I have been a radical individual long before I knew the definition of the words. I am allergic to coercion in any form.

I grew up in a small town in Ukraine. When I was born, it was still the Soviet Union. As a child I remember looking around and thinking how small and insignificant that town seemed, like no one in the world would ever know about it. Imagine my surprise years later, as an adult, when the same town became one of the most contested regions in the Ukraine war because of the nuclear power plant it supports.

My early years straddled history. I was born during the tail end of perestroika. I went to daycare through the collapse of the Soviet Union. I witnessed currency change in real time. Yet none of those geopolitical shifts branded my soul in the way one might imagine. At the time, they were simply the air I breathed. Only later, as I came to study the global monetary system, did I look back on those memories and realize how much they foreshadowed the fragility of the structures we live under.

You might think: Alisa, of course you became self-sufficient. You grew up under a collapsing communist regime, your family had to fend for itself, you had no choice but to become resilient. There is some truth to that. But it wasn’t those headlines that crystallized radical individualism for me. The roots came from something far more personal.

Some of my fondest childhood memories were with my great-grandmother, Afiza, at her dacha, a summer house with a sprawling garden. Dachas were common then, a lifeline that allowed families to grow their own food and preserve it for the winter. My great-grandmother’s dacha was abundant: rows of vegetables and berries, fruit trees heavy with sweetness, chickens scratching the dirt, and one particularly cruel roster named Petyka, who eventually became lunch to my great delight.

My mother and grandmother both worked at the nuclear plant, so my days were often spent with Afiza. She taught me how to tend the garden, how to preserve food, and how to care for animals. I can still recall it with perfect clarity, the smell of the earth, the heat of the sun on my shoulders, the sense that life made sense when you worked with your hands and saw the result of your effort. Those days etched in me the dignity of self-reliance.

When my great-grandmother passed, my great-grandfather could not bring himself to maintain the dacha without her. So, he did what he thought was wise. He sold it and put the full amount into an interest-bearing account in my name. It was his way of leaving me a legacy, a seed of security for the future.

Years later, when I returned to Ukraine with my family, my mother told me about the account. I was excited. I had no idea I had been left an inheritance. We went to the bank to claim it. That is when I learned the truth. The currency had changed. My account had been inflated, converted, and devalued down to a fraction of a cent.

 The day I discovered I had an inheritance was the day I learned it had been stolen by the system. Not by thieves in the night, but by the machinery of currency and government. The civic structures that promised stability and erased a lifetime of careful intention.

That was the day I lost the illusion of permanence. It was the moment I understood that no matter how much someone loves you, no matter how hard they try to set you up for the future, you cannot rely on promises made through fragile institutions. The ground can shift beneath you overnight.

This is why I was drawn to Bitcoin, and why I see hope in decentralized networks. They are not built on trust in bureaucracies or political promises. They are built on code, consensus, and transparency. They remove the need to trust the system, and in a way, they even remove the need to trust people. Transactions are verifiable, rules are clear, and no one can quietly change them in the night.

The people that gather around Bitcoin and Nostr tend to be like me. They are skeptical of authority, allergic to coercion, and unwilling to place blind faith in institutions that have already failed them. They prefer voluntary action over imposed order. They would rather build new systems than beg old ones to change.

For me, radical individualism is not an abstract philosophy. It is not something I borrowed from books. It is the recognition, born in childhood, that permanence is a myth, that systems are brittle, and that sovereignty over your own choices is the only foundation that lasts.

This is why I trust gardens more than bureaucracies.

This is why I trust Bitcoin more than central banks.

This is why I found community here on Nostr with people who value freedom of association over algorithmic control.

We do not need permission to live freely. We do not need to wait for stability to be granted. Radical individualism is the recognition that freedom is already ours, and the choice is whether to claim it or not.