MY IKIGAI : WRITING ABOUT NFTs
As I submit my six month notice for quitting my job I look back at a working life of over two decades and think to myself, what have I achieved that I really love reminiscing about in my work. Frankly, I realized there are events few and far apart. A major part of the last two decades of work life have been drudgery and going where the flow takes you. Well… its not a bad life. It puts food on the table, pretty decent food at that, it puts a roof on my family’s head, a pretty decent roof… Well you get where I’m going with this…
Why then did I decide to move into another profession/ field of work when I could have continued with this life for at least another decade and settled down happily ever after. For those of you who have seen Madagascar, I had a Marty moment. A well fed and well sheltered zoo animal has a pretty comfortable life, but have you ever closely looked at its eyes. There is a loss of hope and unhappy acceptance there, or so I felt. A caged animal is not happy, it is provided for, a comfortable life till death sets it free. Well if I wanted caged comfort, you wouldn’t have been reading this article of mine. I was always an out of the box thinker and a conformist at the same time (as if that’s possible…but I was), that’s why I’m goofy, loyal with a hint of a revolutionary streak. I really enjoy the life and the professional satisfaction that my work gives me currently.
So why the heck am I leaving that comfortable life and moving into a zone of uncertainty. Here is where I introduce the term ‘Ikigai’ to the uninitiated. Its literal meaning in Japanese is ‘reason for being’… This image below, many of you must have seen in WhatsApp forwards and some may even remember it moving them…
Did I suddenly find my Ikigai in my 45th year of life? No, maybe, I’m not sure… But what happened in 2021 and the events in the year previous to that did certainly change the course of my future. Early 2020, I volunteered at a Yoga Centre for a week which changed my perspective on many things in life. However COVID hit after that and suddenly seeing the effect that the pandemic had on people in my vicinity, loss of life of known people just made me question my choices. Am I leading the life I want to? But as always time works in strange ways and I got back into the rut of daily life soon.
I was always looking to dive into new things in the crypto space thanks to my out of the box thinking. I was investing hard earned money left, right and centre into ICOs in the later part of 2017 and when NFTs came out, I picked up my first one, a CryptoKitty by Dapper Labs in December the same year. Went on to get some more, bred some taking my collection to 21 of them before the crypto mayhem of mid 2018 followed by the so called ban by India’s RBI, wiped out most of my portfolio leading me to be at a 90% loss overall. Thankfully I did not lose hope and fighter exchanges like WazirX and Unocoin that stood strong were my avenue to continue. India’s crypto community finally won the day and just after COVID hit, the Supreme Court of the country rescinded the ban by RBI. It was the day I was waiting for, I went all in on some tokens that I was bullish on, Binance, Travala and Klever being top among them. By the later part of 2020, though still a minnow compared to the whales that ruled the crypto seas, I was aping into every BSC liquidity pool, trying to get DeFi to make me wealthy.
There were gains there were losses but the ones that I believed in rewarded me reasonably well and by early 2021 I had the liquidity to move into other things and take risks, something that I never had before that. I was hearing about NBA Topshot since late 2020 because it was by Dapper Labs (the CryptoKitties Company) and I was getting emails from them. I opened an account, bought a pack but got locked out of it somehow and couldn’t get back in. In end Feb 2021, I suddenly had the liquidity, so opened an NBA Topshot account and started pouring money into it. Around 5K invested in Feb had become 2K by Aug leading me to stop being bullish on that. But that’s not the hero of this story… It has to do with aping in…
But why did I cover NBA Topshot then? Well its because of the creator of NBA Topshot, Roham Gharegozlou. I started following him in Feb 21 and he followed me back a few weeks later. One of his tweets in May 21 was about a project called House of Kibaa (HOK). What struck me was that he had a pfp of a monkey then. I picked up one HOK Genesis immediately and after joining the HOK Discord, I realized the team was dedicated and the small community was really nice, so I picked up two more (which I have since flipped). In the HOK Discord, there was talk of an Apedemption NFT, giving 3D metaverse ready Apes for Bored Ape holders. That was when I started looking at the Apes, they were there on many pfps similar to what Roham had. I didnt know it at the time, but I was experiencing the start of a movment, a defining moment in history.
I picked up mine on 01 June 21 and that started my aping in… Over the next few months I liquidated over 90% of my crypto and moved all into NFTs. Today, I’m a top 1% NBA Topshot holder, and in their Nine Lives Lounge, a Bored Ape, Gutter Cat/ Rat and a House of Kibaa Genesis/ Gen-X holder. I have all the Myth Division NFTs released till date, a couple (literally… Fefe & Baxter) of Stoner Cats and many others, but near zero crypto and fiat liquidity. Will I go back to crypto? I’m not sure…. The community that I found in the NFT space is one of the best groups of people I have found anywhere, so I’m here to stay.
As you can see, the reasons I decided to quit my current job are not that many, in fact, its just one… NFTs. That, I feel is my ‘Ikigai’, my reason for being, I spend most of my time thinking about NFTs, I want to work in the NFT field, I want to contribute to the NFT space and the community. I love research, writing and sharing my views. That combined with my love for NFTs is the reason I decided to kick off srinigoes.medium.com with this article, on why I want to write about NFTs.
These phrases convey the essence of why I’m all in on NFTs : ‘Apes Together Strong’…..‘Gang Gang’…..LFG
