Month: May 2021

Categories
Chronicle

Day 131 and Doing Less with More

I’m a lot busier recently. Maybe it’s a function of the ebullience that is gripping a vaccinated America but I’m finding more obligations in my calendar than I can recall in years. It’s still not quite to the place I was when I was a full time founder but I’m noticing fewer long blocks of time to myself.

I benefit from unstructured unencumbered time at rest. It’s not that I need it to be alone time or quiet time as much I need full on rest. I thrive when I have no reason to get out of bed. I do best reading and synthesizing when my mind is free to wander without any obligation to anything but that space.

Even otherwise pleasurable but not explicitly rest activities like going for a hike or painting my toenails doesn’t register as rest to me I’ll feel a kind of indignation when I’ve had an otherwise amazing day (filled with leisure activities) but didn’t get enough rest. I’ll think “sure it was fun” but also “now I’m tired and that wasn’t restful at all” goes through my head. For me the most restorative thing is not to do anything at all.

In fact the further away my activity is from boundaries like being constructive the more constructive I am afterwards. I try not to set myself up with the expectation that I am rewarded by productivity when I am at rest. That would set in motion the same circle of doing activities and not feeling rested because it wasn’t explicitly rest. That would become a kind of self limiting belief that leads to workaholism which I’ve pledged to avoid.

I hope that as the enthusiasm of exciting work and better help take more of my time I don’t feel tempted to indulge in activities that don’t feel restorative to me. None of this year would have been worth it if I went back to old unfulfilling ways of living.

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Chronicle

Day 130 and Smiling When Sad

If you asked me my dominant emotion when I was younger I probably should have said anger. I was a fired up young woman. But as the years have gone by and the social benefits of seeming happy have piled up I’m finding it easier to spend more energy on smiling. This isn’t the same thing as being happy.

We like when people are friendly (even if we actually prefer they be kind) and I seem to have bought into it as a moral virtue over the years. I thought it was a gender thing but now I’m much more convinced it’s part of a family trauma cycle set in motion by my father who is exceptionally good at being liked. Cue Bojack Horseman joke.

You inherit your parents’ trauma but will ever fully understand it. Haha the cop is a cat.

Naturally I rebelled against perception of happiness and likability thing with a lot of anger as teenager. Cue lots of screaming stuff like “why do you care more if other people like you more than family” and you’ve got a pretty good idea of what I repeat to my therapist now as an adult.

And because intergenerational trauma and family systems work actually isn’t bullshit I’m starting to realize I stopped being angry and started smiling at some point not because I’m happy but because it’s a learned behavior from my childhood. And the smiling is papering over a lot.

What used to be passion, intensity and anger is fermenting into sadness over the years. Not because I’m actually sad inherently but because it makes me sad to lie about how I feel all the time. But I’m not entirely comfortable expressing any emotion. So now I smile when I’m sad. I’ve absolutely smiled when crying from sadness and grief.

Thankfully I hasn’t yet started laughing and smiling when I’m angry, but I fear if I don’t resolve this pattern and move on it might not be far off. I’ve still got significant work to actually feel my emotions in any given moment. Anger feels like it’s too reactive. Sadness like it’s a sublimation of something else. And if I actually am happy then I need to feel that. But I can’t force it with a smile.

Categories
Chronic Disease Chronicle

Day 129 and Worried About Wellness

Last week I felt like I was struggling to hold together level emotions and coherent thought. I had a lot of “feels” posts where I spent more time inspecting my interior world than I did analyzing exterior events.

When I feel energetic I can take in more information and engage in synthesis but when I’m feeling tired or otherwise am flaring from autoimmune condition I requires more mindfulness. This mindfulness lends itself to more of an inner focus. Often this brings me a sense of peace and emotional well being. Lately my case has been well controlled to the point of recovery, yet I haven’t felt as emotionally joyful about the development as I thought I would.

Then around Thursday or Friday of this week I found myself turning a bend. I was excited to think about very abstract ideas like the aesthetics of finance and how critical theory and how great works culture is colliding with Gen Z vibes.

