What Seeds Needs: The path to mainstream adoption as a viable, alternative economic system
I had a more involved draft of this. But after reflecting, and going through my own process of making a Request for Help after recently being robbed, I realized this message is simpler and more streamlined than I originally thought: what Seeds needs to hit the 10% adoption threshold at which rapid acceleration starts to happen - and then to eventually go mainstream - is the following.
But first let’s talk about the problem Seeds is working to transcend: the dysfunction in the old economic system.
It worked well enough for its time, but it seems like we’re outgrowing it. Many of us no longer want to be forced to trade our time (finite) for money (made up), as most of us are today. The old system makes things zero-sum and transactional that needn’t be, and compartmentalizes giving and building abundance oneself, because it presumes all people only act out of self-interest all the time, a fallacy (and why non-profits have to exist).
Seeds seeks to transcend all of that, because we help people build wealth through giving, and empower them to ask for help when they need it too.
What Seeds needs to succeed at scale is more generous, kind people with a healthy balance of masculine and feminine energy to
Give to others through Seeds
LP their SEEDS in our mutual aid pool to help it grow (and earn returns/potentially bonuses & airdrops)
Buy SEEDS on Uniswap to also help the mutual aid pool grow
Share about Seeds with others
And we can go about achieving those things in a variety of ways.
To get there, Seeds needs to have that healthy balance energetically and practically within the ecosystem itself, which means our team - and me especially as the person stewarding it - need to have that too.
There are product improvements that are involved, better communication approaches to try, new teammates to find, etc. But at the end of the day, the crux of the thing is really this.
But though it’s simple, I don’t think it’s easy - yet - because I think Seeds is ahead of the evolution of Earth in this area, and we’re going to have to blaze a trail. I think this is a big part of the reason I’ve had so much trouble with engineering hires over the years, though my own imbalance of masc/fem was a huge part of that as well (I would be too deferential and would come from a place of scarcity, and I made about every hiring mistake under the sun - but the rampant misogyny in the tech sector also played a large role).
So it’s about finding and connecting with the people who have the capacity for this healthy feminine/masculine balance. But at the same time, I expect that few of them are likely consciously aware of this balance as a thing yet…so Seeds needs to bring it to them. In terms of traction channels, I think YouTube is currently our best bet. TikTok was previously a great traction channel for Seeds, but in the last few years it’s become terrible in my opinion/experience. It’s overtaken by capitalism and various binaries that make meaningful communication much harder. So my immediate plan is to focus on YT.
A reference point.
Some backstory:
Maybe you’ve heard me talk about the idea of a Spiral Course of Progress. I think it’s the way humans actually grow. A healthy combination of ‘masculine’ energies that are linear and projective, and ‘feminine’ relational, energetic cycles.
Several years back, I learned that the Spiral Course of Progress is the way our solar system moves through space - not only orbiting the sun, but also hurtling through the Milky Way on a projectile path at staggering speeds.
Seeing the Spiral Course of Progress play out in nature makes sense to me…and I think it’s time that it’s modeled within our human-made systems. It’s time to grow past the two-dimensional, default-masculine ‘Hero’s Journey.’ Narrative storytelling should model the Spiral Course of Progress instead. It’s past time to transcend capitalism, with its two-dimensional line graphs that are supposed to go up and up forever, regardless of the practical feasibility of that at all, regardless of the human and environmental cost. Seeds is on the scene.
But what do I mean when I speak about a ‘healthy balance of masc and fem?’
I think we’ve been caught in a trajectory dominated by wounded masculine energy, which exists in humans of all genders, for millennia (relatedly, I had a past life regression that showed something at the fall of Atlantis, and I completely believe it. I made a YouTube video about meeting someone who felt she remembered me from then, if you’re interested in checking it out. It’s kind of a crazy story). And the wounded masculine has oppressed healthy feminine energy, leaving it maimed.
The wounded masculine is aggressive and outwardly striving. It causes war and tells you you need to ‘work all the time.’ The wounded feminine is contracted. It hates its body, it tries to mold itself to fit the wounded masculine’s stated ideal, in order to survive in a world the wounded masculine designed. The wounded feminine does not support the healthy feminine because it feels it isn’t safe to do so. The wounded masculine actively attacks it.
The healthy masculine is a good, solid structure. It creates a quality container for the best of the healthy feminine, its creativity and wildness. The healthy masculine wants to support the healthy feminine in all its expressions. It protects and honors nurturance and receptivity, instead of badgering and draining it, as the wounded masculine does.
