If you've worked in Silicon Valley for any number of years, one thing you'll realize is the unusually high interest in "anti-aging" technologies and "lifestyle hacks" - especially by "successful" people in the sector. It's an industry that prides itself on being forward-looking, which is often coupled with an obscession with everything new and the power of "youth".
If you've worked in Silicon Valley for any number of years, one thing you'll also notice is the lack of presence of young children - the Bay Area in the last few decades has gained a reputation of being a "college-ish town" - a place to work at a big company for a few years then move out to somewhere more affordable. Years of rampant NIMBYism and the goverment's refusal to take meaningful action has largely left America's urban centers a shadow of its former self - as talent and young people flee regions due to simply being unable to afford being there, one by one.
For aging technologists who are starting to confront the reality that the end-point of "progress" in their own life all ends in one place - death - this starts to pose a very real problem: that they can't take their money to their grave, and the possibility that they won't have any legacy to leave behind when they're gone.
Many of them have distracted their life with work their whole lives - which in itself isn't necessarily a bad thing - but to meaningless work, not worthy of being remembered in the annals of history.
Artificial Intelligence is still unpopular (due to the industry promoting it as replacing workers rather than focusing on the positives), and AGI is still nowhere near to being a reality.
Crypto is still known for gambling/scams/memecoins and its failures to live up to its aspirations of a truly decentralized world. Politically, the world itself has moved in the opposite direction.
The Metaverse came and went - with one big company going all-in and spending billions - now being shut down for good.
Self-driving cars remain perpetually "five years away" after nearly a decade of promises, still struggling with basic edge cases - even the active versions are still reliant on human operators, and it's still questionable wether or not it's even cheaper than just hiring someone to do it.
The "creator economy" that was supposed to democratize success has instead created a winner-take-all system where everyone is hustling for the same scraps while platforms change the algorithm on a whim.
So these days you have venture capitalists and technology leaders openly rejecting the idea of introspection, ethical boundaries (one prominent VC now talking about the antichrist in a bizarre turn of events), complaining about how noone likes rich people anymore, and an overall aversion to talking about young people because if you think too deeply about where a lot of tech projects ended up in recent years, most of them are failures in the bigger picture - or an ongoing quagmire, at best.
When technologists reach the limits of what capitalism has to offer, many of them turn to politics as a "solution" to their woes. But more often than not learn the hard way that the system doesn't change so easily - especially when they have to deal with pesky things like voting, negotiation, compromise, and human emotions - it's not a sort of thing you can just write and re-write in an iteration of code, after all.
And it's quite obvious that those excursions into that world isn't going so well, either. So what do these folks really have to look forward to in the future? Other than death, not much, honestly.
So that's where the anti-aging thing comes in - the "solution" to being forgotten - simply don't die! Later in life, a lot of technologists gain a sudden appreciation for bio-technology and a strange obsession with "lifestyle hacks" to try to delay the inevitable. Looking backwards becomes too painful for many because introspection will point out the fact that there is not much there - especially if they had treated people poorly to get to where they were.
Most people get remembered through the friends and family they made along the way, but for the mediocre technologist that sacrificed everything to something they couldn't take to the finish, all they have is the void...both in front of them - and behind.
...but wait! We have an app for that, too! 👍
🚀 Crypto & NFTs: The Legacy Engine You've Been Waiting For 💎
🚀 Crypto & NFTs: Your Legacy, Immortalized 💎
You've spent decades building. The exits happened. The portfolio is diversified. But now you're lying awake thinking: "Okay... now what?" 🛏️😰
The old playbooks for leaving a mark are broken. Putting your name on a building? So 20th century. You didn't disrupt an industry to become a plaque in a lobby nobody visits.
Enter Web3. 🌐
🖼️ NFTs: Your Permanent Seat at History's Table
When you mint an NFT, you're not buying a JPEG. You're inscribing your legacy onto the immutable ledger of human achievement.
That's not art collecting—that's legacy insurance.
👨👧👦 A Legacy Your Kids Will Actually Want
A hardware wallet and a curated NFT collection? That's not an inheritance—that's an education. Your grandchildren won't just inherit assets—they'll inherit your thesis. They'll carry your digital flag into a future you won't live to see. 🚩
🌍 You Can't Take It With You
That much is true.
But you can leave it somewhere that won't crumble. Somewhere that won't be forgotten.
Leave it on-chain. ⛓️
Stop worrying about mortality. Start worrying about your seed phrase.
WAGMI. 🫡
In all seriousness - the crypto/NFT hype that happened a few years ago was, in part, fueled by the desires of some who wanted to partake in "forever" - something the blockchain initially promised, which should have been a great moment for all...had it actually worked. Now we've found out that half of them ran on traditional servers - while the other half ran on IPFS systems, which could just as well disappear if it wasn't maintained properly.
These were difficult, but largely solvable problems if the will to take it seriously was there. But in the end, what we mostly got was bridge hacks and memecoins instead.
But the infrastructure to build something "lasting" is still there. Most of that potential lies right here on TEIA, because it is open-sourced and verifiably decentralized, like it was always supposed to be. They might have to hit rock-bottom a few times, but if we keep pressing enough, maybe they might be willing to take another look. AI is all the hype these days but no matter how good the technology becomes it's always going to be a tool of extraction, not ownership or identity. A very poor model for legacy building, to say the least.
One way Crypto/NFTs could succeed is if the general public sees through the marketing grifts of the current industry and learn to utilize the tools as it was intended, but that path may be very difficult without industry leaders dedicating its resources to the education and usage of said tools - it's currently a hard sell because true decentralization requires power to be distributed - something that the incumbents say is a good thing but don't actually want.
To be fair, not all technologists think this way and there are plenty of examples of them finding a lot of meaning in both work and life as well. But that is not who are calling the shots right now - when the pendulum starts to swing the other way, we may finally start to see things improve in a more meaningful way. Change will most likely happen as a result of shift in leadership norms due to shifting markets, which we seem to be on the path on already. Until then, it's mostly about survival - and hunkering down until that moment comes.
A few years ago when our family dog Tyco passed away, my mom asked me to create a "grave" for him online - he's here, but also on the direct on-chain minting contract KT18xXt4pX4Lj211AvptpLtcpLErwiKrodiz I did through the Zero Contract as well. He'll probably be there forever - if not, at least 64,000 years, as far as conservative estimates go.
Hope that's long enough for you buddy. Granted, all you did was eat our food, ran around, and hanged around the house, but you'll at least be remembered for that. Some of these folks you see talking at conferences? Maybe, maybe not.