# Hello world, my name is Tyler Lengyel. By [In My Opinion](https://paragraph.com/@tylerling) · 2023-04-21 --- Over the past year and a half, I've delved into a world of technology, innovation, and encountered people who are smart, creative, challenging, and everything in between. In this ever-changing landscape, scams seem to be commonplace, getting "rekt" seems like a rite of passage and beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder. You see, the thing is, this world has been around for decades, I’ve only just been introduced to it recently. My experience has felt like a scene from the movie Never Been Kissed with Drew Barrymore. I feel like I’ve had the word "Loser" written across my forehead, clueless about what’s been happening, while everyone else appears to be in on the secret. But what is there to understand, you might ask, and I’d say, it all lays in the history. The last thing anyone should do is enter a new space, knowing nothing, and start challenging the people that have been here for a decade or more in some cases. If you do, your journey towards the truth may be a bit long, kind of like mine. For my journey, a year and a half has seemed to fly by, but something is telling me it should have only lasted 90 days. In December 2021, I bought my first NFT. During the two days of owning and losing the NFT, I learned the importance of keeping your private keys just that, private. My wallet was drained, and the NFT was transferred out. But when I saw a TikTok video of Floyd Mayweather promoting a project not even a month later, I joined a Discord server for the second time, trying to gain access to the "Whitelist" so I could mint one or two of the NFTs being promoted. At the time, I knew nothing about crypto, Ethereum, or smart contracts, and I was in way over my head. Everyone in the Discord server kept saying "DYOR" (Do Your Own Research), so I did, or at least I thought I did. My thought process was: if a person like DJ Khaled, who often talks about God being great, is promoting this project, there's no way it could be a scam. In hindsight, seeing Floyd Mayweather, French Montana, Jake Paul, and other celebrities promoting it should've negated that vote of confidence, but it didn't. I became the project's number one fan, even roping in my brother and best friend. Ultimately, it was a scam, and the journey from beginning to end on that project is another story of its own, but it's where the larger journey began—the journey of trying to find myself. Back in 2007 when I was in 9th grade there was a large party that my brother threw at our house, it was the first night I ever got drunk. It was on a bottle of Blue Alize, I drank the whole thing, then I ended up making out with a girl 3 years older than me named Brittany. After that I was yelling her name the rest of the night, ultimately ending up sleeping outside the room she was in with another guy, right next to my bedroom. It’s a funny story, but the reason I bring it up isn’t for the humor, it’s because that’s when I was introduced to something that would eventually try to end my life. In May of 2021, I woke up one morning and couldn’t stop vomiting, after 3 days of puking over 20 times a day, holding nothing down, I went to the hospital where I was hyperglycemic and was ultimately diagnosed with Acute Pancreatitis. The pain was the worst thing I’d ever been through at the time, but after 11 days I was able to beg and plead with them to discharge me. Three months later, I was back in the hospital with two infected fluid collections in my stomach and my Acute Pancreatitis turned into Necrotizing Pancreatitis. This stay ended up being 30 days, where after I was able to walk out on my own two feet. During the 4 month span I lost 65lbs, and now I’m a diabetic that must take medication with every meal. My discharge papers stated that drinking again could result in death—a scare tactic, perhaps, but an effective one. Since my first DUI at 17, when I was finishing my senior year in High School and crashed into three trees after falling asleep at the wheel, I’ve been able to escape my feelings, escape reality, and fall into the simulation. Now, with alcohol out of the picture, I’ve been forced to deal with every single emotion without any way of escaping it, and it’s been one of the heaviest mental battles I’ve had to go through in my life.   On January 14th, 2022, I was sober, feeling the healthiest I’d been since high school, and thought I was now part of a project that would get to a status like Bored Ape Yacht Club. On that day, I was working for a company in an industry that I never had any passion or desire for, Building Products. When I was 21 I moved from Colorado to Kansas City to start a job in the warehouse for a company both my dad and brother worked for at the time, my dad for close to 20 years and my brother for about a year or two. This was the last time I was sober before the Pancreatitis came along, and it lasted for about 6 months, just like the time did after rehab when I was 19. The story of the last few experiences I had in Colorado before moving to Kansas City is a story for another day as well, but there was a good reason I was moving away from Colorado at the time. From Kansas City for a year to Texas where I live currently, I worked my way up from warehouse Manager to Sales Manager for the 3 distribution centers we had in Texas, making $80,000 a year at 27 with no college degree, I was proud of myself. However, due to my drinking and the way I acted towards my boss, I really gave him no choice but to fire me. So, by the time January of 2022 came around I was working for a new company. With the thought of the security