Outgrowing the Narrative

tl;dr: Spending time with your family this holiday season may help us all think about the unspoken narratives that inform our worldviews.

The holiday season is upon many of us and that means a lot of time with family. For many, this is a challenging time and requires another level of patience.

Families are really complex, of course, and dynamic, but I wonder if one of the reasons why many people find it difficult is because of narrative inertia.

We form stories about ourselves and our family members early on in our lives. Despite other evidence, as people grow and age, we tend to assume that the narrative about others is static, particularly because we had years of foundational evidence to support the original story.

I was thinking about this in the context, naturally, of Bitcoin and crypto. There were a few recent articles in the Wall St. Journal such as Nearly $50 Million of Ether Swiped From South Korean Cryptocurrency Exchange and How Investigators Busted a Huge Online Child-Porn Site that advanced the narrative of crypto as volatile, used by criminals, and risky.

Of course, the challenging part for those who believe in a people-backed currency, is that many of these allegations are indeed true. There’s plenty not to like about crypto assets as an emerging class.

However, I still (and maybe naively) maintain that the pros ultimately will outweigh the cons, particularly for the disadvantaged and underprivileged people who are not in the target audience for the Wall Street Journal.

Yet, I recognize that the narrative inertia is going to be strong and very difficult to overcome.

At the same time, this means there is a really big opportunity. While many people shy away out of fear, others will see this as a chance to get familiar and comfortable with a new asset class in its nascent stage.

That’s a powerful position to be in from a learning curve perspective.

Postcript: The totally unfounded conspiracy theory about the WSJ and Crypto
While I’m on the topic of the WSJ, I had a thought. It’s 100% unsubstantiated and I have NO evidence to prove this whatsoever, yet, I started to wonder if the Wall Street Journal is actually incentivized to write anti-crypto articles?

It’s a pretty simple rationale.

Many of the readers and advertisers are in the financial services business.

Crypto represents a direct threat to these businesses and, thus, indirectly to the WSJ.

Therefore, WSJ has an incentive to downplay or disparage crypto.

I haven’t looked at all of the articles over the past few years, but take a look at Paul Vigna’s evolution. He started off very favorable and, as of late, has been very negative.

Now, it could be that he did the deep analysis, has seen all of the negative parts of crypto and decided it’s bad.

Or, it could be that he got the message “maybe you shouldn’t be so encouraging about this crypto stuff. It’s upsetting our big advertisers and subscribers. Since we are a newspaper, we don’t have that much leeway, so don’t rock the boat.”