It is 4:17 in the morning and I am sitting in the darkness of my apartment. My face is illuminated by the glow of three computer monitors, a harsh blue-white light that makes my skin look dead. The right monitor shows the ai16z/USDC chart, a token I’ve been watching obsessively for weeks. The middle one displays my open positions. The left one shows a Discord channel where traders share signals and rumors at all hours. I have been here since yesterday afternoon. The muscles in my lower back ache from sitting too long in this chair, which I bought five years ago from IKEA during a period when I thought better furniture would somehow improve my life. It didn’t. The plastic armrests are worn smooth where my forearms rest, and there is a coffee stain on the right one that resembles the shape of Finland.
I need to urinate, but I don’t want to get up. The ai16z/USDC pair is approaching a resistance level that has held four times in the past week, and I have placed a sizable position against it breaking through. A notification sound from Discord pulls my attention—someone named CryptoShaman69 has posted a new chart analysis in the #alpha-signals channel, with red circles and arrows drawn all over it. I check it quickly, but it tells me nothing I don’t already know. There are 347 unread messages across the twenty seven crypto Discord servers I belong to. I’ll never read them all, yet I can’t bring myself to mute the notifications.
It is stupid to believe I can control the outcome by watching, but I watch anyway. I have always had this tendency, even as a child. I would stand guard over things as if my vigilance could prevent disaster. When my father went out, I would stay awake until he came home, as if my consciousness was somehow necessary for his safe return. Now I do the same with these meaningless digital patterns, these candlesticks forming on the screen that represent the collective decisions of thousands of strangers I will never meet.
The coffee beside me has gone cold. I drink it anyway. The bitterness makes me grimace, but there is a comfort in the grimace. Dad drank his coffee black too. “Only women and children need sugar,” he would say. I believed him then. I believe him still, though I know it’s ridiculous. This is how fathers shape us, through these arbitrary rules presented as fundamental truths. The cold coffee leaves a film on my teeth that I can feel with my tongue. It is unpleasant, yet I make no move to brush my teeth. This small discomfort is fitting somehow.
Through the gap in the blinds, which I haven’t properly closed, I can see the sky beginning to lighten. My phone vibrates with a text from Anna. “Still on for dinner tonight?” it reads. I had forgotten, but I’m glad for the reminder. Anna teaches literature at the university, knows nothing about cryptocurrency, and seems to find my obsession with it amusing rather than concerning. We’ve been seeing each other for four months. Last week she left a toothbrush in my bathroom, a small domestication of the space that I find I don’t mind. I text back confirming dinner, adding that I look forward to it, which is true.
The ai16z/USDC chart moves. A red candle forms, large and sudden. My position is good. I feel a brief surge of something like joy, but it’s hollow, more like relief. 438 dollars in unrealized profit. What does that mean? It’s abstract. It won’t be real until I close the position, and even then, it will just be numbers changing in an account, nothing tangible. Not like the five-dollar notes grandfather would press into my palm when I helped him in the garden, paper made slightly soft from being carried in his wallet, smelling faintly of tobacco.
My Discord pings again. This time it’s the #whale-alerts channel. Someone has moved 2.3 million ai16z tokens to an exchange wallet. Bad sign, potentially. My mouth goes dry. I should close my position now, take the profit, but I hesitate. There’s a particular greed that takes hold in these moments, a desire to extract every possible cent from the market. It’s shameful, really, this naked avarice that I would never admit to in conversation but which governs so many of my decisions here in the blue light of my screens.
It is strange how we pretend money is real. How we have collectively agreed to behave as if these numbers matter. And stranger still that I have devoted my life to their manipulation, these digital representations of value that have no substance.
I stand up finally, my knees cracking, and walk to the bathroom. The linoleum is cold against my bare feet. When I urinate, it’s dark from the concentrated coffee and lack of water. I should drink water. I know this, yet I will return to my desk and continue to drink coffee instead, as if deliberately making choices that punish my body, small acts of violence against myself that nobody else would notice or care about.
In the mirror, my face looks tired. There are dark circles under my eyes, and my beard has reached that stage where it no longer seems intentional but merely neglected. Father had a beard in the seventies. In the photographs from that time, he looks like a different person, someone with possibilities. When did that change? When did he become the father I knew, severe and disappointed? I splash cold water on my face and feel momentarily more awake.
When Linda left two years ago, she said it was because I was never really present, even when I was physically there. “You live inside your head,” she said, which wasn’t accurate. I live inside these charts, these patterns of human behavior translated into lines and colors. I didn’t tell her that. I just nodded and helped her pack, carrying boxes to her sister’s car double-parked on the street below. It was raining. The cardboard became damp in my arms. She took most of the furniture, which was fine because I rarely noticed it anyway.
Back at my desk, the profit has increased to 512 dollars. The ai16z/USDC pair is still dropping. Outside, the world is turning a pale blue as dawn breaks fully. People will be waking up soon. They will shower and dress and eat breakfast and go to offices. They will have meetings and lunch breaks and conversations by coffee machines. Normal things. I used to do those things too, before I discovered the trenches, these digital ravines where I have made a kind of home.
I check the #sentiment channel. Twenty-three new messages. A mix of panic and forced optimism, the usual emotional weather of crypto communities during downtrends. “HODL,” someone types in all-caps, as if shouting a religious mantra. Another posts the suicide hotline number. I’ve seen it all before. I even recognize some of the usernames now, though I’ve never met these people and likely never will. Bootoshi, coinGoblin, 0xGenius—these are my colleagues now, these anonymous avatars typing from bedrooms and basements around the world.
