Benji

• Their circumstances, like mine, were not fixed; our highs and lows, successes and failures, are fluid and ever-changing.

• I believe we can all benefit from the practice of mudita to unburden our hearts and minds from everyday comparison and jealousy, and connect to more expansive, open-hearted joy.

• As the Dalai Lama said, “There are so many people in this world, it simply makes sense to make their happiness a source of our own. Then our chances of experiencing joy are enhanced 6 billion-to-one. Those are very good odds.”

• Begin by taking a few deep breaths. Feel your body on the cushion or chair and relax into your posture.

• What do I have in my life to be grateful for?

• When you’re ready, bring awareness to your heart. Feel what is present in your heart with kindness and nonjudgment.

• May your happiness and good fortune continue to grow and increase.

• May your joy not leave you.

• May you recognize and appreciate your good fortune.

• As Peter Thiel observed in his famous Stanford lecture, founders occupy a peculiar place in the Valley's collective psyche, simultaneously worshipped and vulnerable to sacrifice.

• The Valley's founding stories often follow ancient mythological patterns: the outcast-turned-hero (Jobs), the boy-king (Zuckerberg), the Prometheus figure bringing divine fire to mortals (Musk).

• As Thiel observes, the evolution of founders into sacred figures follows a consistent trajectory: the initial blessing (funding), a period of adversity (the "valley of death"), and eventual triumph or failure.

• When founders succeed at scale, their companies can transcend mere business to become something approaching cosmic centers.

• True sacredness is rooted in forms of value that cannot be bought or sold.

• The crypto space serves as a concentrated laboratory for understanding how sacred narratives can be corrupted into sophisticated fraud.

• The attention economy has created a new priesthood, where the sacred rite of "founding" requires no actual founding, only the ability to perform the outward signs of “founding.”

• When a critical mass of sacred narratives is exposed as cynical manipulations, the ability to discern genuine visionaries diminishes.

• This essay is less a prescription than a reckoning, a meditation on what we stand to lose.