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The real brain melter was the societal culture shift.

I grew up witnessing “the end of history” with my own eyes. People were getting wiser and kinder year after year, decade after decade. It was like a feedback loop of positive changes, the only way was up.

Then 2010s hit and I’m still processing the 180 degrees shift.

Fucking thank you! This has been hard for me to put into words. (I'm on the older end of Gen-X)

Facebook and unregulated social media. Up to now most governments in the world don't even have a clue or idea that the internet is a very powerful tool that should actually be regulated because there are very evil people who will always act in bad faith to manipulate others for power and control. The Golden era of the internet is definitely over, I think 2016 was a defined shift that will be recorded by historians.

Holy shit thank you. You finally put it into words for me. The shift of 'the internet is the greatest tool for knowledge, to what it is now, some cancerous corpo bloated bullshit that ignorant people are harnessing just to find others to support their shitty beliefs. Been such a hard thing to watch and understand how the fuck we got here.

Going from seeing nothing but possibilities when I heard about some new device or software coming out to dreading what they are going to remove or break has been one of the most depressing parts about my life.

Hell, I was looking to replace my 10 year old mouse last weekend and couldn't find one that was equivalent or better. I even asked people who were more into computer shit than me and I felt like I was taking crazy pills reading their responses. I ended up just fixing the problem myself rather than replacing it.

It's a decentralized pyramid scheme. It's a way for the rich to syphon money from the gullible and gambling addicts.
That's all there is to it, it's not really hard to understand.

everyone either loses money in crypto or makes very little

And this is why people misunderstand crypto. The point isn't to make money, and it never was. Profiteers have twisted it into that to make a quick buck from pump and dump schemes, but it shouldn't be considered "investing" in any sense of the word.

Cryptocurrency should have two primary uses:

1. Facilitate transactions - needs successo widescale adoption by merchants and fast, cheap transactions
2. Store of value, like a bank account

BTC transaction costs are way to high and slow for #1, so it's unlikely to get enough volume of regular transactions to even out valuations. The lightning network helps, but I think it also has problems. And unfortunately, coins with lower transaction costs that should scale better either get banned (e.g. privacy coins in some areas) or don't catch on.

I'm still holding out hope that it'll stabilize and become useful for transactions, but I'm not putting any significant money in until that happens because I don't see it as an investment.