SELF-CUSTODY YOUR LIFE
A friend of mine, Max, recently said something that lodged in my head and wouldn’t leave:
“Self-custody your life.”
I immediately saw this as a powerful extension of the crypto line “not your keys, not your coins.” Max and I talked about it, and here is what emerged.
For each critical part of your life, you can ask:
Who actually holds the keys here — and what happens if they change the rules overnight?
That’s what this piece (and the series that follows) is about.
Not going off-grid. Not trying to control everything. Just seeing clearly where you’re fully dependent on a single gatekeeper — and then making one or two moves to reduce that fragility.
Your life stack and the people who hold the keys
Think of your “life stack” as all the systems that keep your life running:
1. Your income and career
2. Your retirement and long-term promises (pensions, company plans)
3. Your banking and liquidity
4. Your jurisdiction and passports
5. Your housing and basic living setup
6. Your business infrastructure and platforms
7. Your digital identity and data
Each of these has at least one gatekeeper:
1. An employer
2. A government
3. A bank
4. A platform or marketplace
5. A cloud provider
6. A landlord
Some dependence on gatekeepers is normal. You can’t realistically “self-custody” everything. The problem is when you have a single point of failure in a domain that really matters.
One employer. One pension. One bank. One platform. One passport.
If any one of those gatekeepers changes the rules overnight, what breaks — and how badly?
That’s the starting point for a risk/fragility audit.
A simple risk & fragility audit
You don’t need a massive spreadsheet or a bunker mentality. A basic audit can be done with a pen and a piece of paper.
Step 1 – Take a quick inventory
Pick one domain at a time and write down:
Who are the main gatekeepers here?
How many do I have? (one employer, one bank, one passport, one platform…)
How hard would it be to switch if I had to?
You can repeat this for:
- Career / income
- Retirement / pension
- Banking
- Jurisdiction & passports
- Platforms your business depends on
- Digital identity & data
- Housing / basic living setup
Step 2 – Highlight single points of failure
Now look for places where all three are true:
1. There’s basically one gatekeeper.
2. The function is critical to your life.
3. Your ability to switch is low or slow.
Those are your fragility hotspots — the obvious single points of failure in your life stack.
Step 3 – Decide what you actually care about
Here’s the important part: you are not trying to fix everything.
Dependence is not automatically bad. In some areas, the risk is low, or the cost of building alternatives is not worth it. You’re allowed to say, “I’m okay with this dependency.”
The point of the audit is to surface the handful of spots where the situation clearly feels off:
- The potential downside if the gatekeeper changes the rules is very large
- And your current setup leaves you with almost no room to maneuver if that happens
- And your current setup leaves you with almost no room to maneuver if that happens
Step 4 – Make 1–2 moves, not 20
For the 1–2 domains that clearly bother you, ask:
Often that looks like:
- Adding a second gatekeeper
- Regaining some direct control
- Creating a modest buffer so that a sudden change doesn’t knock you over
You don’t “self-custody your life” in one dramatic gesture. You run the audit, and then you chip away at the most fragile points in sensible, boring ways.
Those are the ones worth working on.
Two examples: career and retirement risk
To keep this concrete, here are two domains this lens applies to immediately.
1. Career and income risk
For most people, the core of their life stack is:
That’s three layers of concentration. If that employer folds, restructures, or changes the rules — or if something shifts in that country or industry — the impact can be severe.
A “self-custody” move here is not “quit and become a YouTuber.”
It might be:
Building skills that are recognized in more than one country or industry
Positioning your visa/residency so you’re not locked into one jurisdiction
Adding a small side income (second client, micro-business) that could be expanded if needed
The point is to move from 100% dependence on a single gatekeeper toward a position where you have at least one alternative path if things change.
2. Retirement and pension risk
Many people’s retirement plan is effectively: “My government and/or my employer will take care of me.”
That can work — until policy changes, schemes are under-funded, benefits are cut, or inflation quietly does the damage.
A “self-custody” move here is again not extreme. It might be:
You may still rely heavily on your national or company scheme. But you’re no longer only relying on it. You’ve shared the keys.
This is not about going off-grid
There’s a caricature that talks like this inevitably leads to doomerism: buy land, store food, distrust everyone, disappear.
That’s not what I’m interested in.
Most of us want to participate fully in the world:
The question is not, “How do I escape all systems?”
The question is, “Where am I blindly all-in on one gatekeeper in a way that doesn’t fit the world I actually live in?”
You will still rely on governments, companies, platforms, and other people. The difference is that you’ll understand where that reliance is reasonable — and where it’s quietly extreme.
Where this series is going
This piece is the introduction. In upcoming posts, I’ll take this risk/fragility audit into specific domains, including:
Career / income risk – one employer, one country, one path
Retirement / pension risk – promises vs assets you control
Platform risk for business – depending on one marketplace, one ad account, one algorithm
Banking & liquidity – one bank, one app, one jurisdiction
Jurisdiction & passport – life on a single legal/political rail
Digital identity & data – what happens if your main cloud account is locked?
In each case, the structure will be the same:
Domain → gatekeepers → single points of failure → 1–2 realistic moves.
If any of this resonates, you don’t need to overhaul your life tomorrow.
Just run a quiet audit:
That’s what I mean by self-custody your life. Not total control. Just fewer invisible single points of failure in a world where the rules can and do change.
