
Trillionaires have the right to create any kind of nonsense they want and offer it up for sale. You have the right to come to your senses and say, “You know what, I don’t actually need that shit, I need a job. I need a nice new suit to go on interviews with. I need to fix my car. I need to upgrade my apartment so I can bring a date home and not be embarrassed about my situation.”
So here’s my suggestion, as someone who was broke in my twenties and bought books to read my way out of the horrible situation I had found myself in. Get out of the house. Leave the home. Go outside. Get off that fucking internet. Stop scrolling, stop gaming, stop trading, stop making fucking memes. Stop collecting things that don’t function and will, with the passage of just a year or two, become completely laughable. Nobody’s going to want to buy any of this stuff from you because they’re going to make 70 billion versions of everything you’re buying now. It’s artists today, but eventually it will be corporations. They will sell you limited edition ziploc bags filled with air if you demonstrate a willingness to buy it from them.
Stop funding other people’s SPAC launches. They don’t love you back. This is a reverse wealth transfer. The sponsor – already a billionaire or a hundred-millionaire – ends up with 20 percent of the company that the SPAC acquires and all sorts of related fees paid to them. You, on the other hand, end up with a stock that went up and then went back down in almost all cases, with a few notable exceptions. You are supplying them with the means to take over companies at a cost outlay of effectively zero. You are not a co-investor, their foot is on your fucking head. They are laughing at how easy you’re making this all. I know them. There are 500 SPACs chasing deals and most of them aren’t going to be DraftKings. No one in the food chain has any risk except you, the schmuck who paid an 80% premium on a cash pile because so-and-so on the board used to work at Google.
You’ll be receiving your $1400 relief payment this week. I won’t be, but a generation ago I would have been just like you. So, instead of enriching people who don’t need your money, I have some alternative uses to suggest to you…
Take the $1400 and do one of these things:
Buy a business suit, some nice shirts and a pair of shoes. Laugh all you want, but these will be tools you can use to get into the right rooms and meet the right people. I promise you this is true: When you’re well dressed, people treat you differently. With respect. With honor. They hold doors for you and make eye contact with you. They can tell you hold yourself in high esteem and this subconsciously encourages them to hold you in high esteem as well. You can scoff at this and call it materialistic or bourgeois or anachronistic or whatever other big bad words you learned in college, but what I am telling you is the truth. If you had invented Facebook, you would have invented Facebook. But you didn’t. So the hoodie isn’t going to work. Watch how people deal with you when your shirt is tucked in and your shoes are shined.
Buy a bicycle. Set a routine. Breathe fresh air. See the sun. Feel the breeze. Smell the roses. You can listen to your podcasts while getting some exercise and being a human being. Every hour you spend with your eyes off the screens is an hour better spent. You will know I am right because you will feel it in your soul.
Buy a cookbook and some high quality pots and pans. Maintaining a grown-up kitchen with nice implements and utensils, as well as obtaining the ability to make quality meals for yourself or others will bring you the kind of psychic income that speculating in someone else’s shitty art projects can never replace.
Do some goddamn pushups. There’s no cost for this, just thought I’d add it in there.
Buy concert tickets. It’s not rappers and singers who need the money. It’s the million other people who work at these venues and are involved in producing and putting on these shows. You’ve done enough bullshit online, like watching DJ sets on Instagram and Verzuz battles on Apple TV. It’s enough already. Get in the car and go to shows with your friends. Buy plane tickets and see your favorite acts in another city. In ten years, you’ll be glad you did it, no matter how much some NFT is trading at.
Take an online course or obtain an additional accreditation for your career or the career you want to switch into. There are no shortage of ways you can better yourself or make yourself more competitive in a given field.
Travel for work. No matter how great at trading or flipping collectibles you think you are, it is highly unlikely you’re going to parlay a $1400 stake into $100,000. I’ve seen people take one business trip, meet the right group of people, and then parlay that stroke of luck into millions.
Any of these ideas are better than throwing the cash at Robinhood and spinning the wheel. Anyone who tells you otherwise is not looking out for your best interests. They are trying to get you to click on stuff or lose money to them or distract you for the benefit of their advertisers. I don’t want to sell you crypto art or coins or SPAC shares or baseball cards or get you to trade options against me in a private chat room or any of that shit. I just want you to win.
Improving yourself, even while everyone around you is playing games and seemingly winning prizes, is the right thing to do. The more it doesn’t feel that way, the more you know it’s the truth.
