Month: August 2021

Categories
Emotional Work Finance

Day 233 and 927 Hours of Therapy

I’m motivated by media. If I’m in a bad headspace I can take time to read a book or watch a tv and shake myself out of it with a few hours. I’m a voracious consumer of all forms of narrative, it’s how I synthesize.

You’d have to be a professional to keep track of more stories than I do just by sheer numbers alone. Maybe journalists, authors or publicists read more than me, but even then I’d bet real money I’m still top decile. I never lose a “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me” news quiz.

I’m working though some emotions on risk, punishment, hurt, and fear this week. So I’ve been watching a favorite show on all those emotions: Billions. It’s a show about a hedge fund manager feuding with the US Attorney for the Southern District. It’s a terrific portrayal of finance culture and elite consumption. But it’s real strength is it’s portrayal of therapy. Emotional capacity is the key to coming out ahead in Billions.

While I don’t want to give any spoilers, the second season gives us a character named Taylor who is a prodigy. Not only are they intellectually brilliant but they understand who they are. I’m rewatching the show so I’m noticing details I didn’t process the first go around. Taylor says they have had 927 hours of therapy.

The impression I had on the show was that Taylor was in their twenties as they frame the introduction of the character around an internship and graduate school. I wish I had started on therapy in my twenties. Imagine having over three years of intensive emotional work before you’ve started your career. Honestly I’m envious. When I was in my early twenties I didn’t understand jack shit about my emotions.

Maybe by the time I get 927 hours of therapy I’ll recognize my own traumas and motivations as well as Taylor. I’m getting up there in hours and I am admittedly sinking a lot more into understanding what motivates me now than I ever did when younger. It’s not exactly linear progress. Feelings aren’t facts. That makes it a lot harder to lock down what will or won’t work for you. But I’d rather be finding out who I am now. Some people never do. But still I wish I’d had the good sense to invest 927 hours into therapy when I was Taylor’s age.

Categories
Internet Culture Politics Startups

Day 232 and Human Being & Citizen

There is a famous line from Plato’s Apology that sums up the central dilemma of human organization. It’s also the title of my favorite college course at UChicago.

Who is a knower of such excellence, that of human being and citizen

Socrates asks us to consider how an individual’s highest calling conflicts with the group. We actually haven’t made a ton of progress on resolving the issue since antiquity.

I’ve been watching crypto struggling with the Human Being and Citizen Problem as governance in decentralized systems because a pressing issue. Much of crypto doesn’t really have philosopher kings, despite startup land’s affection for the willpower driven CEO, because a lot still happens in the commons. Open source and all.

I’ll be curious how we proceed and resolve these issues of individual versus group intensives as DAOs get explored. The corporation with its board and executive structure is being pushed back. But we haven’t figured out how to coordinate yet.

Vitalik has been exploring moving beyond coin voting for decentralized projects in recent posts. The incentives for public goods has generally been economic in the crypto space. We coordinate on commons by being driven by selfish incentives.

Gitcoin is working through shared governance structures beyond itself with a DAO of DAO concept emerging out of Kevin Owoki’s Egregore metaphor. Though I’d personally avoid using occult old Enochian terminology (egregore is a shared manifestation come from the minds of multiple people) as no one wants to accidentally manifest an elder god

Speaking of elder gods, we are all fighting Moloch the god of coordination failure. In popular imagination Moloch is usually defeated by a world historical great man. We love the great man theory of history. One visionary dude leader slays Moloch. Humanity gets coordinated! Hooray! Historians generally agree that great man theory is too simplistic. So however these problems get solved it’s probably not going to be one great savior.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 231 and Afraid of Feeling Fear

Being sick has left me with some scars that I am working through. Currently I’m afraid of pushing myself to my limits. I don’t know it for a fact but I fear some of the severity of my illness was tied to the overwork that is required when working in startup life. So now I’m afraid of overdoing things physically. I’m struggling to even set the boundaries of what 50% capacity would look like.