I struggle with wanting to lean into enthusiasm though. Too many days in a row of exertion or excitement and I fear I’ll set myself back. That’s a kind of self limiting behavior that I hope I can let go. I want to feel confident in my energy but I do not want to turn myself back into workaholic habits either. This is a fear so persistent I’ve tagged eight posts in the last five months with the topic. So great is the fear that I felt some relief that I felt physically unwell today as I could blame my body instead of making the choice for myself if I wanted to be driven by energy and not recovery.

I can’t put off the mixed emotions on wellness and how I feel about working in the world. My capacity is nearly there. I’m taking on more and more. I have even plotted some of my next moves. But I’m feeling Augustine about the whole affair. Oh make well God but not quite yet!

Categories
Aesthetics Finance Internet Culture

Day 128 and Financial Aesthetics

Humans have imbued money with so much significance over the centuries that financial spaces (merchants, traders, banks, trading floors, brokers, hedge funds) show us the style of their times better than almost anywhere else. Even when power centers have shunned money directly (democracies), and sometimes even because of it, money has dictated the soft powers of perception and relevance.

This makes investigating the styles of finance particularly fun as their signifiers tend to hum with unsaid anger, greed and resentment. Sexy stuff generally as we fixate on ever finer granular details to indicate that our taste shows us to be worthy of holding power (and hopefully money).

There is a reason popular culture loves the Hollywood treatment of Wall Street. Even if some of the most iconic touchstones like American Psycho were meant as dark comedies we didn’t perceive them at way. We were supposed to laugh at the business card scene not get turned on. When Gordon Gecko bellowed “Greed is Good” we were supposed to know he was the villain. We didn’t. We don’t particularly like watching these heros get their comeuppance. Giovanni Ribisi in Boiler Room ratting out the pump and dump scheme doesn’t leave a very satisfied audience but oh how we loved the second act when the gambling prodigy finds a way to go “legitimate” and become a millionaire. Just ignore the crash at the end.

Americans in particular love to fetishize our villains. Our media is littered with anti-heroes that over time become our actual heroes. We throw jealous narratives at the preppy alpha males but love it when their power is subsumed by someone who plays their games better than them. We are riveted when a protagonist emerges that knows how to best the alphas at their own game and emerges victorious. Just be careful you don’t overplay your hand and remain a villain (sorry Martin Shkreli you deserved better) as we need you to be seen as the good guy. It’s a delicate tension.

Think poor savant Bobby Axelrod in Billions becoming the titan of industry. Sure you know he didn’t start out as a classic alpha male (that hard knock upbringing) but I doubt you could tell at the end as he styles himself in the cashmere of his former enemies. Sure now it’s a hoodie but that’s a small inversion of the original sweater. The WSJ has an extensive shoppable feature on the style of the show. Now that’s cultural relevance. Turns out we do want cosplay Carl Icahn or Bill Ackman.

I’m particularly excited about the aesthetics of the next phase of financial heroes emerging from the financialization of cryptocurrency. Scrappy upstarts that want to make a more just and free financial system free of cronyism and accessible to the entire world is a beautiful narrative arc. The chaos of outsiders making the system their own has an ending we all know. You might start out in a tee-shirt and hoodie like Axe but beware the creeping encroachment of luxury goods looking to ride on your newfound wealth.

Turning doge gains into jokey NFT art is just a hop skip and a jump away from getting subsumed into the Art Basel scene. Lest you one day turn up and wake up in a new Bugatti. And while right now it may seem funny to buy a Lamborghini remember the narrative the world wants. You may just claim the mantle of a new kind of power. Or the Feds will come for you. Have fun out there!

Categories
Aesthetics Internet Culture

Day 127 and Horizontal Thinking

In the beginning there was the word? I dunno, seems more likely it was the image and then the Levantine religions got around to giving God the word. And thank God too as internet culture couldn’t exist without binary stuff.

But lately it seems like we’ve decided to go all in on horizontal thinking. Now it’s all about images. Gifs, YouTube videos, twitch streams and TikToks giving us cultural understanding not though the written word, but vibes.

