Sunday Thoughts from the trenches with your favorite bathtub philosopher and people who still pretend “HODL” is a complete financial strategy.
This week has been absolute chaos on my side of the screen! Work has been relentless. My brain has been bouncing between meetings, policy, crypto charts, household logistics, and our newest furry raid boss: Jenova. Listen, nobody fully prepares you for the emotional whiplash of bringing a giant puppy into your life. One minute she’s peacefully asleep with her little squeaky platypus toy like a precious angel sent from heaven itself. The next minute she’s galloping through the property, dragging my husband behind with the force and momentum of a tax audit.
I’m still in the trenches trying to analyze liquidity mechanics while managing the emotional collapse of my chiweenie, Jafar, who currently feels overwhelmed, betrayed, and spiritually replaced by the new arrival. The jealousy is unreal. He looks at Jenova like we brought home a hostile corporate merger.
But somewhere between the household madness, charts, and the squeaking platypus soundtrack echoing through the living room, I kept thinking about one thing: crypto communities have a dangerously unhealthy relationship with selling. Some of you are going to learn that lesson the hard way if you don’t build and exit strategy before your emotions start making financial decisions for you.
I love strong communities. I love strong conviction. I really love people believing in a project enough to weather volatility, but there’s a difference between conviction and financial martyrdom and it’s the ugliest reality of crypto: the loudest people screaming “NEVER SELL” are sometimes quietly scaling out into your buys while posting motivational memes. Not always, but enough times that every investor needs to understand something important: UNREALIZED GAINS ARE NOT REAL GAINS.
If your portfolio goes from $1,000 to $50,000 and back to $3,000 because you were emotionally manipulated into believing selling anything made you a traitor- you might be a “diamond hand”, but you also volunteered as sad tribute whether or not anyone around you is ready to break it to you.
This isn’t even unique to crypto because I’ve seen it happen in stocks, collectibles, real estate cycles- literally anywhere human emotion collides with greed. Markets move in cycles but humans don’t evolve nearly as fast as any chart will.
A sound exit plan is a matter of adulthood. One of the biggest mindset shifts any investor can make is understanding that you do not need to perfectly time tops to win, you just need systems: simple systems will beat emotional disorder almost every time.
This can include sensible practices like taking your initial investment out after a 2x or 3x, scaling profits at predefined market cap targets, selling percentages instead of entire bags, setting “life-changing money” thresholds BEFORE emotions kick in, reallocating into safer assets during euphoric mania phases, and keeping stablecoin reserves for opportunities during crashes.
What we always need to keep in mind is that the market will always give us another opportunity. People act like selling means exile from the kingdom. Smart traders preserve their mental health when they cycle their capital and stay liquid enough to survive bad seasons. Trenches reward survival more than ego.
A healthy community educates people. An unhealthy one emotionally pressures holders into ignoring risk management entirely and this is what especially wrecks newer investors. If you let them, they’ll condition you into thinking selling is weak and that real believers never take profit, and that paper hands deserve poverty. The whole time, wallets are rotating and whales are laddering out. Insiders manage their exposure while the majority of memecoin retailers are dreaming about billion-dollar market caps.
I need people to understand this clearly: selling responsible doesn’t make you disloyal. If crypto has taught me anything over the years, it’s that sustainability matters more than temporary glory. Is your goal to become a screenshot millionaire or to improve your real life? Pay your debt. Build your savings. Help your family. Create options. Buy yourself breathing room. That’s the win condition.
Honestly, I want to give props to Pinto and team here because he’s one of the new developers I’ve seen in crypto who consistently approaches this space like an actual adult where it matters. He won’t sit there emotionally blackmailing holders into riding positions straight into the earth for the sake of optics. In fact, he’ll often be the first one reminding people to recoup initials, secure healthy profits and manage risk responsibly.
I respect that deeply because THAT is real maturity in crypto- not this bizarre culture where some developers completely unravel the second people begin taking profit, then start blaming normal market activity for every red candle like selling itself is some kind of moral betrayal.
That mentality honestly exposes how inexperienced and emotionally unprepared many teams are.
Seling is not a personal attack; it’s not sabotage or treason no matter how painful for a holder to see those red candles. This is literally how markets function! People enter, people exit, people rotate capital and manage risk. People pay bills and take wins. That is healthy activity.
A project that completely collapses the moment people take profit was never structurally stable to begin with. Strong projects survive market movement; strong communities survive volatility. Strong builders account for human behavior instead of pretending they can emotionally bully reality into submission. Crypto gets a lot healthier the moment we stop treating responsible profit-taking like some war crime.
Now with THAT said, you already know I’m still a trench queen at heart. I love discovering weird projects and on-chain experimentation. I love watching communities form all the time. I love the chaos. I love the game. These trenches are my playground, but one thing I’ve genuinely enjoyed lately is how my SOL MINE rewards basically keep my wallet loaded with gas fees for all my nonsense. That alone has been weirdly satisfying because instead of constantly needing to reshuffle funds just to interact on-chain, I’ve got this little passive stream helping fuel the endless cycle of swaps, experiments, chart watching, random entries, and “this looks either genius or catastrophic” moments when the rest of the house is asleep. It’s less “I’m a disciplined institutional investor” and more “I saw a token with a suspiciously confident racoon mascot and now I need to investigate”. Balance, people!
People obsess over exits while completely ignoring entries, which is another killer. A few things I wish more people respected: stop full-porting emotionally! Scaling into positions is one of the healthiest habits you can develop. No one knows the exact bottom. Nobody knows the exact top, which means averaging in and averaging out often beats dramatic all-in behavior.
Don’t chase vertical candles, either. If a chart looks like it was launched out of a friggin medieval catapult, there will usually be another entry eventually. FOMO creates terrible decisions.
Understand liquidity because low liquidity cuts both ways: yes, tiny caps can explode upward, but they can also collapse faster than a folding lawnchair at a WWE tailgate party. Also, position sizing matters; you should be emotionally capable of surviving the volatility of your position. If a 30% dip destroys your mental stability, your allocation is probably too large. Crypto is already psychologically violent enough without self-inflicted damage.
At the end of the day, crypto is still one of the most fascinating financial ecosystems on earth: it’s insane, irrational, hilarious, predatory, and brilliant; sometimes, all within the same 15-minute candle. People who last the longest aren’t usually the loudest, though. Learn patience, emotional control, risk management, position sizing, profit taking, and how to survive long enough to keep playing. Survival is still so underrated in crypto and honestly, so is peace.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a crockpot to supervise, cookies to bake, a giant puppy and husband to supervise, and a wallet full of bad ideas to monitor on top of about 17 tabs open tracking charts that absolutely did not need my attention today.
Happy Sunday from the trenches!
