Are we all gonna make it?

No.

Matter of fact, none of us are gonna make it.

As John Maynard Keynes said, “in the long run we are all dead.”

But that’s not quite right. “Making it” doesn’t mean living forever - it means doing well enough while you’re alive, getting what you want out of life, not dying lonely and penniless.

So…in that sense, are we all gonna make it then?

Again, no.

Horrible things will happen to us - some of it within our control and some of it not. Cancer, the loss of loved ones, addiction, depression, losing a job we’ll never find again.

Some of us are truly NGMI. Not because we did or didn’t invest in crypto. Not because we bought a jpeg for a fortune or right-click saved it. Because shit happens. And a lot of it is unrelated to the way we invest our time and our money.

When I first learned what WAGMI meant (only last year), I loved it. The acronym, nicely fitting into a vocabulary of GMs and GNs, represented the beautiful optimism of the folks playing around in the crypto space. Soon enough, though, I realized that WAGMI often doesn’t really mean WAGMI…it means you’re GMI if you’re in my tribe.

And “tribe” usually means people who prefer BTC or ETH or SOL or BAYC or even USDC to USD. It means those who’ve been crypto-pilled, and not those that opted out of the rabbit hole.

That’s a Web0 perspective, though. We’ve been fighting over immaterial differences since we were apes (real apes - not those of the bored, sleepy, stoned, etc. variety). In the US (and elsewhere), this tribalism has become more common in recent years as we feel almost obligated to mock and blame people who vote for the other party.

In some ways, Web3 is bridging the political divides as libertarians, liberals, and conservatives can all find something in crypto that fits their narrative. Yet the crypto community seems to be creating new divisions between the converts and the skeptics.

It’s not entirely unprompted. Early crypto adopters have likely endured an unhealthy dose of pity, concern, doubt, and insults from family, friends, acquaintances, and anons over the years. Now that some of those early adopters are rich, people who feel they “missed out” tend to be resentful towards those who’ve “made it.”

Let’s not lie to ourselves, though. Crypto “enthusiasts” can be just as antagonistic of the “boomers” as they are of us. Valid crypto criticisms are often met with a stream of NGMIs on social media. But, like it or not, many of those boomers are actually going to make it. They have the followers to get critics’ attention and that probably has a highly positive correlation with earnings and wealth.

Let’s hope those boomers are going to make it. I don’t think anyone benefits in a world where fiat-rich crypto-skeptics “have fun staying poor.” If everyone who’s early to the crypto space “makes it” and no one else does, then we’re all worse off.

Warren Buffett famously avoided investing in internet stocks through the late ‘90s, and looked like a genius when the .com bubble burst in early 2000. Since then, Buffett has missed out on plenty of tech opportunities because he chose to stay within his circle of competence. Yet Berkshire Hathaway also made one of the best investments of all time (in terms of $ profit) in Apple during the mid-2010’s. At the same time, Buffett’s been a vocal critic of crypto.

So, is Buffett going to make it? Well, again, we only have so long to live. But financially, he’s secure. And so are most of his investors even if they miss out on tremendous crypto gains.

That’s the situation that we want right? It doesn’t and it shouldn’t have to be an us vs. them scenario. We’re going to make it and they’re going to make it. WAGMI.