This isn’t the first time I’ve struggled with the question of my capacity. I’ve been a fan of what I call the “Gattaca” method since I was a child. “Never save anything for the swim back.” But now having experienced the worst case scenario of being unable to work for two years I’m gun shy. That common knowledge says failure “is never as bad as you imagine” is bullshit. Losing two years of my life was fucking awful. What if next time I give my all and I lose more than two years? I’m running myself in circles with this fear without any indication that it will become reality.

When I was a teenager I rode horses. I liked cross country eventing where you jump over obstacles on an open field. It’s a bit dangerous. That’s how Christopher Reeves got hurt. I had plenty of spills but it never really upset me. I always got back on the horse. I wanted to become more competitive so bought a thoroughbred who was being retrained from being a racehorse. I thought I was a talented enough rider for the job. I wasn’t.

He was a high strung panicky creature and threw me into a wall. I cracked my helmet, blacked out briefly and was diagnosed with a concussion the next day. Despite the severity of the fall, I got back on the horse immediately. I was afraid of being scared. So I pushed through.

Turns out I should have just felt the fear. I should have gone to the doctor, allowed myself to recover and not pushed through it. I never fully recovered my nerve about that concussion. I just slowly circled the drain emotionally and my fear won over my enthusiasm for rising. I never went back to competing in eventing. Instead of working through my fear I chose to ignore it. That turned out to be a sure fire way to let fear win in the end.

I don’t want to be afraid of being scared. I want to embrace my feelings and their origins. I want to come to terms with them. Because unlike horseback riding, I intend to keep working.

Categories
Emotional Work Startups

Day 230 and Punishment

I wish I understood why we feel the need to punish ourselves sometimes. What is it about human nature that makes us abuse ourselves? Oh we deserve it. It apparently has a social purpose as well according to Psychology Today

Self-punishment tends to serve a dual purpose as it not only relieves internal feelings of guilt but impacts how others perceive us as well.

I’ve been feeling guilty. This month is the two year anniversary of me selling my last company Stowaway to a private equity firm and pursuing a medical leave to diagnose and treat my spinal condition ankylosing spondylitis. It was a happy ending, at least mostly, with the company being put into better hands than mine. But I still felt guilty.

I felt bad I didn’t live up the expectations of our biggest dreams. I felt guilty I didn’t 100x the capital for my venture investors. I felt guilty that my colleagues had dedicated so much to me and I had failed to deliver on the outcome we had dreamed of in our early days.

So punishing myself seemed like the right thing to do. I deserved to be sick. I deserve to be in pain. I deserved for the whole world to read about my experience and my failures. I deserved to be shown in public as a weak sick woman. It sounds so abusive when I write it out. Like I thought I deserved to be tortured. But maybe that’s exactly what I felt.

I am trying to unearth why I have the self limiting belief that punishment is what I deserve. As it’s more than just the circumstance of selling a startup and not seeing the results I wanted. It’s got to be deeper than the rationalizations I’ve given.

I’ve practice family systems therapy. The basic premise is that our childhood informs how we react as adults. And by healing the rough patch’s or even traumas of those times we can live the life we choose. For me I felt abandoned as a child. I wanted my father in particular to be emotionally available. But it just wasn’t to be. But I held on to the idea that I must have deserved to be abandoned. But of course it had nothing to do with what I did or did not deserve. It wasn’t about me at all.

Now I remember that I am a capable, brilliant and above all reliable person who needs to accept what I can be and not be bound by what I learned in failure. Finding that and turning it into your superpower is where the real success comes from.

Categories
Emotional Work Politics

Day 229 and Under the Anger

They teach you in various therapy and 12 step programs that anger isn’t a real emotion. Anger is steam rising from true emotions like hurt and sadness. It’s easier to feel anger than to plumb the depths of our deeper vulnerabilities. It takes courage to admit we’ve been hurt.

