A Love Letter to The DAO: I'm Exhausted In Love With The DAO

I still love you very much, DAO, and I intend to spend the rest of my life growing with you. But for now, I'm going to focus more on the DAO that I call home.

DAO, I fell in love with you at first sight, and I have never moved on. At the beginning of my acquaintance, you are a brand new and eternal new world in my eyes, an open universe with unlimited potential and passion, and a fascinating new life. chapter. The future seems within reach, while the past begins to blur and slowly disappear into the long river of time.

I love you, DAO, but we must talk. You are special to me and I am willing to give my all, but I also miss my other life. DAO, you need to become more mature and keep growing. I often tell people that you are too rare to find, but you still have some problems to solve before you can really thrive. Otherwise, these great technological innovations that we build in the depths of Discord every day will not be able to reach their full potential, let alone drive social change in the real world.

Building new worlds and ways of life is hard work, and if we don't take a critical eye at what we're building and where we're headed, we won't be able to reach its full potential and deliver on the promise of those "revolutionary" . While you will change the way we coordinate social affairs and the world, we need to really think about what kind of world we are building and what our vision for the blockchain world looks like. Are we building for cyberpunk or cypherpunk, sunpunk or moonpunk, DAO punk?

We also have to understand who you really are: how are you organized and managed? How will funds be deployed to fund projects and contributors? How to properly incentivize the tokenized community to fulfill its mission in an efficient and sustainable manner? And what do you have to do before you're ready to scale up?

I notice you play at the intersection of contribution and collaboration, coordination and consensus, cohesion and community, all fueled by capital through a tokenized incentive model. These traits are unique strengths that build you, but we don't really understand how these traits fit together, so we're experimenting with what's possible in a decentralized and free manner.

We're trying to build these new things with old tools, which disincentivizes contributors, makes DAO's functionality impossible, and ends up causing confusion and inaction. Your many model processes are difficult to coordinate and manage. Incentivizing long-term contributors and retaining them is an emerging issue across the ecosystem, with full-time DAOers starting to burn out.

I was ecstatic during my first three months with The DAO, a state of "fugue" fueled by hopes, dreams, and coffee. I'm constantly going to various voice channels, clicking to unmute, and quickly starting to engage in discussions. I spend 16 to 18 hours a day on these channels without anyone prodding me. Until then, I’d been writing in my basement, I was a lawyer, and while I’d been successful in so many ways, I’d never felt such a deep sense of purpose and belonging. State of War is a poor analogy, but the feeling of being on the brink of the unknown, maybe even a little bit taboo and dangerous, outweighs the excitement. It was the only thing I wanted to do, and it permeated every cell of my being, and it still does.

As days turned into weeks, as I kept hitting new server links, meeting new people, new communities, and colliding with new opportunities, my Discord server list expanded rapidly and my DM list grew even faster amazing. I spend as much time talking to people on DMs and Discord as I do creating and posting content or building a community. Anonymous intimacy became my way of life, and I created a Twitter account just for it.

I'm not a programmer, but I now know what it's like to create new things in new places. DAO is a design tool for self-discovery, which pushes the boundaries of our inner space and expands the frontiers of technology and human imagination.

It's everything I wanted but didn't know.

I learned not only how to use a DAO, but also how to create a DAO: how to build Discord, how to coordinate new forms of consensus, how to rally and incentivize new communities, how to create and publish content. Three months later, I joined the core team of two DAOs, took on multiple roles in another DAO, consulted more on community development, and was often asked to join and build new areas, including privately funded Web3 company. It is no exaggeration to say that I have become a full-time DAO success story myself.

I am married with young children. I haven't worked outside since the outbreak. Although we are always at home and trying to maintain a harmonious family relationship, due to the excessive obsession with the DAO, the family relationship has become precarious.

Falling in love with The DAO and the people in it, I almost completely abandoned my family, including my wife and a three week old son. The pull of the DAO space was so strong that I didn't even realize I had left the real world. My home life was slowly getting worse, but I was too busy to notice: I didn't even have time to think about the consequences of my wife's increasingly angry, pleading expressions, or neglecting my tender, sweet children Some of our requests to our father. I woke up early, went to bed late, and I never stopped working until Christmas day.

My kids asked me not to work on Christmas and I didn't. Christmas was the first time I stopped working, and it made it long and difficult. After three months of working 16-hour days and suddenly stopping work, I became restless, grumpy, sad and depressed.

Before I had kids, Christmas was my favorite holiday. Christmas allows us to relive our childhood, even after having children, and having a wonderful time together can help us strengthen our family bonds. But last Christmas, I had a hard time getting interested and had a strong desire to spend it with my friends on Discord. I worked so closely with these people for three months that I almost forgot what it was like to be close to family at home.

I neglected my wife and four kids and got lost in the metaverse. Despite the warmth of the fireplace, happy kids playing happily in our living room, happy holidays, I still want to sit at my computer desk.

And it was at this moment that I realized the seriousness of the situation.

I started thinking about what I had done in just three months and realized my life was unbalanced and unstable. I understand that the creativity that allowed me to thrive is drying up, I no longer look forward to joining Discord as much as I used to, I am emotionally and mentally drained, what I am doing is not sustainable, I am exhausted . I still love all the work and all the people, but realize that this pace is not sustainable for high-level output, creativity, and work that requires deep thought.

After months of deep immersion in The DAO, it was time to get back home. I now find a better balance between DAO and family, creativity is returning, and family life is gradually becoming happier.

My wife and kids say I'm still obsessed with work for a long time, but I'm happier when I'm at home. Working hours are slowly reduced from 16 hours to 10-12 hours. I often type with one hand while holding my six-month-old son in the other. This seems like a good start for now. I don't have a lot of time to listen to a jazz album or read a new book, or do yoga, meditate, or write in a journal, but I have time to play chess with my son, play in the backyard with the kids, and a hike in the woods is great feel.

As I get better at saying "no" and shortening my work hours, I'll settle into a sustainable cadence of loving family life while maintaining the productivity and creativity of the DAO. I've talked to a lot of people about what a full-time DAOlife is like, remember you need to have a family life outside of the DAO too.

I still love you very much, DAO, and I intend to spend the rest of my life growing with you. But for now, I'm going to focus more on the DAO that I call home.

I will still be in your world, but I don't have time to wander, to think so much, to get lost in your forest. But that's ok, the spring I'm camping in is good, but I'm just going to settle here for a while, and then I'll go back to my other life.

My wife just started an alumni artist Facebook group. They are sharing ideas and getting to know each other, helping each other work better for a nominal fee, and discussing how they can collaborate and use the network to help them work better. They want to know how to get paid in a more equitable and sustainable way. Whenever she tells me what she's doing, I say, DAO? She rolled her eyes, but gave me a small smile too. I know she will eventually ask me to help her build a DAO, and until then, I will continue to learn and grow with you. We're still figuring out how to implement the DAO, but as long as we keep focusing on what we're doing, I'm sure the DAO will get better and better.

This article was first published on February 23, 2022.

Written by: Hiro Kennelly, BanklessDAO Member

Compilation: Aididiao