The weaving together of aural, visual and emotional planes is an aesthetic that I’m thrilled to see Gen Z adopting en masse. If vibes had a gender, it wouldn’t. But seriously, backing away from the linear is a lot of fun and all of this vibes zeitgeist has been throwing my thinking back to a 1998 pop-science book called “The Alphabet and The Goddess.”

The Alphabet and the Goddess by Leonard Schlain is about humanity’s progression from horizontal to linear thinking. Shlain, a neurosurgeon, argues that that learning written languages, especially alphabetic languages, altered human brain function from holistic thinking to linear thinking. In other words, humanity wasn’t always so limited in processing. That’s a kinda new development.

I can’t say I have any real expertise in different theory’s of the mind like lateralization, but it does seem as if we seek to reduce complex matters such as ethics to simple rules and numerical measures in human systems, this despite us having significant holistic and metaphorical capacity.

If you coded “holistic, simultaneous, synthetic” views as feminine and the masculine as a “linear, sequential, reductionist”, you’re not alone according to Schlain. The scanning of the written word and visual processing of images may be different processes for the mind and for some weird ass reason we gendered them. Even though it’s just a straight up difference in brain processing. Schlain says:

Images approximate reality. The brain simultaneously perceives all parts of the whole integrating the parts synthetically into a gestalt. The majority of images are perceived in an all-at-once manner. Reading words is a different process. When the eye scans distinctive individual letters arranged in a certain linear sequence, a word with meaning emerges.

Basically humanity has been livin’ la vida linear for a few centuries, even though we have been plenty holistic as a species. But maybe with the internet our horizontal image driven thinking is coming back? Which brings me back to vibes. Vibes getting the New Yorker treatment this week.

I learned that vibes have a strong tie to the critical theory crowd. I suspect this pisses off a number of more literalist thinkers that are dedicated to trad aesthetics… I mean, ummm, Burkean economics? Whatever. Maybe the trads and red pillers sense the critical theory backstory?

Gernot Böhme identified “atmosphere” as the basis for a new aesthetics of perception, a kind of over-all feeling that has much in common with vibe. Heidegger had used “mood” to describe the quality of being in the world, and Walter Benjamin had identified “aura” as the feeling inspired by the presence of a unique work of art.

I think I’ve finally found the through line of why the “woke, critical theory, Gen Z, gender fluid crowd” and their vibes upset the “Athens to Jerusalem Western Civilization” crowd. Going from “great works” to “vibes” is going from linear to horizontal. It’s big dick energy being trounced by hot girl summer. The patriarchy is falling to glitter queers. And there is nothing anyone can do about it. And personally I like these vibes.

Categories
Aesthetics

Day 126 and External Aesthetics

An essay by Amanda Mull, whose writing I generally enjoy, has an essay on fashion and the end of the pandemic. It’s an interesting read on how fashion and disease have intersected in history and how we might react to our own moment in history as the summer of the vaccine rolls around. But it was this line that caught my attention.

Clothes are a language we use to tell others about ourselves; fashion is a conversation. If there are no other people to talk to, then what’s the point?

Aesthetics have been a big part of my adult life and one of my primary professional interests. I’ve worked with brands as diverse as Nike, Gucci and Ann Taylor and I founded a cosmetics line. I like conversations in the language of style.

But I didn’t realize until the pandemic that I had very little interest in an internal dialog on aesthetics. I think Ms Mull has hit on a truth I couldn’t put my finger on. What was the point if I was just talking to myself?

I’ve got several drawers of cosmetics and a full closest of clothing but I haven’t felt the urge to use any of it simply to please myself. I didn’t realize just how little these aesthetic conversations were about a personal dialog with myself until this year. I never wore makeup to please myself. If I did then I would have work lipstick this year. Nor did I wear clothing for my own enjoyment. The pandemic seems to have proven that for me aesthetics are all about the dance with others. The joy of communicating one’s taste and preferences to the outside world is more riveting than playing with my look for an audience of one.

While I have a personal style (it leans towards minimalism and Italian basics) it’s not so tied up with my identity that I felt I needed to expressive it to myself. I’ve got mixed feelings on the matter as there is an undercurrent of moralizing that suggests style should be for the joy and satisfaction of the wearer and no one else. It’s got a kind of self care “you be you” celebratory tone that is in reality a bit judgmental.