We have the potential to balance healthy feminine and healthy masculine within us all. FWIW, on a personal note, I’ve also realized that this balance is what I find most attractive in potential romantic partners. I’m thinking this may become more of a thing.
I don’t want to get caught up in semantics, and you definitely don’t have to agree with my spiritual ideas in order for Seeds to help you, but I think it’s important to share this framework of thought for the people out there who hear it and go like, yes, that resonates, and I’m relieved to hear.
So Seeds seeks to embody that healthy balance of feminine and masculine energies within a new kind of economic system to supplant the old, because the old way is more and more obviously leading to bad outcomes for the vast majority of people, and a solution like Seeds seems to be what our near-term future requires.
Depleting the Feminine
In early 2020, I was so broke, after many years of putting almost all my funds into Seeds when few others would, that I couldn’t pay the rent on my studio apartment, and I received an eviction notice. Over 98% of venture capital funding, the sector that invests in tech organizations, goes to white male-founded organizations. This is a big part of the reason Big Tech is so dysfunctional, and more evidence of the over-focus on the masculine in the old economic system.
Like a lot of women, I was very conditioned to serve others before even considering my own needs. So much so that it was only when I had nowhere else to turn that it even occurred to me to use Seeds, the organization I founded to help people, when I needed help myself.
I didn’t have a husband or live-in romantic partner to help pay the bills, and my immediate family, though financially able, didn’t help when I asked. I was conditioned to kind of semi-consciously take this on, as I had never received enough support from them in any sense…as in like, when I think back on this, I knew they would be unresponsive even if things for me were dire, but I was still sort of turning away from fully feeling the pain of being shunned by them even in greatest need because the hurt of that was too much to bear - it was a root wounding, and at a deep level I thought it was me, that it was because of some deficiency in me that meant I didn’t deserve to feel sustained…but through a ton of work, I’ve very recently moved through that. Like as recently as the last few days, when navigating this section of the spiral again….but more on that in a bit.
When I did use Seeds to make the Request for Help, I felt embarrassed. I should be ashamed of myself for not being able to pay my rent, right? Even though the concept of rent, especially when the landlord is a shitty corporation like mine was then, is arguably the biggest albatross weighing down the working class, a capitalistic imperative to keep most people trapped in billionaire servitude.
The systems around me had shunned and abandoned me to varying degrees, and I internalized it, devaluing the work I’d done for many years to keep Seeds alive - through being held in jail in Kenya without cause, through homelessness - so that Seeds could serve others, and, at scale, work toward the mission of helping humanity transcend the bind that transactional, zero-sum late-stage capitalism leaves all of us in, as it divorces the ideas of giving and building abundance oneself. I devalued my work and my person because my family and society at large had taught me to do so, and I hadn’t yet healed enough in myself to bring awareness to this and release it once and for all. I know I’m not alone in this - it’s a wounded feminine hallmark.
Within 24 hours of making that 2020 request, I had received enough money to cover the rent, over $1300. I was so humbled and grateful.
You can see on the Request for Help page that I felt at that time that I was on the cusp of leaving monetary scarcity behind…and things definitely positively transformed in some ways that were impossible to predict.
My 2020 Seeds Request for Help.
COVID happened, and more funding was available for small businesses regardless of who you were. I expected the 3rd Bitcoin Halving in May 2020 to kick off a new cryptocurrency market cycle, and my trades became very profitable. I started using TikTok regularly, and finally got views when I spoke about my belief that cryptocurrency was going up, and I wanted nice people - not the stereotype of the Greedy Crypto Bro - to benefit instead. I grew an audience, and it became easy to connect with people who were interested in what’s now called the How to Build Abundance in Cryptocurrency course, because mainstream awareness that cryptocurrency was a thing that could be beneficial had grown to a sufficient level.
A little over 13 months after I made that Request for Help, because I couldn’t afford rent on my studio apartment, my pup and I moved into a 3 bedroom Hollywood Hills estate home just vacated by a movie star. I had made a manifestation list for a new home - one of the items was ‘paying rent feels effortless.’ After I moved in, I realized it checked every box on that list.
And importantly, my own 2020 experience making a Request for Help allowed me to recognize and address a missing piece in the Seeds model - generous people should be receiving SEEDS in thanks *because* they gave. And that unlocked everything.
It also wasn’t a coincidence that just before a bunch of money started to come in, I set boundaries with my family. I went No Contact with most of them, sending letters to clearly explain what I felt I had been clearly explaining for many years, though it had not been heard. If any of y’all grew up in a Narcissistic Family Dynamic in which you were the Scapegoat, you know what I mean, and you know how much emotional work it takes to get to the point at which you understand going No Contact is the best option. It’s almost always the choice you make after you’ve tried literally everything else, and it made my life a lot better.
