A Letter From A Matrix Escapee

On the urgent need to touch grass

Writers note: I normally separate church and state—my job in crypto stays separate from my writing. But recently, I had a lot to say returning to work after my sabbatical. While a lot of the jargon is specific to working in web3, it applies to anyone in todays terminally online world.

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Dear Matrix dwellers,

I did it. I broke free. I made it back to the forgotten world from which we came and I return bearing news that may be disturbing—which is precisely why you need to hear it.

Look around. This place you’re in, the one with the glossy screen staring back at your glazed eyes, scrolling for what’s surely not the first time today, or even the fifth this hour. Scanning, searching… for what? Knowledge? Alpha? It’s instinctive numbing masquerading as productivity, digital fidgeting for adults.

I don’t say this disparagingly. Listen, I’m right there with you. Price feeds ticking in the next tab. Telegram one hotkey away. I’m equally engrossed. I’m not saying it’s necessarily bad, but it’s not reality.

I know what is though—I’ve stepped inside it, walked around, felt its materiality not as theory but cold, hard truth. It's more vivid and alive and real than you could imagine. Like the first stoned ape returning to the tribe, what I’m about to tell you will seem absurd, strictly unbelievable, yet it will reduce your worldview to a child’s crumpled Crayola drawing beneath the Sistine Chapel.

I say this not to encourage renunciation. What we’ve built—this chaotic, high-stakes experiment in sovereignty, speculation, and software—it’s not just bagholder-deluded hype, it’s a viable shot at rearchitecting everything from money to the firm to the internet itself.

To do so, we have to step out of this myopic mess. We must break free so that we can return with more clarity, more fervor to finish what we set out to when we first took that alluring red pill into the Crypto Matrix.

How I Got Here

Years ago, after the heat of DeFi summer, having labored away in the trenches back when it was a small troop of familiar faces, I was incepted with an idea. A radical one. One I knew would consume me.

As I sat at my desk, strung out on caffeine and hopium in the wee hours of the night depositing uncomfortable amounts of money into obscure food-themed LP pools, I thought to myself–is this real? This alleged yield, these alleged applications, these avatars on my screen, all of it, is it real? Not in a Di Caprio spinning his top am I dreaming kind of way but rather is there more out there than all of this in front of me that I’ve been so vehemently consumed by?

To test my hypothesis, I began with a radical change of scenery. Instead of renewing my lease in New York, I stored away all my things and became one of those digital nomads who wears the title on their sleeve, over-identified with the glorified vision that’s mostly explaining shoddy WiFi on Zoom calls from different locales. Paris, LA, Bali, Lisbon. It didn’t matter. Wherever I went, the Matrix followed.

If physical separation wasn’t enough, perhaps it was mental. I started meditating more. Took long walks without a phone. I even went to live in a van in Kauai for a week. These afforded brief glimpses, fleeting memories as to what life used to be like. But ultimately, my efforts fell short.

How I Escaped

While my early attempts proved unsuccessful, I knew I was close. I was using the right fuel for rocket propulsion. I just needed a more powerful engine for that last push out of the atmosphere. I spent weeks formulating a plan. Which, for the amount of laborious thought and trials and failures that went into it, the actual execution was quite simple.

I sat down with my boss and told him I needed to take six weeks off. I braced for the backlash, expecting a scolding for such an outlandish ask. Surely this would be seen as a betrayal, forever branding my Slack profile picture with the words “lazy traitor”. To my surprise, he subtly grinned, and without the slightest opposition extended his blessing.

Once the requisite time was secured, I had to create the necessary preconditions for how to spend it—which I’ll preface are stringent. Absolute. When I said the execution was simple, I meant like in the way quitting smoking is simple—you just don’t bring a cigarette to your lips and light it.

I don’t possess the superhuman willpower of a lifelong digital chainsmoker who can sit with a pack of Marlboros without indulging, so I opted for distance over discipline. I shut my laptop, left my phone on airplane mode, and flew across the Atlantic to walk 500 miles across Spain. Extreme, I know, but the effort needed to get out is proportional to the time spent in, and it had been a while since I opened my eyes in Zion.

You may not need to walk across Europe but don’t fool yourself into thinking you can move a few apps to the third screen or toggle your phone to grayscale. That’s just burying bodies in the backyard and calling yourself Mother Teresa. It’s self-delusion. It denies the indisputable yet insidious power these one-inch cubes on our phones have over us. You need outright separation. The mere presence and hypothetical accessibility of them is enough to prevent a clean break.

