So, here I am. I dusted off a MetaMask wallet from 6 months ago after trying to connect my Coinbase Wallet, thinking it would solve the problems I was facing. It didn’t. In the end, I opened up DevTools and cleared site data, which fixed both MetaMask and Coinbase Wallet.

I haven’t had this much fun setting things up since the first time I installed a set of World of Warcraft addons to track my DPS.

This is Day One of what will be many days. I decided Saturday nigt—November 6 in the year 2021—I would go all in on Web3. Funny how a single conversation can light up a couple years’ worth of accumulated kindling. I’ll thank Adi for this years down the road, and Audyn as well for introducing us. The morning after when we regrouped, he didn’t even remember the conversation we had. Not unexpected. Six tequila sodas pounded at 12:23am at a mediocre house venue will do that.

The reasons I’m taking this plunge are many. The most fundamental one, though, is this deep sense of mission I have always felt, even before I went into high school and then college, long before I was exposed to a long tail of essays and blog posts and exhortations telling my generation of kids we needed to “impact” the world. I don’t know where it started.

It is this sense of mission that has paradoxically given me the most angst, because I have felt dissatisfied with nearly everything I’ve worked on, from music to writing to a four-years-and-running career in tech. I have been given gifts—my brain, my friendships and the ones I will make down the road, my creativity, my curiosity, my drive, my heart—yet knowing how to use them to their fullest is the hardest problem I’ve ever dealt with. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve felt that euphoria of total engagement, in which every cylinder I have is firing and a tingling warmth spreads like liquid gold from the center of my body down all my limbs to my fingers and my temples.

Now, I feel I am on the cusp of that feeling again. This time, though, it is going to last. I’m afraid, though, because I would be crushed to lose it this time around. I have struggled for the past few years, perhaps most of my adult life, attempting to gather my whole self and aim it without reservation at some far-fetched target. Boredom and apathy would always cut down those attempts before I could even lift the bow. But today—today I am grown, I have overcome the foundational struggles of my life which predate adulthood, and I am ready for Day One. So it is today—so it will be tomorrow.