FOMO with Crypto
I first heard about Bitcoin when it was worth a dollar. I didn't understand what it was. I genuinely thought it was some kind of video game money, the sort of thing you'd earn in a forum for posting enough times. I didn't look closer. I didn't ask questions. I just moved on with my day, the way you do with most things that sound made up.
I think about that a lot more than I'd like to admit. Watching 2017 happen, watching a dollar turn into something that changed people's lives, while knowing I'd had the chance to understand it years earlier and just hadn't bothered, isn't a feeling I've fully shaken. It wasn't really about the money, or not only about the money. It was the sense that I'd been standing right next to something enormous and hadn't even recognized it.
Here's the part I didn't expect: that feeling didn't stay in 2017. It followed me into every decision I've made since. I've put hundreds of dollars into coins I couldn't really explain to you if you asked — not because I'd researched them and believed in what they were building, but because they were cheap, or because people online were talking about them like they were about to be the next thing. Somewhere underneath it was always the same voice: don't miss it again.
Most of that money is gone. Not dramatically, just quietly, the way small bad decisions add up when you make enough of them. Looking back, I wasn't actually investing in those moments. I was trying to undo 2017. Those are two very different things, and confusing them is expensive.
What I've had to build, slowly, is a rule for myself: if the only reason I want to buy something is that it's low right now, or that it's hot right now, that's not a reason, that's the fear talking. I make myself step back and actually research before I put money into anything, even when everything in me wants to move fast because I'm scared of watching another one get away. It's not a perfect system. Some days the old feeling still wins. But naming it has helped more than I expected, FOMO is a lot easier to catch once you know it's the thing driving the car.
I don't think the lesson here is "don't feel FOMO", I don't think that's realistic for anyone who's watched a dollar become a fortune for someone else. The lesson, at least the one I'm still relearning, is that the fear of missing the next one is a completely different thing from a good reason to buy. One of those is worth listening to. The other one has cost me a lot more than the dollar I never spent on Bitcoin ever would have.