A Taste of Reality

The first few days were painstaking. For the life of me, I couldn’t shake these thoughts keeping me tethered. I began to question my hypothesis that it was even possible to escape. Perhaps when you’re this ingrained, you become destined to carry it with you everywhere you go like a shadow. Will BTC dominance continue? God I hope my AI agent bags come back. How is Litecoin still around lmao.

But after about two weeks, something happened. It wasn’t abrupt like Dorothy where a tornado transported me to Oz. It was more gradual, like a lucid dream where you begin to notice subtle oddities, so you pinch yourself. Instead of feeling pain, it’s the eerie realization you're dreaming.

That pinch dawned on me as I discovered I hadn’t thought about my net worth for days. No oscillation between envisioning a job at McDonalds or confidently perusing Zillow, no replaying seeing $TRUMP under $1b and missing out on a 70x overnight or trusting 0xwhateverthefuckitwas on Discord and clicking that phishing link.

Nope. I realized I was just living.

I looked around and the world was alarmingly lush and radiant and unpixelated. Auditory stimulation came not from airpods but the chirping of birds and the crunching of gravel beneath my feet. It was like a sensory deprivation veil was lifted and I could experience the world anew.

Even the people were brighter! None of this “what project do you work for” or “are you raising” before you even say your name. Just humans being humans, recognizing we’re here for a short time and that that time would be a little better getting to know those we cross paths with.

Now I don’t want to make it out to be this rainbow and sunshined Utopia. I’d become so accustomed to giving my rabid monkey mind its banana whenever it asked, with every would-be second of empty time filled with mindless, cheap, dopamine-crazed consumption, that once deprived of these, it rebelled.

I was bored. Profoundly, painfully, unbearably bored.

When the tweaky, twitchy, withdrawal symptoms subsided and I could hold thoughts longer than a few seconds, it dawned on me that boredom is good. Boredom is productive. Boredom creates space—room for the mind to wander, to notice things and chew on them with no clear directive. And in that liminal stretch, digest it all to then excrete genuine, novel ideas.

What I Noticed

Much of what I observed were mild intrigues, details to be forgotten. But others piqued my curiosity, creating a drive to simply know for the sake of knowing. No promise of improving my PnL or a pat on the back from my boss.

I spent hours upon hours meandering through Spanish cathedrals, awestruck by the minute details some guy a thousand years ago spent carving into the face of a cherub. We struggle to commit to a job for more than a year or so before jumping to the next shiny opportunity. Meanwhile, these people spent decades on something they knowingly wouldn’t live to see completed.

In speaking to dozens of people in this new world, I realized that the vast majority are completely and blissfully unaware of the Matrix. Those who have see it like a remote Amazonian tribe, entirely detached from their normal existence, a mostly irrelevant plaything of money-hungry autists.

How refreshing! To be reminded of the possibility of carefree living outside Christmas colored candles on your watchlist, wen mainnet, and hanging on the words of Jerome Powell like he’s Jesus Christ giving his sermon on the Mount while his disciples decipher if “data dependent” means another round of cuts or the second coming of QE.

Having now returned to the Matrix and with the gift of hindsight, I can see that despite this being a “crazy” 6 weeks I missed out on, there wasn't much I would have acted on. Instead, I would have carefully watched escalating global tensions without being able to do a damn thing about it. Any trades would’ve been based on herd-anxiety that would have lost me money like the other sheep LARPing as professional traders.

In ridding myself of this incessant news cycle, I caught a glimpse of what other people care about. In my travels, I met a geologist—a real human who flies two hours every week to go study rocks! I wouldn’t have known this possibility existed if it weren’t for Randy Marsh. Now this didn’t incite a newfound passion for limestone but I use this as an example of the unfathomable amount of things to pay attention to outside our pathologically narrow focus.

Parting Words

I say this all not to conclude the Matrix is bad. In fact, I believe it’s undoubtedly good. It needs to exist. Without it we’d be beholden to storing wealth with banks we don't trust in money we don't believe in. We’d be building on centralized rails engineered to harvest our data, weaponize our behavior, and package it back to us as convenience—with a grin and a terms-of-service checkbox. That’s not a world I want to live in. And for all its flaws I’m damn proud to be part of the movement fighting against it.

But make no mistake, this work comes at a cost. Move through the Matrix unconsciously, it will eat you alive. Left unchecked, all that passion and desire will consume you in the fiery tendrils of profit-seeking, self-immolating through perpetual screen refreshing, shackled to a machine that will never let you rest.

I say this with love—for the Matrix, and all of you here with me. Get out. If even for just a moment. Just long enough to remember where you came from and what brought you here. And when you return—which you will—return with a vengeance. Restored and with deeper purpose. Only then can we can complete this mission we’ve set out on.

—Fellow Matrix dweller