One Last Phone Call

In 2052, you just want to go back and make one last phone call.

You lay peacefully in a cemetery, buried approximately five feet underground. You were killed in 2023 instantaneously in an unfortunate accident when a nail gun malfunctioned and sent a handful of nails through your neck as you walked past a construction site on the sidewalk. Your family was devastated and grieved with many loved ones, friends, and acquaintances who attended your funeral.

Your NFT collection, now immobilized, would slowly grow to become prophetic.

Some tokens you owned of course slowly died as communities gravitated to new projects, but a few surged in value. Those few are now worth thousands of ETH, gaining ever higher value from their unique early positioning as the start of a movement that indeed consumed the world. Visitors to your now quiet and anonymous wallet are amazed at your early curation abilities, stare in awe at pieces of generative art now at truly eye-watering levels of value, and wonder why this wallet’s progress came to a screeching halt.

However, you never told your family how to recover your assets or where your seed phrase was stored.

They were vaguely familiar with your endeavors. They know the assets are worth something valuable, but never bothered to figure out how to access the NFTs, figuring the value was not truly sizable and instead most likely included the “NFTs that went to zero.” Even if they knew the value, they had no way to recover your wallet. So they simply mourn your loss and wish you were still around.

You stare down from heaven and watch your parents enter their final years.

They read novels, go on long walks, help their neighbors fix a broken fence, and cook dinners. You observe your siblings get married, raise children with morals, fight about time spent watching TV, shower with fresh soap, run at sunset, and love. Your friends work challenging white-collar jobs, overspend on new cars, and drink margaritas at their favorite Mexican restaurants.

But as your elderly mother arrives with flowers at your grave on your birthday and smiles quietly with glistening eyes thinking about the life you didn’t get to live, you experience a now annual painful reminder: the NFTs never really mattered.

What mattered was the people who attended your funeral.

And now all you want is to go back to the day of your accident and log off Twitter and stop doom scrolling.

Stop browsing OpenSea and stop hunting for the next grail.

Close Discord and stop trying to find alpha.

All so you can call your mom one last time.

Just to tell her you love her.