133,000 views. A couple weeks ago I answered the question ‘what did you learn too late in life’ on Quora. Somehow it’s got more views in less than one month than this entire website in 7 years. Don’t ask me why. It took me five minutes to answer and it’s a shitty list, don’t be confused by the number of views and the more than 1,500 upvotes. I didn’t put much thought in it. If I had, it would have got zero views, as per usual when I make an effort to write something good. (advice to aspiring writers: learn not to make an effort, just churn out shit, you’ll slide to fame like a ***** in a moist ******)

Somebody remarks that I didn’t mention bitcoin. Implying that I could have made a ton of money if I had known about it earlier.

Before you read further, please pause to take in this quote:

“Write about this man who, drop by drop, squeezes the slave’s blood out of himself until he wakes one day to find the blood of a real human being–not a slave’s–coursing through his veins.”

― Anton Chekhov

It will take me my entire life to squeeze an ocean of slave mentality out of me, and hopefully I won’t pass this self-sabotaging mentality on to my children. There’s nothing grand or romantic about making peanuts.

Here’s my self-flayingly honest -if I say so myself- answer to that smart remark:

Excellent remark. However, even if I had known about bitcoin, I’m so impractical in matters like this, that I wouldn’t have done anything with that knowledge. I had sort of a similar opportunity back in 2006 -nothing to do with bitcoin- and somehow it just slipped my mind and I forgot about it. Am guessing I would forget to act upon any knowledge about bitcoin as well. I’ve received plenty of excellent financial advice over the years, and I never did anything with it, most of it later turned out to be very sound advice. That’s why it’s midnight and I’m still translating an incredibly difficult text from Slovak to English just to make ends meet. Zero talent to make serious money… Tony Robbins would say that I have ‘wealth wounds’. Anyway, that’s why I didn’t include it in the answer, I wouldn’t have done anything with it anyway. I’m programmed to suffer for money (working class background), grew up in an industrial town in Belgium, and no matter how educated I become, I can’t shake off the mentality. Thanks for this remark, you’ve made me realize something about myself.

PS

I wish more people would admit they have gaping ‘wealth wounds’, because I’m certainly not the only one. By wealth wound – a concept borowed from Tony Robbins- I mean that you are somehow extremely uncomfortable with the idea of having a lot of money, especially if you haven’t deeply suffered for it.