The word “trenches” makes me think of war, of men huddled in mud waiting for death or glory. My grandfather fought in the resistance during the occupation. He rarely spoke of it, but once, when he was very old and I was perhaps twelve, he told me about hiding in a forest for three days, how hunger changes your perception of time. “Minutes become very long,” he said, “but somehow days become short.” I didn’t understand then. I do now.
The radiator in the corner makes a clunking sound as the heat comes on. It always does this, a mechanical clearing of the throat. The apartment building is old, built in the sixties, and has all the characteristics of that era’s architecture—functional, unadorned, aging poorly. The walls are thin enough that I can sometimes hear my neighbor coughing in the morning, a deep, phlegmy sound that makes me imagine his lungs, pink and diseased.
The chart begins to move again, this time against my position. The profits shrink. I feel a tightness in my chest, not quite panic but its precursor. This feeling is familiar too. It reminds me of standing outside the principal’s office at fourteen, waiting to be punished for something I had done but can no longer remember. The same anticipation of consequences, the same powerlessness in the face of authority. The market is the ultimate authority, indifferent to my needs or desires.
I have been doing this for four bullruns now. I still work in an office for a telecommunications company, writing reports that nobody reads about customer satisfaction metrics. The pay is regular and the work is easy, but each day feels like a small death. I sit in meetings and look at my colleagues’ faces and wonder if they feel it too, this sense of life slipping away in increments too small to measure but too large to ignore.
Trading is different. Every moment contains the possibility of significance. Every decision carries weight. There is a purity to it that I find nowhere else in life. Just numbers and the movement of those numbers and the emotions they generate. Nothing extraneous or false. No pretending to care about office politics or someone’s weekend plans. Just this—the raw, animal response to gain and loss, to risk and reward. It is exhausting but honest.
The sun is fully up now. Light fills the apartment, revealing the dust on surfaces and the general disarray that accumulates when one lives alone and cares little for appearances. There are books piled by the couch, mostly unread. A plant on the windowsill that has been dead for months, its leaves brown and curled. A plate with the remnants of yesterday’s dinner—pasta with sauce from a jar, eaten directly from the pot to save washing a dish. These details of my existence seem both pathetic and strangely meaningful, like artifacts that archaeologists might study to understand a vanished civilization.
I close the position. 327 dollars profit on the ai16z/USDC trade. Not what it could have been, but positive. I move the numbers from my trading account to my cold wallet, a ritual of validation. It is done. Success, of a sort. I should feel something more than this dull relief, but I don’t. Perhaps I am too tired, or perhaps this is all there is—this muted satisfaction that never quite reaches joy.
I post in the #price-talk channel: “short ai16z/USDC from 1.42, closed at 1.31. +$327.” It’s a small brag, a marking of territory. Others respond with rocket emojis and “good trade” messages, a digital approximation of camaraderie. These people I’ve never met are somehow more present in my daily life than Linda ever was in our final year together. She used to stand in the doorway of this room, watching me stare at the screens, and I could feel her presence like a physical weight, a judgment. These Discord voices make no such demands. They want only what I want: signals, confirmations, the shared delusion that we understand what cannot be understood.
I should sleep, but I probably won’t. There are more charts to watch, more patterns to interpret. The day’s trading sessions are just beginning on the east coast. I make fresh coffee, stronger this time. The familiar ritual—measuring the grounds, filling the reservoir, the gurgling sound as it brews—provides a kind of comfort. Soon I will be back in the trenches, watching the blue light of possibility, waiting for something significant to happen.
Outside my window, people move through the morning with purpose. A woman walks a small dog. A man hurries toward the metro, checking his watch. Children in bright jackets make their way to school. They all seem connected to the physical world in a way that I am not, as if they have substance and I am merely a ghost, observing but not participating. Sometimes I envy them. Most times I don’t. Their lives seem constrained by physical realities that I have somehow transcended, for better or worse.
The coffee is ready. I pour it into the same unwashed mug, watching as the fresh black liquid rises to meet the ring of dried coffee from the previous cup, a tidemark of my continuous consumption. The steam rises in a small cloud. I blow on it gently, creating patterns in the vapor that dissipate instantly. Nothing lasts. Not steam, not profits, not life. Yet we act as if permanence is possible, making plans and forming attachments as if the temporary could somehow be made eternal through sheer force of will.
I return to my chair, to my screens, to my trenches. The ai16z/USDC chart has formed a small double bottom pattern now, possibly signaling a reversal. Or whatever. I open Telegram, where a bot posts automated entry and exit points. It’s suggesting a long position now at 1.30 with a tight stop loss. I ignore it. These bots are wrong as often as they are right, but people follow them with religious devotion. On my second monitor, a notification appears from the #dev-update channel—the ai16z team has changed their brand again. Third time this week. The market hasn’t reacted yet.
I take a sip of the too-hot coffee, burning my tongue slightly. The pain is clarifying. I am here, now, watching numbers change on a screen, making my small wagers against an indifferent universe, but also planning a dinner, anticipating a meeting, considering which wine Anna might prefer. This is my life—complex, contradictory, divided between different realms but somehow cohesive. It is 7:23 in the morning, and I am wide awake in my particular version of existence, for whatever that is worth.