No, We Don't Accept Bitcoin

...and other ways to kill modernity.

A few weeks ago a wonderful group of life-loving spirits from China came to our farm to learn about community building, sustainable living, seed saving, you know, all the good stuff modern educational institutions seem to have neglected to tell us about. Near the end of their stay, the trip leader asked if she could pay us with cryptocurrency. I suppose it was only a matter of time before someone asked us this, a sign of the times we live in to be sure, but it caught me off guard nonetheless.

Our farm is located in a village where most of the locals make less than $10 a day. To be honest, people here are still getting use to the new school definition of “making a living”, a term that use to mean, grow your own and as such many don’t make any money at all and certainly don’t know anything about Bitcoin. Furthermore, aside from making money, villagers here know very little about how to manage money earned. To be sure, the community members who live at our farm know very little about how to manage money well either. Heck, I’m certainly no expert myself! Simply put, we are simple people, who don’t operate in the same way as people from the city.

We never made money at all at our farm until a few years ago when members of the community started having babies and began lusting for fancier toys to give their wee ones to play with. We never had wifi either until COVID hit, when no one was allowed to come in or out of the farm, so we needed to figure out how to stay connected with the outside world. We have evolved slowly and as far as I can tell, this is far from being a bad thing.

There is a peculiar frequency of regret that seems to be plaguing citizens of planet earth at this time. Occasionally, I feel it too. A borderline agonizing belief that one has “missed their window”, that they should have taken advantage of the low cost of housing back when it was relatively affordable, that they should have invested in Apple computers or Bitcoin when they first learned of their potential. Alas, many fear, now it’s too late, with real estate at an all time high and the price of Bitcoin soaring to unfathomable levels, the dreadful consideration that one should have been wiser when they were younger, a little more proactive in preparing for the future can easily debilitate ones ability to be at peace, here and now. Yet all of this is the product of modernity’s violent view that focuses solely on the individual pursuits of me, me, me, with little regard as to how such “investments” effect the planet, culture, or how it all effects our much-too-overlooked mental state.

“Stress” painting by Marla Edwards

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I lived for nearly two decades in one of North Americas most beautiful ski towns. Strangely, it was off the radar of most humans until Covid hit. When I first moved there in 1999, I could have easily purchased a home. There were so many vacancies in town. The ski company that provided many locals with their livelihood struggled to survive and eventually had to throw in the towel. There simply weren’t enough people and/or jobs in town to charge high prices for, well, anything. So houses were cheap. But at that time all I cared about was spending as much time as I could in the mountains. I was fully absorbed then by the present moment. I wasn’t thinking about the past, the future and I sure as hell wasn’t thinking about buying houses!

Some may recall that magical time before iPhones, or even cell phones. I didn’t have one when I first moved to Colorado. Come to think of it, I didn’t get a cell phone until roughly 8 or so years later into my sojourn in the High Country. I managed instead to then spend my days and nights completely immersed in the wide open timelessness of the West Elk Mountain Range. I only worked a couple days a week, as a dish washer, just enough to put gas in my rusty old ‘84 chevy pickup truck, that I literally lived in, that allowed me to traverse daily through a wonder-filled environment few nowadays can but imagine due to our hyper connected age of digital obsession. I was so deeply invested in high alpine lakes, psychedelic fields of aspens and wildflowers, the glow on the peaks at sunset, the call of the elk at dawn, that I rarely even worried about not having a girlfriend in my prime (the guy to girl ratio in Crested Butte was then about 6-1), much less whether or not I should be worrying about purchasing a house or learning more about Bitcoin!