I’ve experienced anger over the entire covid pandemic as it turns endemic. I’ve avoided looking too closely at what is underneath the anger all year. It turns out it was hurt. I feel abandoned by my fellow Americans. I’m hurt you didn’t make the choices to protect me. I’m hurt you chose you over me. Even though I recognize and believe in your God given right to do so. I’m still hurt.

Reconciling my hurt with my belief in freedom has been an exercise in faith. I’m a Calvinist. I basically believe that God is the set of all sets. I do believe in predestination, in that there exists the possibility that something, we can call it God, can and does know all possible outcomes. The infinity of choices is knowable to God.

A number of people find this fatalist. We have no free will if all possible outcomes have been seen. I don’t see it that way. We chose every moment in our infinite outcomes. It only looks fatalistic because humans live forward in linear time. God does not. God lives in all instants all at once. I alas and living each choice forward in time. I experience causality. God does not. Time isn’t real, it just feels real to humans.

Let me try to explain. I ate a ham and cheese croissant instead of yogurt this morning. I had a latte instead of an espresso. I’ll never know what the other me who had a different breakfast got up to but it’s possible to know. That’s God to me. Knower of all outcomes.

We literally have infinite choices and are ever in the process of refining our paths. This does not contradict that God has already seen every version of me. It is my responsibility to make the version I want. I believe we can make better choices. Turn ourselves into the person we wish.

Or we can hate ourselves for poor choices. We can chose to be victims to ourselves. At any moment we can make a new choice and branch into infinity again. That’s free will to me. Calvinism accepts that we live in linear time but God does not.

I’m also a libertarian because I believe each of those choices to be a sacred individual responsibility. It’s up to us to make a good choice. We own our failures. We own our successes. But that isn’t the narcissism of a childhood ego assuming everything is our fault (or our doing) but rather everything is our responsibility. We don’t chose the forces that act on us, but we do chose our response to it. We make every choice in freedom even if we perceive ourselves to be bound by forces outside our control.

The moment we lose sight that we own all our actions and decisions, we give up our free will. We abandon the project of becoming our infinite selves. This is why I am reticent to have prescriptive rules for our behavior.

Legislating behavior is fucking Old Testament nonsense. Jesus did not die for our sins so we could continue to feel guilt over a rule book about hygiene and how to prepare pork. He freed us to own how disgusting and sinful we are and how we can continually chose to overcome it.

As a Calvinist and a libertarian, I think we must chose to do the right things. We’ve been freed from rules, which in turn makes the freedom to chose better all the more crucial. Every mandate from an outside authority is just an excuse for us to victimize ourselves and abdicate the freedom we’ve been given to pursue infinity. We don’t need rules to behave well.

This means I get fucking pissed when societies need laws and mandates for basics civility be enforced. American shouldn’t be a Hobbesian war of all against all. I think shit like vaccine mandates and masking rules shouldn’t need to exist. You should be capable of choosing how you want to balance your responsibilities to the community and your freedom to make infinitely bad choices. Our society has given you the freedom to make those choices yourself. Our civilization is meant to be an experiment in free will and democratic society.

I’m not saying law isn’t important nor that humans won’t fail to live up to our higher selves. We fail at this every second of every day. We are sinners after all. It is easier to be a victim than to cope with the burden of freedom and responsibility. So sometimes we grasp at burden of free will and become nihilist. It becomes too much.

Fuck Jesus for freeing us. Fuck God for knowing that we could chose to toss back our free will. Fuck everyone for seeing our frailty. We have a God given right to be a an indulgent irresponsible baby that takes no responsibility. A lot of us are spending time coping with our freedom to make an infinity of bad choices. We’ve all got coping mechanisms. But we’ve got to stop acting like free will means there are no consequences.

You want to know what happens when you fail to live in civilization? Your neighbors lose faith in you. I feel abandoned by society. And I have abandoned society too. We offered ourselves complete freedom in liberal society, we left behind Old Testament thinking of rules & regulations and now we are struggling with that freedom. Instead of rising up to our freedom from rules we are sinking. And maybe that is our karma for this lifetime. To discover the full extent of our frailty. To live as a sinner. Only God can judge. But we all have a right to our feelings about how the bad choices of others impact us. And I am sometimes hurt by it.