And once I’d set those boundaries, the drain on my energy drastically decreased. I think it was the definitive reason that the monetary abundance coming toward me and Seeds suddenly surged.
Hitting the Same Chord
Fast forward to late 2024. I struck the same note on the Spiral Course of Progress an octave above, further along the coil.
In 2021 to 2022, as the cryptocurrency cycled kicked off by the 3rd Bitcoin Halving in May 2020 reached its apogee, my financial situation had become better than it had ever been, and by a large margin. Besides SEEDS going up like 3000x, the driving factor was my newfound ability to use my experience as a former pro stock trader who started buying Bitcoin in 2013 to teach the How to Build Abundance in Cryptocurrency course, which helped learned how to trade crypto, and raised awareness about and brought in funds to support Seeds. It also acted as a distribution mechanism for SEEDS cryptocurrency, because we offered them to all who bought the course, making the expertise I was sharing effectively free.
The hope was that people would then use their SEEDS to LP in the mutual aid pool, helping it grow as they simultaneously earned fees, and potentially bonuses and airdrops as well.
That allowed us to build the ‘marketplace’ for SEEDS, even though centralized exchanges had ignored us (which I think may have been a blessing), and even centralized platforms like CoinMarketcap, which are supposed to give info about literally every cryptocurrency there is, and therefore contain a lot of garbage, had bizarrely treated us poorly when we asked them to include SEEDS years ago.
All of that wouldn’t matter, because we could do it ourselves. We could grow the decentralized SEEDS pool ourselves in a way that could be beneficial to all involved.
But the problem was that, in sandwiching the Seeds message about building abundance through giving in with the online course, coupled with the nature of short form video/TikTok, we attracted too many people who didn’t really care about helping Seeds grow.
To be fair to myself, I think figuring out this strategy had been a necessary step for growth at that time, and it was pretty smart, considering - the misogyny in VC was just too thick to get funding for Seeds any other way I’d tried, and selling the course worked well for a good amount of time.
And again, I think Seeds is ahead. Humanity will need to progress a little further before the idea of building abundance itself through an ecosystem like Seeds is even widely believed, let alone embraced.
So if you’re reading this, you’re early. 💗
Back to 2022: bad (male) actors in the broader crypto space crashed the market. SBF and the FTX scandal dominated headlines. And suddenly, though almost all highly publicized failures were actually those of centralized entities, unchecked greed playing out to its logical end, an annoying tragedy was that cryptocurrency at large was thought to be shady by the people who would most resonate with Seeds….if only they knew it existed. And this happened fast.
That made it a lot harder to share about what Seeds is, especially via short form video, and also to sell the course. My TikTok views went way down, as I realized that people had mostly been following me to learn about cryptocurrency generally, and too many only really paid attention when it was WAY up. Those folks weren’t following because they liked and wanted to be a part of Seeds, which is of course what we needed.
Gifts coming in to Seeds drastically reduced. This revealed that many of the people giving either were doing so to get our generous bonuses and/or because the price of SEEDS had been going up, and also some well-intentioned people who were contracted, in wounded feminine. They would stop giving when funds got tight, rather than trying to make a Request for Help themselves, as we encouraged them to do (this is close my heart, as I had to sell my Bitcoin in 2014 to pay bills, and so Seeds is intentionally designed to help others avoid a similar opportunity cost - I want you to have that cryptocurrency in hand when it goes up, and as much of it as you could get). They would feel too afraid to share the pages with their requests, which could help them, and would raise awareness about Seeds as well.
A disheartening number of people also didn’t seem to recognize the significant value of the bonuses. This was largely my fault, because our product didn’t adequately show them this, and I kept having bad experiences with software engineers while trying to remedy it. My frame of mind, and I think the external energies as well, were not getting me the results Seeds required.
So really, it came down to this: at the end of the day, we weren’t attracting the right people to make Seeds thrive…and when the going got harder, this really showed.
Like before, when times were tougher, I put more of my own money in to Seeds, and I was happy to do it. I knew the tide would turn. I’d figure out a more effective way to share our message, another traction channel to reach like-minded people who would love what we’re doing would start to really hit, etc. It would just take a little effort and time.
But then I got robbed.
If you want to read more about that whole thing, it’s here. It was about $80K, a big amount of money for me (and for most people). And the crime was committed by someone I had helped.
It was an overt, hostile expression of wounded masculine energy, taking and destroying, and it was one of the worst things another person has done to me in my life.
