Liquidity Kills: Check Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself
We are our own worst enemy. Having been in Silicon Valley, I’ve seen far too many cases of people blowing themselves up after a massive exit. As exited founder Steven Simoni said: “Liquidity F-cks you up!”
As many folks have worked most of our careers to get this liquidity (myself included), you may think: what are you talking about? This is the goal. Liquidity, financial wealth and independence. This is the dream. But like everything this cuts both ways.
I saw a tweet https://x.com/_The_Prophet__/status/1999972581135503541 on X that explains exactly why this happens:
“If you woke up a billionaire tomorrow, the most dangerous thing in the room would be you.
Not greed. Not enemies. Not bad investments. You.
Because sudden abundance does one thing almost no one admits: it destroys constraint, and constraint is what keeps identity coherent. Before money, reality pushes back. After money, reality goes quiet. That silence is not freedom. It’s loss of feedback. Most people mistake that silence for arrival.
They fill it with motion. Projects. Statements. Philanthropy. Visibility. Legacy narratives.
That’s how they rot. The real first act is restraint to preserve signal integrity. When constraint disappears, your thoughts get louder. Your intuitions feel divine. Your worst ideas arrive with confidence. Your ego stops being checked by friction.
That’s why billionaires get weird. Not because they’re evil. Because they are no longer corrected.”
Now I’m not saying you shouldn’t go for the big exit. You absolutely should. Money is a tool. Money is energy. Money is a score card. And especially in a place like America, money is survival. The more money you have, the better your life and those of your loved ones will be. The issue is that money enables everything and anything. Any vice you have. It means you can do anything. Worse, maybe it means you can do nothing. Literally nothing. So your brain starts to rot.
But Sightbringer has a cure. A way to deal with this so you don’t go crazy when it happens.
“So the real first move is re-introduce resistance on purpose. Delay. Isolation. Silence. Unobservable time.
You rebuild an artificial gravity well so your thinking doesn’t drift into fantasy. Only once you’ve proven to yourself that your internal signal still works without external correction do you act. And here’s the part people don’t like hearing: If you don’t do this, the money will eventually control you. Not through need. Through narrative.
You’ll start justifying. Explaining. Performing meaning. Believing your own story. At that point, the money has already won.
So the truth is: The first thing I’d do is protect my inner coherence as if it were the only scarce asset left. Because at that level, it is.”
Source: https://x.com/_The_Prophet__/status/1999972581135503541
Basically don’t change anything in your first year. Keep doing some kind of work. Don’t scale up your lifestyle. It helps to keep hobbies you had from before. It helps to stay curious and curate your circle. To stay fit, healthy and strong. Do everything you did when you were working toward wealth and liquidity. Keep internal coherence. It helps to have religion. It helps to have a bigger mission in life now that you are post economic.
Don’t be the cautionary tale we hear about all the time in Silicon Valley, Wall Street or Crypto. People who lose everything at a time when they supposedly gain everything, everything materially that is.