Something happened to the coworking café this week.
I noticed it on Tuesday. By Thursday it was undeniable. By Friday it had become the dominant activity of the room, more dominant than the actual work, more dominant than the networking that doesn't happen, more dominant than the ambient laptop presence that everyone performs for no audience in particular.
Everyone is watching charts.
Let me describe the room.
It is a coworking space / coffee shop in Southeast Asia. You know this room. You have been in this room or a version of it, the exposed brick, the plants, the sign about collaboration that nobody reads after the first day, the wifi that works until it doesn't. Twenty-something people at long wooden tables with the focused expression of people who are definitely working.
They are not working.
Every screen I can see from my chair by the window, the chair I have been sitting in at the same time every day for three weeks, the chair that is now mine in the unspoken territorial logic of shared workspace, is showing a chart.
Green candles. Red candles. Lines that go up and then down and then up again in the specific way that makes the brain release something that is either insight or dopamine and is probably both.
The man two tables to my left has three windows open.
Binance on the left, his portfolio, the numbers, Bitcoin sitting at a price that would have seemed impossible two years ago and now seems like a floor rather than a ceiling.
TradingView in the centre, a chart with more lines on it than I have ever learned to read. Moving averages, RSI, something called a Fibonacci retracement that sounds like it was invented by someone who wanted trading to feel like mathematics rather than gambling. It does feel like mathematics. It is also gambling. Both things are true simultaneously and the lines do not resolve this.
On the right: a fear and greed index. A dial. Currently pointing at extreme greed, which is either a warning or a confirmation depending on what you already believe and which YouTuber you listened to this morning.
He is looking at all three windows simultaneously in the way you look at something you cannot stop looking at even though looking at it is not producing any useful action.
His actual work, a document, something that appears to be a client deliverable, is minimised in the taskbar. It has been minimised since I sat down.
The woman by the window is on a voice note.
Not a client call. A voice note to someone called Marco, I can tell it's Marco because she said Marco three times in the first thirty seconds. She is explaining, with the specific urgency of someone who has already decided but needs to say it out loud to confirm it, whether to hold or take profit.
Marco apparently thinks take profit. She apparently thinks hold. The voice note is the argument she is making to herself using Marco as the structure.
The Solana position she is describing is large enough that the decision is genuinely consequential. The voice note is six minutes long. The client work beside her laptop has not moved.
The guy in the corner is watching Solana.
Specifically he is watching Solana go up 3.2% and then down 1.8% and then up 2.1% and then sideways for eleven minutes in a way that is either consolidation before the next move or the beginning of a retracement depending on which the next candle decides to be.
He has not touched his design software in forty minutes. The software is open, a half-finished brand identity for what appears to be a hospitality client, the logo in progress, notes visible on the artboard. It is sitting behind the chart the way the actual work always sits behind the thing that is more immediately compelling.
I know because I have been watching him the way he is watching Solana.
I recognise all of this.
I have been in this room before. Not this specific room, the room inside my head during a bull market, the one where the chart is always one tab away and the work is always the thing I was about to get back to. I have watched Bitcoin do something and spent forty-five minutes reading about what it might do next, which is not the same as the work and does not produce the same outcome but produces a feeling that is adjacent to productivity and therefore easy to confuse with it.
The chart is more interesting than the work. This is simply true. The work is the thing I do to afford the life. The chart is the thing that might mean I don't have to do the work for as long as I thought. The math of the chart, if it goes right, is more compelling than the math of the invoice.
This is not irrational. It is a completely logical response to the situation.
It is also how you end up with a half-finished brand identity and a Solana position you haven't decided whether to hold.
I closed my chart twenty minutes ago.
The Bitcoin position is where it is. It will be where it is whether I watch it or not. Solana will do what Solana does, the thing about Solana is that it always does something, sometimes in your direction and sometimes not, and watching it does not change which direction it chooses.
XRP is XRP. It has been about to change everything for eight years. I have made my peace with this.
The work is on the screen. The client is waiting. The invoice, when it is sent, will produce money with a certainty that the chart does not offer regardless of what the fear and greed index is pointing at.
I open the document.
The man two tables over just made a sound. A quiet sound, not alarm, not celebration. The sound of a number moving in a direction.
I do not look up.
Probably.
Andrew — No Refunds •••