And I think it happened now because Seeds is getting close to breaking through.
When the authorities and the insurance company did virtually nothing - though they could have forced Binance to share the identity of the thief after he sent my money there, we send them all of the transaction records - I had to swallow my pride and share my vulnerability again, making my second Request for Help in nearly 5 years.
(Sidenote: when the Portland FBI Head of White Collar Crime or something told me that I hadn’t had enough stolen to merit their time, I asked him how he slept at night, knowing he only supports the rich….and he hung up on me (lol). I recorded this part of the conversation and am going to put in it an upcoming YouTube video to call these fkers out, so please watch. All of that dysfunction needs to burn to the ground.)
I’m super grateful to the kind people who have already given toward my need. As of this writing, 3 days after I shared an email about my Request for Help, about $850 has been contributed.
But that’s also telling, because again in 2020, people gave over $1300 toward my need in 24 hours. There are different variables to consider - my need probably seemed more urgent back then, and it was a smaller ask, which can make some people likelier to contribute. But I think this is another clear sign that we need to course correct, in terms of connecting with the giving people who will bring Seeds forward.
So we’re doing that now.
I think a lot about how organizations - tech startups, social groups, artistic endeavors, whatever it may be - take on the unhealed aspects of their founders. It’s another reason - along with the incentives driving late-stage capitalism - that Big Tech is so fucked up.
In my case as the founder of Seeds, perhaps the biggest of the many mistakes I made has to do with bringing in the unhealed conditioning I carried from being the Scapegoat kid in a Narcissistic family structure. I had gotten the message that no matter what I did, I was not going to get the support and unconditional love that all of us deserve…and so I brought that expectation into my work, into relationships of all types, and that expectation was therefore often fulfilled.
But I think I’m finally healing that. And I want to honor myself in acknowledging that it’s a big fucking deal, for me personally, and by extension, for Seeds.
So, as in 2020 when I set boundaries around that behavior in my family of origin - and then not coincidentally, monetary abundance at a level I had never previously experienced began to flow - I sense that now I need to set similar boundaries within the Seeds community.
For the genuinely giving, supportive people who have shown real kindness to others, to me, through Seeds, you are the reason we’ve been able to do any good work at all over these years, and you are deeply appreciated. 💗
And I can’t and won’t put energy toward anything less than that anymore.
In a practical sense, I think this is mostly going to involve me vocalizing where I think boundaries need to be set more than I had previously, and not engaging when it’s not of the highest good to do so - so for example, if someone is taking an action that’s low effort, or isn’t meeting me halfway, I won’t pick up someone else’s slack.
I’ll also be in the Discord less. I’ve poured a lot of good intention, knowledge and service into that over the course of the last several years, and it’s an important resource for us and also a good record to have, but I feel what’s wise is going to be putting what I was giving there toward the new people coming in, the giving people who will really receive what is being offered and value it. Like I’d said, my thought based on my experience this year is that they’re going to come in through YouTube, so that’s where I’ll be.
I don’t think I’ll dive deeply into product development needs in this post, but suffice it to say that there are many relatively basic updates that we should have had years ago, and they’re not missing for lack of trying. My sense is that, now that I’m setting the boundaries described here, I’ll finally be able to find the brilliant, kind dev partners who deeply understand what Seeds is and what it’s working to be, and are excited to help us gry there.
If you want to come with me as I continue on the path - the ultimate goal of which is providing an accessible alternative to the late-stage capitalistic ecosystem we’ve been trapped in all our lives - - I ask you to give to my immediate need, and you’ll receive SEEDS in thanks. If you’re not able to contribute financially, please share, and/or send good vibes. All good volition is very appreciated.
If you’re feeling further inspired, I’ll restate the other ways to help from above:
The problem we’re working to overcome is the dysfunction in the old economic system, which forces most of us to trade our time (finite) for money (made up), makes things zero-sum and transactional that needn’t be, and compartmentalizes giving and building abundance oneself because it presumes all people only act out of self-interest all the time (which is why non-profits have to exist).
Seeds seeks to transcend all of that, because we help people build wealth through giving, and empower them to ask for help when they need it.
What Seeds needs to succeed at scale is more generous, kind people with a healthy balance of masculine and feminine energy to
Give to others through Seeds
LP their SEEDS in our mutual aid pool to help it grow (and earn returns/potentially bonuses & airdrops)
Buy SEEDS on Uniswap to also help the mutual aid pool grow
Share about Seeds with others
Because we all deserve abundance. 💗
Happy American Thanksgiving to all who celebrate! I’ll see you.
-Rachel