I’m struggling to see how many of us have choices and don’t live up to that freedom. How shameful of us. How human. To be human is to hurt. I know that is the cost of freedom. That is salvation.

But I’m having a hard time forgiving my fellow citizens for making bad choices. I know we are all sinners. I am too. But good fucking Christ I want you to own that. Be truthful that you chose yourself over me. We gave each other that freedom. In the balancing act of human being versus citizen we chose the individual. What progress we’ve made that this was a choice. But own your fucking choice.

And even though this all sounds very philosophical. I’ve laid out my entire theology and political foundation which I’m sure will be handy in the future. But it’s important to note that this is all my stuff. I’m reactive because it’s my trauma. The feelings of hurt are grounded in my own childhood. I only explored this philosophy of freedom as my inner child remains angry my father chose his individual path over the community of his family. I wanted him to chose me.

And when he didn’t, I felt abandoned. Because even if he had chosen me, my little child knew he didn’t want to chose me in freedom. He chose himself over the family.

I’ll forever carry that wound to my inner child. In his infinite choices, my father needed to chose the individual over the community of his family. And that was his call. And I am not a victim to his freedom. I forgive him. I chose to believe there is a reason he was my father and I needed the lesson that sometimes others chose themselves over you.

I want you to chose the better infinity for us. But I cannot prescribe it or mandate it. You must choose it in freedom. The grace of God has given us that right. Anything less isn’t human. Anything less is making us a victim to infinity.

This is why I don’t believe that a flourishing human society should mandate our choices. It stunts our branching to infinite Godhead. It throws away the freedom to chose to be better even though at every single turn we could chose to be worse and that God has seen that we have. But we don’t. Even in the face of predestination of all possible choices we don’t give up on our responsibility. We continually, in every moment, work to own every choice we make, good or bad.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 228 and Recurring Nightmares

Chances are you have some kind of recurring nightmare that your subconscious tosses up for processing regularly. Some blend of math tests or being naked at a big meeting seems pretty popular. I used to regularly have a dream where I was told I wouldn’t graduate from university as I had forgotten to take some core requirement. But by far the most consistent and upsetting nightmare I have is packing.

I moved a lot as a child. A fun (sad) fact about me is I changed schools every two years for my entire tenure as a student. These moves were generally coupled with moving homes while some just were just me moving by myself. I did first and second grade in Orange County in California, 3rd and 4th in Sacramento, 5th and 6th in Niwot Colorado, 7th grade I was homeschooled (somewhere in there my parents got divorced so my mom and I moved out), 8th was a prep school outside of Boulder, 9th grade was boarding school in Connecticut, 10th was half at prep school and half in France, 11th grade I dropped out and took classes in Manhattan, then for 12th I was back to Colorado and remote classes and prep school. The first and only time I had a consistent schooling experience was at University of Chicago. I did it in three and a half years to save money.

Just writing it out makes me anxious and sad. I wish I could condense it for purposes of the narrative. It feels too long reading it over. It wasn’t just moving schools and houses. It’s actually worse than I’m letting on. My father loves travel. I was put on an airplane at six weeks old for a flight to Hawaii. Many of my childhood memories are of airplanes and cruise ships and motor homes. You name a form of traveling and we did it. We were always going somewhere. I fucking hated it.

Now as an an adult I loathe packing. It brings back all my childhood memories of never feeling stable. Boxes and suitcases take me back. And I don’t just dislike it, I loathe it so much I dedicated several years of my life to making it more convenient to carry your cosmetics with you. I called the line Stowaway. It was all travel sized. I hate packing so much I went to years of trouble to make one core routine easier to take with you. I wanted one thing about travel to be less scary. Less overwhelming. One less thing you leave behind. Childhood trauma sticks.

