I have had a series of accounts on HN since it was "Startup News"(I make a new one every so often just for the sake of discarding old attachments). I did game d

I have had a series of accounts on HN since it was "Startup News"(I make a new one every so often just for the sake of discarding old attachments). I did game development for several years out of college. It went from steady job to odd jobs to no job, which I can see now as a result of the market cycle in games creating momentary, unstable opportunities - it's notorious as a short career path. I considered doing something else in tech and startups, but I managed to torpedo every interview, mostly because I was not submitting to the rules of the technical interview game, and had been feeling increasingly disillusioned. I really didn't know what I was going to do in 2016-2017, but then came the 2017 crypto bull run, which felt like a sudden salvation. Now I pay my bills through holdings that were initially built 9 years ago off a single $5000 investment. It is not an eye-popping multi-millions portfolio, but my lifestyle is cheap and I can generally afford anything I want. My college study was in economics, and while finance isn't my most favorite topic in the world, my hand has been forced to use what I know to grasp in that direction and predict what the next steps are in the space so that I can make successful speculations. Finance is conceptually important to societal coordination, and the tech simply adds more ways of achieving it. But in the near term it has to endure wave after wave of rent seeking activity, which is also what makes it good for speculation. More recently, to pass the time(because I play a long game here, and do not try to trade more than a few times a year) I started paying attention to the NFT markets and have been using that as an excuse to practice illustration skills, which has been fun and builds on what I already knew from games. A few works have sold. As a side gig it's fine, it lets me work on ideas I want to express, and if I continue to invest in those skills I'll have another set of options for income. My wants are mostly centered around relationships, community and society - things that can't be answered just with work or money.