For some of us it’s clearly about telegraphing who we want to be seen as in the world. The semiotics of taste, class, wealth and culture are arguably more interesting than a personal picadillo for purple. Layering nuances into garments and color is an art but if no one looks at the final piece it feels a bit like keeping a painting locked up in a private collection. So I guess I feel ok that I’m only interested in style if it’s part of an external world. I’ll keep the talking to myself in my head and off my hips and lips. It’s nice that I have something I actually want to share with the world.

Categories
Startups

Day 125 and Working With Startups

One of the most frustrating aspects of startup life is the vendor startup relationship. There are so many pitfalls and disasters that can befall each side. That naturally leads to a lot of dysfunctions as each optimizes for their own needs, a process that unwittingly leads to the disasters we sought to avoid in the first place by trying to prevent issues.

From a startup’s perspective there are two key issues. Established businesses tend to be slow moving. They are slow moving as they have process and documentation. Nothing is more frustrating to a startup than needing a nimble partner that can throw shit at the wall only to get a meticulous vendor that documents all the shit that didn’t work in exacting detail. This isn’t to say that one shouldn’t report (in a remote first culture documentation is even more crucial) but 40 page decks on what happened will send a founder running.

From a vendor perspective startups are frustrating because they never have any of the assets, documentation or processes in place that make your job possible. Anyone who has become embroiled in a mess of half functional SaaS operation software knows what I mean. How are you supposed to deliver on a contract when all the basics you need from a startup are impossible to locate and occasionally contradictory?

The tension between the two workflows is clear. Especially because startups eventually become more process driven and operationalized over time and vendors are always looking for ways to become more nimble and cost efficient. So you’ve got two parties who want to become more like the other, but as they do that risks upsetting the partner that chose them for the opposite virtues. If this were a romantic relationship it would be heading for a breakup. “You’ve changed man!”

My best advice to vendors is to be as flexible as possible with startup clients. The faster you provide an output the more likely it is that the founder will come to rely on you. Most successful startup vendors simply roll up their sleeves and start producing. They don’t scope in too much detail or negotiate contracts that lock them in, no, successful startup vendors know they give themselves security and contract stability simply by giving a founder what they need every day. As you find more needs you act on it. You stay flexible till suddenly you’ve become the crucial partner that gets budget every quarter. As a startup grows becoming the indispensable partner means that you grow along with it. Your goal should be to have your client succeed at the same pace that you are succeeding.

My best advice to founders is to allow your vendors best traits to rub off on you. Paying attention to their competencies allows you to build up teams that support that. That then enables your vendors to perform even better for you as the fluency on expertise develops. Great marketing teams don’t just produce great marketing in-house but rather they allow it to flourish in the entire ecosystem. There is a reason why CMOs have winning agencies and winning agencies have great brands. The truth is that you will always get the most out of your vendors if you respect what they excel at and spend your time and money prioritizing that support.

The danger if you don’t make productive vendor startup relationships is two fold. One startups will waste valuable capital with a partner that was never a good fit. Two vendors will waste billable hours and employee energy on accounts that have a high probability of imploding. It’s a waste of money for both sides. But when it works well lol it’s absolutely money.

Categories
Chronicle

Day 124 and Taking a Pass

Most days I have at least some idea of a topic or an idea that grabs my attention. Even when I click open the WordPress app to write and don’t have something I want to explore I can generally find my way into something. Today I had a number of appointments for medical stuff that has just drained the life out of me. So I’m threading together sentences but a topic isn’t coming to me.

I mostly just want to sleep. My head hurts, my spine is throbbing, and I feel like the day just kicked my ass. But I swore everyday I would write something so here I am with nothing to say trying to fill a page.

It’s hard to know when a bad day will strike which is part of the challenge of a daily writing obligation. It’s somehow easier and harder all at once. It’s easier because with a daily exercise you know it will have some duds. But it’s also harder because you can’t just put it off. Still I think I’d rather know some days will have poor content. That’s easier than only ever publishing writing I’m proud to have made public. I’ll take the “pass” grade and move on. Perhaps tomorrow I’ll have something great.