Maybe only people who love travel should try to improve the experience. Working from a place of childhood trauma is often the road to riches. I guess it worked out fine for me. But I don’t have the fondness for travel that many millennials of my generation have. I only have nightmares. Maybe if I had realized that before I started it would have gone better.

A common theme in my recurring nightmare is trying to find all the basics I will need for some trip. I’ll be searching for underwear or prescription medication. As the dream unfolds I’ll find a key item only to have it disappear. There is always a countdown. Some reminder that a flight is taking off soon. But it’s usually much more dramatic than that. It’s often some kind of unspoken crisis. I won’t remember it when I wake up. Maybe it’s apocalyptic. But it’s rarely a go bag or a bug out situation in my nightmares. It’s just a suitcase or a box or a bag never being filled up.

I never leave on the trip. The dream never lets me finish packing. I guess my unconscious hasn’t figured out how to proceed that it wasn’t the packing that scared me, it was leaving behind the life that I thought was safe. Maybe I’ll get there eventually. I don’t want to be stuck in a nightmare, packing up my life, being afraid of being dragged someplace I don’t want to go.

Categories
Politics

Day 227 and Dog Days

I learned today that the dog days refer to the Sun being in the same portion of the sky as Sirius the Dog Star in the constellation Canis Major. The Romans believed that Sirius added to the heat of summer as the star and the sun rose and set at the same time.

The period between the end of July and mid August is associated “with heat, drought, sudden thunderstorms, lethargy, fever, mad dogs, and bad luck” which frankly tracks. I do feel like I’m going a little bit mad.

I’m planning on a media consumption fast You’d think we’d be inured to crisis, plague, and politics after the last year and a half but as it turns out it can still hit you.

I’ve been doom scrolling all day watching the fall of Kabul to the Taliban. The war has been waged my entire adult life. Watching it all collapse in a matter of days after 20 years makes me feel ashamed. Not that America is finally pulling out our military but that we’ve seemingly accomplished so little when so many lives have been lost and so much has been invested.

And we cannot even support our allies with visas and refugee resettlement. I’m sick to my stomach seeing that we have 18,000 unprocessed visas. The fuck is wrong with us that we cannot find a way to save our allies. There isn’t a damn thing I can do about any of it. That feeling of shame abs helplessness probably means it’s time to put away the internet.

Categories
Internet Culture

Day 226 and Brain Prostitutes

When you sell your intellect for a living you cannot afford to have a stupid day. When I was younger I sold my time but as I got older I got paid for my ideas. Or as one of my favorite anonymous Twitter accounts Becoming Critter said I’m “a brain prostitute.”

There isn’t a union for idea whores so when your mind has a sick day you are fucked. Not idea fucked, no, because then you’d get paid. If you can’t produce a good idea you’ve got nothing to sell. I personally found this entire concept of knowledge worker as as brain prostitution to be pretty amusing. It kind of takes the wind out of your sails if you’ve decided being a “knowledge worker” makes you better than other types of labor.

We’ve decided that selling your mind is higher status than selling your time but I think it’s all just a a clever way for the capital class to move labor into categories that produce better returns. If someone has found it beneficial to employ you, either for your time or your ideas, it’s because it’s worth more than you are getting paid.

I like that the intelligentsia is lying to themselves about being bourgeois. Doing practical things like running a grocery was beneath them. So they had to invent some exciting distinction that convinced everyone that selling ideas made you a better class of person than selling lettuce. I’m not really sure how Marx would see all of this but it seems like if you aren’t capital then you are still labor.

But I guess now that we’ve got rid of hereditary aristocracy the need for more elaborate distinctions for how we determine our betters is clear. The market demanded a rebrand. Personally I like idea whore better but I can see why we went with knowledge worker.

Categories
Finance

Day 225 & Explaining DAOs to Moms

My mother is a sharp woman. She’s interested in economics but if you asked her to explain securities law she’d probably shrug. Not her expertise. She did survive our family bankruptcy during the tech IPO implosion she’s got a slight intuition of securities law in the context of consumer protection but that’s about it.

