i came across a post about wall street and the old history of finance and it sent me straight back to ‘the psychology of money’ by morgan housel
and then i started thinking about something bigger than crypto.
morgan housel didn’t really write about money.
he wrote about people.
how fear makes us hold cash we shouldn’t, how greed makes us chase things we don’t understand, how our relationship with money is almost never logical, it’s emotional, it’s personal, it’s tied to how we grew up and what we watched our parents do.
the book reminded me that nobody is actually rational when it comes to money.
we just tell ourselves we are.
then there’s ‘the wolf of wall street.’
and yeah it’s entertaining but underneath all the excess, jordan belfort is just a person who found a system and exploited every psychological weakness humans have around money.
greed, fomo, the desire to feel like an insider.
wall street was built on those weaknesses.
and for decades, the people at the top got rich off the people who didn’t understand the game they were playing.
crypto came and it was like “what if the game was open source?”
what if anyone could see the rules, participate in the system and build on the infrastructure?
but the truth is the same psychological patterns that made wall street dangerous followed us here.
the fomo and greed is the same.
the influencers pumping bags are just modern brokers with better internet.
what actually changed is access.
for the first time in the history of finance, a person anywhere in the world can participate in building and owning a piece of financial infrastructure.
not because a bank approved them or because they went to the right school, just because they showed up.
the psychology of money is really a book about self awareness.
~ knowing why you make the decisions you make.
~ knowing what fear and greed look like when they’re wearing your face.
that lesson applies whether you’re on wall street, on a dex or just trying to figure out what to do with what you have.
the game changed but the players are the same.
knowing which one you are is the whole thing.