I Lost My Mind in Solana Meme Coin Season
Dog coins, degens, and Discord noise turned my Christmas break into a Solana-induced dopamine spiral
It was winter 2022, and I had three weeks off from work. I had no real plans. I was supposed to rest. Sleep more. Cook meals from scratch and maybe even get back to the yoga studio.
Instead, I fell face-first into Solana meme season.
What started as a quick check on Twitter to see if I had missed anything soon turned into a full-body immersion. I stopped reading books and started scanning price floors. I swapped my slow breakfasts for liquidity charts and traded my history podcasts for late-night Spaces where animal profile pictures yelled “send it!”
I wasn’t just lurking anymore. I was deep in Telegram channels where the links in pinned messages were broken, the memes were offensive, and the mods hadn’t slept in days. Phantom was always open. Fifteen Solscan tabs cluttered my browser like digital breadcrumbs. Discord notifications never stopped, and every ping felt urgent.
I was checking my wallet in the bathroom during Christmas dinner, convincing myself it was harmless, just a quick glance. But by then, I was already two frantic weeks into chasing coins with no fundamentals. I was chasing hype and felt both electric and deeply unstable.
Things only escalated after Christmas. I declined invitations to go out. I lost track of time. I missed swaps on Jupiter because liquidity dried up in real time while I double-checked contract addresses. I bought winners like Bonk and WIF early but sold them way too soon, and held other coins straight into oblivion. I started staying up past midnight, then past two, and found myself seriously considering switching to US time just to keep up.
Some of the coins I chased during those weeks are now so far gone that Phantom doesn’t even bother showing a dollar value. Just a dash.
By January, I was completely drained. Three weeks of nonstop scanning, flipping, refreshing, and second-guessing had burned me out. I was relieved to go back to work. I closed the tabs. I left the chats. I tried to remember what it felt like to go a full hour without opening Phantom. To be the kind of person who didn’t buy coins just because some random person on my timeline said “based community” and “Birdeye trending” in the same sentence.
Back in a more normal rhythm, I kept wondering how people live like this full-time. How people manage to stay plugged in and reactive every single day without losing themselves. The noise is constant. The timelines are endless. The pressure to be early, to stay sharp, to always have a take never stops.
There is a cost to the way Web3 consumes your attention. It never starts with burnout. It starts with curiosity. You check in for a moment and find yourself pulled into a system that rarely lets you leave on your own terms. It is not just time lost or sleep sacrificed. It is the slow erosion of your focus. The way money, identity, entertainment, and obsession start to blur, until you forget what you were ever doing before all this. But at some point, you realise that nothing is going to slow down for you. If you want breathing room, you have to carve it out yourself.
I don’t have a solution. But if Web3 is going to keep expanding, we need to talk more about how to stay grounded inside it. About how to log off, pause, and protect our attention. Because if we don’t, the pace will burn us out faster than any rug ever could.
Sometimes I still open Phantom and scroll through some of the coins I bought during those chaotic weeks — Epep, Chihuahua, CatWifHat — now so far underwater that Phantom does not even show a dollar value. Just a little dash. I do not expect anything. I just look. And then I close it again, before I can even think about starting this madness again.
For something more reflective, explore my other pieces on the challenge of communicating Ethereum’s value and what DAOs can learn from a now-erased, lawless city in Hong Kong. And if you’ve ever been pulled into a meme season spiral like I was, feel free to share it in the comments. I’d love to hear how far down the rabbit hole you went.
I Lost My Mind in Solana Meme Season was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.