The target audience of this article is tech people building products, specifically the web3 crew.
We are all addicted to our work. Addiction is a mental health dis-ease. We are all mentally ill.
I truly believe it is time to take a long enough break for all of us who are developing new tech. And engage in deep interpersonal work instead. Learn to communicate to each other irl. Too many teams right now are operating in remote, which is super-super hard for us psychologically, whether we accept it or not. We are not wired to be daily engaged only via online spaces. We do not enjoy it. Those that are doing it both online and in-person, are secretly hating it as well.
Future is physical, not digital. So is past, so is present. Digital is fake, it is not real as much as you want it to be. Spirituality is more real than digitality, I checked it many-many times. So why do we keep building the digital world so hard, non-stop? Do not try to convince me that we are doing it to free ourselves from tech eventually, get endless money flow from sales of our NFTs and never work again, you know it is not true. We are stuck! Trapped by the very technologies we are creating.
Our collective mental health has never seen such low. We burnt ourselves out. Many of us who have been tech leads, are seeing that we are hitting the brick wall and so few of us are ready to admit it.
Background: I have always worked in tech. Fashion tech, retail tech, start ups, ai, blockchain. Tech has been my life. When I was 19, I started my first fashion tech enterprise, which, not surprisingly for the early days of e-comm, only gained success offline. When I was 26, I quit my full time job at a sexy well backed up fashion tech marketplace in NY and dived in full time entrepreneurship, following my big dreams building the coolest companies with the coolest people I chose to work with. I was a top fashion tech podcast host, led a very niche and popular newsletter and had a blog on conscious fashion tech, had developed and advised numerous edgy tech start ups, participated and later, mentored and co-organized hackathons and organized top level offline and hybrid events in NY and Europe. At a pinnacle of my career growth, I also went through a very dark depression when I was 25-26 and consciously started my healing journey then, dived deep into spiritual wisdom, became vegan, quit caffeine, sugar and alcohol and immersed myself into all imaginable philosophy and spiritual modalities to help myself. By 2018-2019, I finally felt balanced and Nataliya.ai spiritual persona came up to protect my true identity. At that point I was quite successful in my conscious fashion tech consulting career, was also seen as a powerful spiritual guide and channel, I spent days at a sexy conscious co-working space in NY and nights dancing at alcohol and drug-free parties in NY or at personal development events hosted by my friends, featuring deep conversations, interpersonal meditations and cuddle puddles. I knew everyone worth knowing in NY, my life felt absolutely ecstatic and deeply in the flow. I was truly happy and felt complete, in true union with myself and my community.
In 2020, I broke down due to separation from my physical community in NYC: the spiritual guide under cover as a metaverse persona, Nataliya.ai fully consumed me. I aimed to create a new kind of language system for us, that is based on inner tech, with an interface in outer tech we are all engaged in. I participated in and hosted all kinds of digital events, went live daily on different platforms, uploaded my consciousness on New Life, an emerging web3 social network, made a lot of new content, created intense amounts of digital and physical art… I never spent days without technology, I did not hug a person for months, I felt isolated and disconnected from the world and from my body, and as my consciousness kept being uploaded online, I felt more drained and depressed in real life, struggling to find points of connection with anyone in real life. I felt super alienated and outside of physical life.
In 2021, I tested living in different places, looking for a new home, participated in variety of web3 events, both online and offline, led variety of spaces, travelled and tried to get back into my old powerful entrepreneural self, burning myself out even more.
It is mid 2022 now, I am still looking for a new, safe place to live, a solid community to be based in, and a group of close friends.. I am manifesting a home to start deep healing again, engage in intimacy and touch with people I feel safe to developed trust with, dance and practice spiritual modalities together, build a grounded, physical business with and eventually build a family with.
However, everywhere I stay at this time feels temporary. I feel like I need to pack up and go as the moon cycle comes to an end. Every human I attempt to connect with feels unstable to build something worthy with. I feel more than ever separated from any physical or a digital community, I have no income, my crypto savings are dissolving, I struggle to come up with a business model that motivates me to stay focused on longer than a moon cycle and I have zero interest in working a regular 9-5 job. Noone and nowhere feels home to me anymore. When I participate in physical gatherings and events, something is always missing. I don’t feel like hugging anyone or dancing with anyone anymore because I am afraid that anyone I touch will disappear soon enough. Everything feels fake, made up and oh so temporary. The overall spiritual community lost hope (and, what it feels like, minds as well), many people I connected spiritually with disappeared from my life. I struggle to stay in the heartspace, afraid of being laughed at, judged and removed, while all other communities I have been part of feel dispersed, ungrounded and irrelevant to me. The web3 community is in deep depression due to the beginning of the bear market and all of us who have been the active builders of the crypto positive landscape in the past are now deep down rethinking whether this narrative is actually the future-proof one to continue pushing. We all feel burnt out, even though we started taking breaks and be less hyper hyped up about this space, considering what else is possible to do with our bright minds and skills of manufacturing new, enticing realities.
It is like we all lost a sense of grounding, our souls left our bodies and cannot quite land back into them, like we all got so hurt by the events of 2020 and 2022 that we have no clue how to heal that and how to go on living our lives again in a way that is grounded and balanced.
Look, I do not have an answer for us on what to do to get out of this hole we brought ourselves into. I just know that so many of us feel so disconnected and unmotivated way deep down, but unable to access those feelings and express them.
For me, at this point I am looking to become part of an energetic, intellectually satisfying team again, instead of trying to push my own start up ideas, build new teams to match those ideas or constantly be engaged in learning and research, or trying to find ways to promote my consultancy and advisory work for those who don’t even recognize that they need an outsider’s perspective at this time. I aim to develop a work-life balance once and for all, because since 2017, as my full-time entrepreneurship journey started I did nothing but work, and my whole life became work which was actually fun, but I only focused on building, building, building, I cannot even describe what exactly anymore.
All I know that I am an excellent communications person and a spiritual philosopher in heart, so for me building something is very unnatural. I am best in teaching, igniting things, initiating the shift, guiding the leaders, describing complex concepts and being on stage. But before I get into a “hirable by anyone” shape, I need to reset myself and stop building whatever I have been building for so many years. I need to take a break, pause all my r&d work, stop creating new content, stop making so much art that I barely share, and all of it is so, soo hard to do… psychologically, it feels impossible to stop, since I have been running for so long and do not even remember who I was before I started this whole journey, and a bit afraid to see who I am without all of this intense work I am engaged in all these years.
I do not know yet, what would be the ideal physical community for me to escape to to reset myself, would I even need people around, or should I simply be immersed in nature? All I know I have to do everything I can to get myself disciplined and stop running myself into the brick wall, stop, reset and choose a new direction that is healthier for myself and those I consider my audience.
Thanks for reading this. This article was solely meant to be a self-reflection tool to understand what is next for me to do. Nothing, it is. Breathe, and find peace of not being engaged in building any longer. At least for a while.