Courtesy Reddit

Stop. Don’t do it. You will drive yourself nutty. I mean it. You will find yourself savagely pulling your hair out. Bitcoin is a volatile asset after all. It’s worse than your bipolar girlfriend. One minute she’s gently cozying up to you, and showering you with kisses and caresses. The next minute she’s screaming at you from the tops of her lungs. What’s worse, there’s a knife gripped in her hand. Your best bet? Stay away from her and pray she takes her meds.

Sure, I jest, but obsessing over the price of Bitcoin is as illogical as it is unhealthy. Unless you are a serious day trader (or in BTC’s case, day and night trader), there’s really no reason to be staring longingly at your computer screen and/or smartphone 24/7. You need to sleep eventually. You need to eat. You need to socialize and be a spouse or partner. You need to be human after all.

Forgive me for preaching. Truth is, No one is more guilty of falling into the obsessively-check-the-price trap than I am. But allow me to back up a bit. Allow me to provide a little perspective. I’m a fiction writer by trade. I write thrillers, mysteries, and detective novels. We live in an age of instant communication and digital data access. What this means is, unlike the recent past when I had to wait six months to see how many books I sold over any given time period via the publisher’s royalty statement, I can now go online and check my up to the minute real-time stats. Never mind my stats from six months ago. I can now see how many books I’ve sold over the past hour.

Easy…let’s call it…information delivery, is enough to drive any writer to drink (we already drink too much!). Instead of focusing on the long term, we now find ourselves with tunnel vision, focusing only on the here and now. If our sales aren’t to our liking at any given moment in time, we suddenly view ourselves as a failure. It’s a maddening way to live.

The same can be said for how we view Bitcoin’s minute-to-minute price. We find ourselves with tunnel vision, focusing only on the immediate price, forgetting entirely about the long term game. We forget that for every spike in price, the digital asset will almost surely drop two or three times that same amount and do so quickly. But over the course of many months and years, it will almost surely reach new highs until eventually the price will bubble and inflate to $50K per Bitcoin or even $100K, and that’s being conservative.

Just because I can check my book sales stats every minute of every day doesn’t mean I should. And just because you can check the price of BTC every second of every day doesn’t mean you should either. Don’t be the ship captain who falls prey to the evil mermaid temptresses who lure his vessel towards the rocks and what will surely be his doom. Stay the course over the long term, and you will achieve your long term goals.

Obsessing in the short term can only lead to a case of long term anxiety, or worse, total insanity.