@trigs.eth

We all know that it's a struggle to maintain good work<>life balance, here or anywhere similarly demanding. I've recently been exploring the new (to me) concept that it takes 3 weeks to fully reset your brain- Week 1: you're still disconnecting from work, you can't ever cold turkey it even if you're physically disconnected Week 2: you're finally free mentally and can relax and let your body and mind actually recover and reset back to baseline Week 3: once restored you need time to assimilate your new perspective back into your reality 😲🤯 It totally makes sense. How many of you are worthless the week leading up to your vacation, or if you're a real machine maybe you power through but it's extra challenging? How about the week after you get back, how hard is it to get back "into the swing"? This is your mind trying to care for itself. I believe we need a culture that embraces this reality instead of the grindset mindset. And maybe it's entirely selfish, because my creative energy is only replenished when I'm fully disconnected from work and global drama and everything that isn't right in front of me. This is why I garden, restore old vehicles & machines, and do physical projects in my neighborhood on a regular basis. These brief moments of disconnecting from it all are what give me clarity and vision for what truly matters most for me to spend my productive time working on. But the dark underbelly of working in web3 and living outside of the structure of the trad world is that you can't just put in a request for time off. Anyone who's lived the gig life knows this: you have to just make your own vacation between paychecks. When you're self-funding your runway, whether that's living off savings or generating income via investment/speculation in the crypto trenches, you don't have the luxury of taking time off. When everything hinges on never losing momentum, there's no room for vacation. You have to make it, and then you can take time off. Just one more year. Ok, next year for sure. Ok the plan is solid this time, it's gonna work. But no matter what you do, you can never slow down because you lose everything the second there's one lull in the upward climb of your presence in the stream of attention-based-funding. Years go by. No vacation. This is startup life. Those that live it are just nodding, yup that's what it takes. Not everyone can hack it. But what's even worse is when you do actually get on that next plateau, it's hard to see it. Because it doesn't feel like "making it". It's too tenuous. You still can't afford to lose momentum! A week in crypto time is several cycles of the hype train. 3 weeks is generations. You will be a dinosaur when you come back. This is one of the key missing pieces for successfully decentralized communities: People have to be able to come and go without disrupting the growth and development of the community. I do think it's necessary to have hard commitments on certain responsibilities that need to be managed regularly, and that's where the real big missing piece is for most ppl trying to make a living in web3. Often it feels like you have to risk losing everything just to get time off because there's nobody to hand off your commitments to. Mention vacation in a DAO and everyone scatters with well-wishes and congratulations about mental health, while desperately trying to avoid having to take on another commitment while you're away for fear of permanently damaging their own tenuous grasp on their mental health. This is why @mode-nearchos and I do everything as a team, as Nearchos. We constantly have each other's back and can cover nearly everything for the other person as needed. When working in a world that doesn't have worker protection laws like most of us are used to (guaranteed insurance, benefits, time off, etc) we have to learn how to protect ourselves. We are like a micro-DAO, decentralizing the individual obligations of each commitment we make as a team and removing ourselves as single points of failure. And this is the theory behind how we build communities: we strive to design systems that can eventually replace us by providing a structure for others to autonomously take on responsibilities and share them with other contributors. Bad business model, if your goal is to be a service provider forever. Nearchos isn't here to guarantee our own employment, however. We're here to build DAOs and decentralized protocols by dogfooding the process with them. That model inherently requires we work ourselves out of a job every single time in order to be successful! Good thing this is just the first step, not the endgame! 😉 With that being said, many of you may have watched mOde livecast his recent vacation. He validates very strongly that the 3 week vacation is truly necessary to reset one's brain and body! So, at his insistence, I will be taking my much overdue time away. I recognize that it'll take next week to disconnect so I'll still be finishing up some calls and finalizing my handoffs through the week. Please get in touch if you have something urgent that needs my attention by next week! And when I get back.... Well, just wait and see what a refreshed me is ready to attack! 💜

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