A Crypto Enthusiast's Confession of Technical Anxiety: You're Not the Only One Who Feels Out of Sync

Original Title: "I Can't Keep Up! -- What to Do When Technology Moves Faster Than You Do"

Author: Bethany Crystal

Compiled by: Deep Tide TechFlow

When I woke up this morning, I had planned to write a blog post about why Halloween is the best holiday for fostering community block unity in New York. However, when I logged into Slack, I saw my colleagues sharing their experiments with the new ChatGPT search feature that they had just launched yesterday.

Opening Twitter, I also saw similar discussions:

• "This is a Google killer."
• "This new tool changes everything."
• "It will completely change the way you use the internet."
• "Goodbye to the old. Hello to the new. If you can't keep up, you're already behind."

By 8:05 AM, I had conducted a few small chat tests myself, successfully found myself in the ChatGPT search, and installed the browser extension in my Chrome browser, setting it as my default search engine, replacing Google.

Wow, everything is happening so fast.

So, I decided to abandon my original article plan and write this piece about new technology instead.

If you woke up this morning feeling a sense of "Oh no, here we go again…" trust me, you are not alone. Let's take a deep breath and dive into this topic together.

How to Avoid Falling into the "I Can't Keep Up" Trap

Seeing such disruptive comments circulating around can indeed be stressful. These seemingly massive changes happen almost every month, if not every week, making it feel overwhelming.

I can be a bit impulsive and extreme, so whenever this happens, I always have to restrain myself from doing either of the following two things:

Fight or Flight? I have two polarized instincts when facing new things.

1. Abandon everything I was previously working on, fully immerse myself in the new thing, quickly get the whole team familiar with it, and immediately start exploring collaboration opportunities to get ahead in the competition. This is the new world order, and there’s no turning back.
2. Or, completely reject the new thing, give up entirely, and vow to shut down all technology forever, radically change direction, and start imagining myself living a completely agrarian, isolated life in some northern state while waiting for the inevitable robot apocalypse.

Overall, this reflects the "fight or flight" mentality that new technology often triggers. However, I find that my actual response is always somewhere in between.

In my 15-year career, I have worked in tech startups and venture-backed companies, receiving many emails about "disruptive! unprecedented!" technologies. Unfortunately, I am easily influenced by those visionary builders and entrepreneurs who look at the world from a long-term perspective. This led me to genuinely believe for a time in 2018, while working in venture capital, that companies no longer needed to go public through traditional banks, new social media apps couldn't stand out, and Ethereum would become the ultimate technology of blockchain.

Of course, these predictions did not fully materialize.

I gradually realized that after the initial hype, there is a longer, more challenging phase of habit formation and strategic integration. This phase can last for months or even years. While a few early adopters may quickly seize new opportunities, if you are not in that top 5% (I am not), blindly chasing every new trend is pointless.

So, I began to focus on accepting the inevitability of change. While I cannot control when change happens, I can control my response. Rather than feeling deep "fear of missing out" anxiety over every new trend, I prefer to approach change with a playful and curious mindset—thanks to my experiences in the cryptocurrency space.

Lessons Learned from the Crypto Community

This is not the first time I have felt "fear of missing out" or experienced imposter syndrome in the realm of new technology. Through three years of close collaboration with the crypto community, I learned that even when feeling behind, showing curiosity and actively participating still holds value.

I admit that "FOMO" was a significant reason that initially drew me into this ecosystem. Although I had been in contact with builders in the crypto space for years, it wasn't until 2021, a year after my first child was born, that I truly yearned to understand this field firsthand.

Since I hadn't personally toiled in the crypto space for years like others, I felt a significant sense of imposter syndrome when I entered the field. I felt like an outsider with a non-technical, non-crypto background. I genuinely believed that unless I could discuss the nuances of blockchain consensus or governance in a white paper, I wasn't "smart enough" to fit in.

This mindset is actually a trap. Once you start believing that you are not "smart enough" or "brave enough" to try something, you fall into a fixed mindset. And this can really hinder your growth in the future.

When I first decided to dive deep into cryptocurrency, I began joining Discord channels and scrolling through Twitter almost around the clock. My computer was constantly pinging me with information about new cryptocurrencies, new communities, new businesses, new conferences, and new technologies. I added all of these to a massive to-learn list.

Should I go to Denver or Amsterdam for the developer conference? Better not to miss out. Which airdrop should I participate in? Why not try both? Do I know about this DAO? Am I familiar with the latest on-chain governance? Have I attended that demo day? Not yet, but I will definitely look into it.

In those early days, I often asked myself:

The Deep Anxiety of Keeping Up in the Cryptocurrency Space

• "Why do I feel like I just caught up, only to feel behind again?"
• "Was all my effort on the last project in vain?"
• "How do I discern which tools and trends are truly important and which are secondary?"
• "How do I find time to learn new things again?"

What I didn't realize was that in my efforts to explore, I was actually continuously improving myself. This improvement was slow, but suddenly it happened.

While learning, I was also working. I assisted venture capital firms in coordinating communication among builders in their networks. I helped tech teams present their work in simple, understandable language. I also helped hybrid organizations (like crypto-native foundations) design strategies based on both traditional and non-traditional best practices.

It turned out that I didn't need to suddenly master esoteric scientific knowledge to succeed in this field. I just needed to know how to apply my strengths in a new environment.

It took me a long time to break free from this fixed mindset, but I am glad I did. Now I know that no matter which industry I enter next, I can do it again.

Finding Calm Amidst the Chaos of New Technology

This morning, when I saw the first message on Slack saying "ChatGPT search is the killer of Google," I did feel a familiar panic of "I'm behind." But now, I have become accustomed to this feeling and know what will happen next, so it no longer feels as alarming or unsettling as it once did.

Therefore, I chose to pour myself a second cup of coffee, personally tried out ChatGPT search, and then wrote this blog.

So, is this latest innovation truly the "ultimate" technology that will change the world? Who knows? But in the meantime, why not play around with it yourself and see what you think? I dare say that others are not as far ahead as they seem. After all, we are all still within the same 24-hour release window. Let's wait and see what new changes come next week…

Game over, the apocalypse of technology? Maybe. But we still can't get the fonts on DALL-E images to display correctly, so there's no need to panic just yet…