People Without a Starting Line

I just hung up a phone call from my mother.

She was the same as always—her voice laced with sighs, saying how the neighbor's kid works at a factory and earns six thousand a month, with meals and housing provided, living a steady life. Then she mentioned how another family's son got married last year, didn't spend much on the bride price, and now lives a stable life. She paused, and finally said what she really wanted to say: "Don't keep obsessing over that coin thing. I don't understand it, but it sounds unreliable. Finding a secure job is better than anything."

I stared at the screen in silence for a long time.

The candlesticks were still jumping. Bitcoin was grinding around 67k, ETH was consolidating with low volume, and alts were dead silent. My futures position was still open, with the stop-loss set two points below the previous low. Everything seemed calm. But inside me, a torrent of emotions surged—all the traps I've fallen into over the years, all the money I've lost, all the sleepless nights I've endured.

On the path of trading, there has never been a same starting line.

Some people are born into knowledgeable families where their elders have long woven position management, trend rhythm, and risk control into everyday conversation. As kids, they didn't hear fairy tales; they heard "don't go full margin," "don't hold losing positions," "don't FOMO." When they grow up, their father casually tosses them a cold wallet and says, "There are ten ETH in here; practice with it." They don't need to experience a liquidation to understand stop-losses; they don't need to be trapped in a position to realize that trends are irreversible. The lessons that we learn only after bleeding are absorbed by them at the dinner table. They start standing on the shoulders of those before them, walking steadily and lightly.

But what about kids like us from ordinary families?

Our parents have lived their whole lives on fixed salaries, believing stocks are gambling and crypto is nothing but a scam within scams. They don't even know what Bitcoin is, let alone DeFi, Layer 2, or halving cycles. You can't explain on-chain data, whale tracking, or liquidity mining to them. Every word you say sounds like jargon to them. When you lose money, you dare not tell them; when you make money, they just think you got lucky by accident. All experience has to be bought with sweat and overtime; every pitfall has to be personally fallen into at least once to remember.

I remember my first liquidation—it happened in the early morning. I was long on ETH with 10x leverage. Just as I entered, the Fed turned hawkish, and within five minutes, the price blew straight through my stop-loss. I stared at that red forced liquidation notification, my mind blank. That money was my two months' wages from working on a construction site. I didn't dare tell my family. The next day, I ate and went to work as usual, only my fingers were still trembling slightly.

The second liquidation was because of FOMO. I saw everyone in the group shouting "bull market is here," couldn't resist chasing in, and ended up chasing the top. The third time was because I was holding a losing position. The trend had clearly broken down, but I stubbornly told myself, "It can't go any lower." The market then taught me with a huge red candle that it can do anything.

Every loss was a lesson. The tuition was ridiculously expensive, but the knowledge was deeply carved into my bones.

The gap in knowledge has to be filled over several generations. And we are the generation that charges ahead and paves the road. We grope in the dark, turning every liquidation into a note, every missed opportunity into a review, every panic sell into muscle memory. We have no teachers, so we become our own teachers; no textbooks, so we use candlesticks as textbooks; no predecessors to guide us, so we become the first person in our family to open a crypto candlestick chart.

Relationships are no different.

Some people have seen what good love looks like since childhood. Their parents taught them how to express feelings, how to resolve conflicts, how to love and how to protect themselves. They can naturally have gentle and lasting relationships without crashing around in love and getting battered and bruised. But most people don't have that luck.

No one taught us how to distinguish sincerity, how to handle boundaries, how to gracefully walk away when fate ends. We rush in with reckless passion, give our hearts and souls, only hit the wall before learning what it means to cut losses in time, only shed tears before understanding who is not worth keeping. Those fruitless encounters, those tossing and turning nights—they are the growth lessons we give ourselves.

Those who awaken late are destined to miss many opportunities and take many detours.

But so what?

A trading system built on real money losses is the most solid. A relationship perspective forged through stumbling is the most sober. We have no seniors to rely on, no back-up to retreat to. Every step we take is slow and heavy, but every step is solid. We don't have the effortless intuition of "naturally gifted players," but we have a thick manual filled with our mistakes—every loss is clearly recorded, every error is thoroughly analyzed.

The confidence we were not born with, we have to earn bit by bit. The truths no one taught us, we have to comprehend one by one.

The crypto market is brutal. It has no price limits, no circuit breakers, no regulatory safety net, and no one to take responsibility for your losses. It's like a silent giant beast—whether you're a newbie or an old hand, whether you have billions behind you or just a few hundred U's of capital, it treats you the same. Here, the only thing that can protect you is your own knowledge.

So I'm still learning. Learning how to interpret on-chain data, how to judge project fundamentals, how to quantify market sentiment, how to manage my own greed and fear. I know this road is long—maybe I'll walk my whole life and never reach so-called "financial freedom"—but I no longer care. I no longer fantasize about getting rich overnight, no longer believe in the myth of 100x or 1000x, no longer mistake luck for skill.

I just want to be someone who can survive the bull and bear cycles. Even if I'm slow, even if I'm clumsy, even if I have to face loss and self-doubt alone in countless late nights, I won't turn back. Because I know better than anyone—going back only leads to a road that ends clearly in sight; moving forward, even if it's all fog, hides infinite possibilities.

If fate dictates that someone must fill this cognitive gap, let it be me. If a generation must be sacrificed, then sacrifice mine. I'm not afraid of taking detours; what I fear is—not even being qualified to take a detour.
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