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Chronicle Internet Culture

Day 123 and Being Liked

I asked if folks cared if other people liked them today on Twitter. The results are surprisingly mixed on the issue.

A Twitter poll asking if folks care if others like them with 4 options: yes, no, yes but I like about it and no but I lie about it.

The four options were Yes, No, Yes But I Lie About It and No But I Lie About It. It is fascinating to see the breakdown in responses even a few hours into the poll. I don’t know what I thought the response would be but I don’t think it was an even split.

Now, of course, I didn’t ask if being likeable is good, or bad, or even helpful. I just asked if people cared. It’s likely people who do care don’t think it’s good that they care. And there are people who don’t care that maybe which wish did as caring about being liked may have benefits. I don’t actually believe that a third of folks don’t care as frankly society would look pretty different if 35% of us just didn’t care about perception. And sure you can argue that you don’t care but you hide the fact, but then your answer would have been the least popular option “no and I lie about it” which is lagging in the results. My guess is that a number of folks are aspirational “no” votes which I can respect. I’m confident I would have voted no in my twenties. I used to be an aspirational no vote

Currently my vote would be “Yes But I Lie About It” but I’m not sure if I’m lying to myself or others with that answer. I don’t generally care what people think of me but I think I lie to myself about needing to care. I think being liked is important and I want to act like I care more. I’ve got some hang ups about not having been a more palatable person when I was younger. Maybe if I had been nicer or better behaved or well…just more likable I’d be richer, more loved, have a better relationship with my family and other fantasies. I’m also not convinced that changing myself for others has the benefits I think. That’s just some 4 year old inner child trauma emotions. How others feel about me has little to do with me and a lot to do with them. That’s true for how I feel about others. My reaction to you says a lot about my emotions, trauma and hang ups than it does about if you are likable.

Categories
Aesthetics Chronic Disease Chronicle

Day 122 and Soul Delay

There is a line in William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition that has stuck with me for years. The context isn’t all that crucial except to know the hero has just taken a long flight.

She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien’s theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can’t move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.

Sadly I am not jet lagged, as that would imply international travel which is a context I doubt I’ll have for at least a few more months. But I’m finding soul delay can happen even without jet lag. The separation between one’s body and one’s soul is a rich emotional issue. For the past week or two I feel like I’ve been reeling from a gap between my soul and my body. It came on suddenly, despite all the disparate causes been easy to see coming and not remotely surprising.

The dawning realization that I may not be stuck forever with a chronic illness hasn’t been the unmitigated joy I anticipated. In fact, it’s been fairly miserable realizing that the convenient excuse to keep me from workaholism won’t be an available crutch forever. I’m assessing all the things I take for granted in my life and their myriad benefits and it’s not pretty. It turns out even the most joyful possible goal attainments come with a host of introspection.

And that generally means you can’t lie to yourself. It actually feels a little bit like attaining wealth overnight. All those excuses you used to have about how you’d just pursue the life of your dreams if not for financial limitations? Some of them turn out to be lies you’ve been telling yourself for years. And then how do you feel? It turns out much of your circumstances were self imposed.

Which isn’t to say that I’m finding out I need to make drastic life changes and that I’ve been living a lie. That would actually be easy! It’s more that the sum of dozens of self limiting beliefs need to be assessed, turned over for utility, and discarded or repurposed. Why was I a founder? Why am I married? Why do I pursue attention? All of these are little bits of honesty that are giving me soul delay. Because finding out what I actually want, without the benefit of a circumstance preventing me from achieving my desires, is going to require reconciliation between my soul and my reality.

So right now I feel a kind of emotional jet lag. After intensive work and a significant amount of willpower I am getting what I wanted. I’m getting my health back. But I’m still reeling in my soul from the journey. The cortisol spiked adrenaline of the effort is wearing off. I need to recover from my recovery. My soul needs to reel itself in. But I don’t know when it’s arriving at baggage claim. And I’m so very tired from the effort. So even if I have arrived it doesn’t feel like I thought it would. I hope I can be patient with myself while I wait. It’s been two years so I figure what is another few months?