Balancing maxi brain with degen curiosity: how do you keep your BTC conviction while still poking around new-launch land?

The sub is having another round of soul-searching about "Bitcoin’s lost its way," institutional custody, KYC creep, you name it. I’m firmly in the self-custody, long-term-savings camp, but I’ll be honest: I still wander off-trail to scout fresh Sol/Base memes for fun money. The problem is information overload. If you scroll CT or DEX feeds for ten minutes, every new cartoon dog is "the future of payments," and suddenly my hard-earned sats start to look… slow.

So I split my headspace into two lanes:

• Core stack: hardware wallet, no rehypothecation, DCA, ignore the price until the next halving.
• Curiosity sandbox: tiny allocation I can literally afford to round down to zero. For that I run a saved filter in BananaGun Pro that surfaces sub-five-minute launches so I can scratch the degen itch quickly, then rotate any winnings back into BTC cold storage.

Keeping the buckets separate has two nice side effects:

1. It reminds me how calm Bitcoin actually is, ten minutes in launch-chart hell makes one-block confirmations feel like a spa day.
2. When a meme goes 5x and I swap it into sats, it reinforces the "BTC as base unit" mindset instead of letting me spiral into unit bias.

Questions for the hive mind:

• Do you maintain a similar sandbox, or is it 100 % orange-pilled monk mode?
• How do you avoid the cynicism that creeps in when you watch altcoins pump 30 % in an hour while Bitcoin grinds in a $500 range?