At 43, with a wife and daughter, it’s harder to be as fully absorbed in the bliss of the present moment as was I then. As Buddha rightly warned, the need to be a provider seems to demand ones full time attention and can easily bombard ones mind with a steady stream of concerns. And as most of us know all too well, it isn’t all that easy nowadays to “bring home the bacon”. I look at the price of homes now in western Colorado and it literally makes me want to vomit. I’ll try not too drift too far into the overly written about cultural wars rising with the ghastly increase in rent that has forced nearly all the quirky, down home mountain folk I fell in love with back in ‘99 to move elsewhere. Where once people were there because the mountains invited them secretly in dreams, now more-so found are privileged white guys dolling out there inheritances on resort hedonism, corporate CEO’s hoping to buy community for there kids, owners of baseball teams trying to relive a lost youth, Texas oil execs yearning to impress there friends with how much they can tip their waiter, ex-presidents, bitcoin hipsters, real estate moguls and all the other usual suspects there simply because, they can be.

As the old saying goes, “Hindsight is a bitch”. It’s easy to look back, years later, and consider how low the cost of Bitcoin was back then, or how low the price of homes were back in the dizay and think, Daaaamn, I missed the boat! I could be a millionaire now! I could be making a fortune every month of Air B n’ B. And my god! I shudder to do the math on what a few Bitcoins purchased for a buck back then would be worth now. But here’s the thing. If I had wasted those precious early days working overtime to invest in the future (as instructed by the overlords of economy) I would not have had those sacred initiatory moments of holy dialogue between myself and Pristine Wilderness with zero distractions, only endless days of ever-unfolding discovery.

It seems nearly impossible for people to replicate similar experiences nowadays. Even on the most foundational level, there are simply far too many overly enthusiastic rich yuppies tearing trail in the backcountry with expensive gear for such conditions to even be found. Solitary places are as rare as heirloom seeds nowadays. And people seem to increasingly prefer to access the wilds on loud 4-wheelers, electric bikes and snowmobiles, draped in Goretex, blasting shitty music. A far cry indeed from those days we cross-country skied naked all the way to Telluride. (May the Spirit of Dan Escalante forever guide what remains of the original skibum!) The experience offered by REI is far different than the call of the wild my dear friends. Far different. And community, can never be bought.

Had I succeeded in purchasing a home back in the glory days of the Colorado ski country, and now was able to cash in and “live my best life ever” as a result, I would have to live too with the fact that I was now part of the reason why no one can find affordable housing in those mountains anymore, why authentic culture there has all but decayed entirely, everything now looking like a glossy Patagucci ad. And let’s face it, mining Bitcoin is raping our Mother Earth. I am amazed at how many would-be revolutionaries seem to conveniently glance over this well-documented fact. Yes, we need to smash the patriarchy and shift course, but all of this bares a striking similarity to, well, but more of the same. It’s capitalism baby.

Modernity tries to convinces us otherwise. It has gotten very good at leaving important parts of the story out. That somehow we can be green and rich! We need to be clear here, no one gets rich without climbing on the backs of others, destroying the planet, or both. It just cannot happen (yes, the same holds true for Yvon Chouinard who I admire in many, many ways.) You cannot be truly green and rich. Can’t happen. Not as the owner of Patagonia, not as a farmer, not as a creator of electric cars and certainly not as a realtor, or a Bitcoin investor. The Earth needs us to stop aspiring to be rich. Period.

It is a very strange thing to feel regret for not jumping in the game earlier when you view things clearly. What did I miss out on? Screwing people over and further harming our already suffering planet Earth? We need to see all of this for what it really is. What we do matters. Mining bitcoin is killing our planet. Making a fortune off real estate is making it incredibly hard for millions of families to properly support themselves. How we chose to live matters. We don’t need more. We need less.

I’m sure I won’t gain many new subscribers from this weeks offering. In fact, I’ll likely lose a few and I’m certain no one will be donating their hard earned crypto to my desperately underfunded Substack page. But the thing is, back when I should have been hustling to save money for the future, I was making prayers alongside the Slate River and one glorious summer day I made a vow to Her, to always speak for the trees.

*Dedicated to the ones who missed the boat.

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#maypeaceprevailonearth