So I was impressed that she was able to sum up the recent infrastructure bill’s attempt to make crypto foot the bill very neatly.

“So they are trying to convince us that people who program computers to run math problems are actually bankers?”

That’s…actually not too far off. She seemed to grok that this was a misunderstanding of the basic technology, who builds it and it’s purpose. She was glad the amendment didn’t pass. Clearly people who build computer applications are not the same as the guy at Charles Schwab who looks after her retirement account.

We were discussing it, as I was trying to explaining PR DAO and why I wanted to help organize an activist group of folks whose purpose was execute public relations campaigns to tell stories about crypto. I explained to her that rather than having a bunch of executives who make decisions we would write a set of rules that automatically determine how we make decisions. Those rules would let all members of the organization vote on how we wanted to deploy our assets and pursue our agenda. She liked the tag line “rules not rulers” a lot. She’s pretty into freedom. A smart contract was pretty intuitive to my mom.

Where she got confused was the governance tokens. Not how they worked. Again it was intuitive to her that depending on what you contributed and how invested you were in the organization that you would a different say in what got done. Maybe each token represents one vote. Maybe some people have more votes because they are more invested. Presumably we figure that out in our smart contract. What she didn’t get was why the government thinks a voting mechanism is a security.

“So the government treats the way your group organizes decision making as if those little voting symbols were stock in IBM? That’s fucking stupid”

Now granted my mother probably can’t explain what a security is (she’s got the basic idea that they are like a type of money and Boomers like to own stocks). She gets why they are regulated the way they are in a general sense. She’s lost money on badly governed companies. So sure it’s fine that the government has some rules for that sort of thing.

But even to a lay person like my mom it seems pretty clear that something meant to represent ownership in a money making enterprise and something meant to help organize voting and decision making are separate ideas. She seemed to think maybe they ought to distinguish between the two ideas. Because you know the last time we came up with clever ideas like the corporation the whole world changed. Evolving them again to be autonomous could make for the same level of change. If my mom got that in a half an hour phone call seems like maybe the professionals at the SEC could work it out too.

Categories
Chronic Disease

Day 224 and Wanting a Break

I don’t want to write today. I feel foggy, unfocused and anxious. I had to have a medical procedure last week whose preparation was destabilizing. I felt pretty good coming out of it but a few days on I guess recovery has its own logic.

I don’t want to feel like this. In order to have the procedure done we had to remove me from all of my medications. Not normally something you do unless you have no other choice. Which in the end I didn’t feel I had. And I’m struggling. Modern medicine works pretty well. Some of science is neat.

I don’t want to be writing about any of it though. I’m scared, tired, sad and angry about all of it. I want to be alone. But my mind is so fatigued I cannot come up with any other topics. I tried to focus on fun things like the PR DAO I’m working on and some investments I’m excited about.

But I just can’t seem to make sense without a lot of energy and focus. And the doctors would prefer I keep the energy for my recovery.

So I’m stuck writing baleful takes about sleeping and migraines. I’d rather crawl into a hole and lick my wounds in private but I promised myself I’d write every single day.

And it seems I’m unable to write anything remotely intellectual. It’s all emotions and physical ailments. No wonder I’ve been watching so many BBC period dramas. Their leading ladies seem so relatable at the moment. Which is why I’m stuck writing about life as if I were some talentless version of Virginia Woolf. I’m incapable of writing about anything else but the consuming nature of feeling like shit. Write what you know is all fine and well until the thing you know most intimately is physical frailty.

On the bright side I did learn today that Herman Melville and I share the same diagnosis; ankylosing spondylitis.

Herman Melville endured chronic pains in his joints, back and eyes, symptoms consistent with ankylosing spondylitis, an autoimmune disease.

Maybe pain relief was his white whale too. Of course, he didn’t have the benefit of biologic injections like IL inhibitors. Maybe that’s why he wrote the great American novel and I’ve got a daily writing habit. I know glorifying and romanticizing suffering is a habit I’ve got to kick.