that this NFT project could provide me financially, along with this new company not allowing me to do my job in the best way I saw fit, I resigned. I said screw it, I’m committing to web3 fulltime, when at the time I didn’t even know what the hell that meant. The happiness I felt in January was due to ignorance, nothing more and nothing less. During the first couple months in the space, I found myself trying to save this project that I was the number one fanboy for. All my time was spent on Discord, trying to figure out who was behind it, until I thought I did. The thing is, who was behind the project, who scammed me and everyone else, it didn’t matter. At the end of the day, I was the one that made the decision to invest, the record was set straight multiple times by multiple people. The problem was, I can always convince myself in my mind that I’m right, even when I’m very wrong. It’s been a common theme in my life. A perfect example is anytime my dad and I would argue about a certain topic, and a fact would come up where he would be on one side and I would be on the other. Every time I’d be able to convince myself there was no way I was wrong, but 99.99% of the time, I was. So, what does one do when they’re wrong, humiliated, embarrassed, and still have no idea what they’re talking about? They double down, or at least I do apparently. So, on April 25th, 2022, I bought my first Avastar NFT. This was a big deal for me because it got me away from focusing on the project I got scammed on in January, and really started to make me pay attention to the history of everything that has happened up until this point. When I tell you I’ve went down rabbit holes, you have no fucking idea. Like, did you know there’s a town named Boardman, in Oregon, that has airstrip, port, and railroad track running through it with multiple Amazon data centers there? I mean, what better place than there for a scammer to live. Then you think, Boardman, Bored Ape, coincidence? PROBABLY, but that’s the kind of shit that I’ve looked into. On top of the history of money in general, and how corrupt governments are not just in the US, but in the world. The biggest story and most frustrating in my opinion that I’ve researched is that of Julian Assange. It’s disgusting. It’s sad. And it’s frightening. It’s also frightening to know that I could go through 29 years of my life without paying attention to anything else. It’s just never been something on my mind, it’s never been part of my simulation. My life was work, drink, repeat. Then on the occasional weekend once or twice a year I might take a vacation trip somewhere, where I’d drink, sleep, and repeat. That’s a cycle that I know a large majority of Americans fall into, whether we want to admit it or not, and that’s ok.  But what’s not ok is being blind to everything that’s going on around us, and I was for so damn long.   I’m not sure what this article is supposed to be, I’ve spent the past week trying to think of what to say. Cause in my reality, I’ve been driving for Uber since last year, I drove 47k miles in 2022, and have been doing the same thing this year. That was until my car broke down. Then on top of that I’ve already been behind on rent every month for the past year, facing eviction, and now I’ve officially been “rekt”. My only assets are the ones I hold in Crypto, which aren’t worth much, but I didn’t get “rekt” by the space, I “rekt” myself because I followed something blindly without giving it a second thought. Mistakes were made, and now I’m forced to live with them. I’m not sad, I’m not mad, I’m kind of just wondering what to do next, whereas two years ago I would be shit faced and probably trying to figure out a way to kill myself. Instead, for the past week I’ve learned how to build a Smart Contract that acts as an NFT Auction for my NFT’s, it can be reusable, and there’s a website interface as well for people to make bids. It’s probably not a lot to some people, and yes, I used ChatGPT to help me a good amount of the way, but it took me to the point of having nothing to finally just do it, to finally build something. Everyone said build during the bear, and I did, just not in the way others did. I built up my knowledge of the space, so much so that I feel like I know more than most of the world when it comes to Web3, Crypto, NFTs, and everything in between (I know less than 10% of what Erik Vorhees knows, though). Then when I got knowledge, I wanted to keep learning, and now that’s all I want to do, is to keep learning about all this cool new stuff that I never knew existed. To learn how to code and build things that have never been built. To create, collaborate, and express myself freely without giving a flying fk what anyone else thinks. Freedom. But I want to fight for others’ freedom as well. It took me 30 years to find myself. To finally feel like I’m going down a path that will lead to a life I’ll be happy living for the rest of it. A little too late? Never. What comes next, I’m not sure, but homeless or not, the decision to pursue my curiosity and interest into a world I knew nothing about was the best decision I’ve ever made in my life. To whatever the next 69 years bring, I’ll be here for it, even if its sober on a street corner. Cheers y’all, Ling 💙 \* My DMs are open and if you have a job in the Web3/Crypto/Tech space that you think would be a good fit for me, I’d love to hear from you. As you can see, my life is a bit upside down right now, but that just means there’s a lot of opportunity to flip it right side up, and I’m ready to get after it. --- *Originally published on [In My Opinion](https://paragraph.com/@tylerling/hello-world-my-name-is-tyler-lengyel)*