By mid-2023 I wasn’t tired of making; I was tired of a gallery wall behaving like a leaderboard. Every image shrunk to a thumbnail on a ticker. I got swept up in it early and learned fast that I can't create healthily in that room. I’m the kind of person who reopens the file fifteen times, zooms to 400%, then deletes it out of self sabotage. I’m human: insecure, hypercritical, wired a little differently by early-life turbulence. When the room turns into a scoreboard, my work turns into an audition.

I don’t think art and money are enemies. Rent is real; collectors want something that lasts. But when the chart becomes the point, the image goes blank. I’ve stared at that blankness on my own screen. Refreshing a slow mint, bargaining with myself, wanting to yank the piece. I left it up, and hated that the decision felt like a market move, not an artistic one.

It wasn’t just my page. The space grew heavy with speculation: Profile-picture projects built to flip, white papers that promised worlds and delivered Discords, platforms optimized for day traders over ideas. A few broke through with vision but most left people holding bags. The grift stopped being an exception and started feeling like the frame.

That atmosphere seeped into the studio. Nights to sunrise, deleting more than I saved, testing whether an idea could breathe without a price attached. The longer I worked, the stronger the critic got. Early on I’d release anything with a pulse, now most drafts die on the screen. Those hours weighed more than any chart.

So I turned the instinct to cut into a project. In August of 2023 I opened a burn window with Manifold: send ten tokens you no longer believe in. Failed mints, rugs, scams, and claim a piece of my work for free. I called it The Great Purge. It was symbolic cleanse of the space, a way to let go of tokens that were only implemented to extract. By the end, 43,480 tokens were gone. What stayed with me were the messages: “I kept this out of stubbornness.” “Needed a clean folder.” “Felt good to let it go.” For once, the only graph that mattered was relief.

Since then I’ve tried to ship work with fingerprints: trial, error, rework. Some pieces sprint; some walk. I let both teach me. I use a simple test now: if a piece still speaks after I’ve ignored the metrics for a month, it leaves the studio. If I need the metrics to hear it, it goes back into the fire.

Art and money will keep sharing a table. I’m fine with that. I’ve just changed where I sit. I make the thing first and measure it by the pulse it keeps when the numbers go quiet. If the chart lights up after that, great. If not, the work still has a life and I can live with that.