Year: 2024

Categories
Internet Culture Media Politics

1196 and Reality Crazed

Just when I think shit cannot get any crazier reality absolutely fucking mogs me.

“Surely” I say to myself. “It cannot get more weird, more brazen, more chaotic, more fucked up, more absolutely unreal.”

And then it absolutely fucking does.

What if I told you there was a funny movie about dysfunctional airlines?

Getting second passports is normal don’t you know? I guess us regular professional class moves to Montana because we stupidly believe in America but everyone else is splitsville.

But don’t worry Italy welcomes digital nomads. I’d personally go to Tallinn though. But if you like Riveras hit up Albania. Thank me later. Never too early to think about where you might find yourself as a refuge.

Looking for something a little more exotic? I got you. How about some drugs. No really.

Hack the planet! Hack the gut biome! Hack your cavities? It’s possible the effective altruists saving us from bad teeth with polyamorous sex parties? I learned about an experimental probiotic from a sex worked based Austin. No I am not kidding. Her name is Aella. Iff you don’t know what this means I’ll spare you. But I’ll leave you with this.

Unless you are an investor like Yishan here, the way to get it is to pay $5000 for an appointment at a clinic in Prospera, the libertarian-run ZEDE on the island of Roatan currently suing the Honduran government for a third of the countries GDP

True Anon Pod

Now to be fair this is excellent affinity marketing. Who else would know more mouth bacteria than a hooker right? Well actually you’d be more likely to get gets thrush from that sort of extracurricular which requires an anti-fungal not an antibiotic but I’m quibbling.

In even stupider news, control of the senate might be up for grabs and the control hinges on a dude who might have lied about shooting himself for reasons? I don’t fucking know. I’m not a mercenary. But I hear Erik Prince is a dope podcast interview.

Anyway, the Gen Xer didn’t shit about reality biting. But the rest of us might be getting an idea.

Categories
Culture

Day 1195 and Responsibility

No one seems to be responsible for anything anymore. To take on a duty seems almost quaint in a world where honor has become a historical oddity. To have responsibility means you have an obligation to do something. And sadly many seem to be saying who wants that?

And yet we can’t substitute liability for responsibility. At best a liability has a specific meaning in financial and legal realms.

To be liable for something means there are repercussions if something bad happens. We’ve got whole professions dedicated to avoiding liability.

Browsing for insight on the difference yields interesting Reddit threads. If you want to get into international law you can really get tied into intellectual and moral knots.

The interplay between the obligation to prevent harm and the prohibition to cause harm, the question of cessation and the procedural treatment at the International Court of Justice of the issues of injury, causality and reparation owed

International Responsibility of Public Institutions

This is on my mind because Norfolk Southern reached a 600 million dollar settlement for the train derailment in East Palestine Ohio.

What we owe each other seems to only ever resolve itself when money changes hands. And perhaps that’s simply not good enough. If we only look to reduce liabilities because duty is simply too much to ask (or too dangerous a commitment) then is it any wonder no one wants to be bond to one another?

Categories
Community Internet Culture

Day 1194 And Awesome

I wasn’t in the path of totality for today’s eclipse. Practical matters leave me less able to pick up for shared cultural experiences these days.

Nevertheless I followed along thanks to the livestreams from NASA conveniently running on multiple social media platforms. It’s definitely not the same thing as experiencing an eclipse (I was lucky enough to see the 2017 eclipse) but it was still incredibly moving.

A screenshot from the NASA livestream from Mazatlan Mexico

I had on public radio as well. I had run out to get food and ate my lunch as totality swept across North America. The NPR host went from county to county. You could hear cheering. One reporter who picked up for her station yelled “we are on the radio” as the entire station was clapping and laughing.

Coronal mass ejections maybe because of solar cycle timing?!
Categories
Emotional Work Startups

Day 1193 And Peak Performance

I was really struggling yesterday so I didn’t expect to jump right onto a flow state today. I went into town to eat a hamburger.

“You may not like it but eating a burger in the back of a casino in a strip mall in Montana while reading an economics lecture by Deidre McCloskey is actually female peak performance”

Maybe it was the positive effect of a bunch of fat and protein but I was in the zone afterwards. I was able to pull together a bunch of disparate connections on a specialty niche where I’ve had some very promising investments.

I, for a brief shining moment, realized I was almost certainly one of the most expert and well connected people on the planet for something.

So much of not getting eaten by change is simply accepting that you feel absolutely bonkers an enormous amount of time. Learning to live with it isn’t as easy as it looks

If you are lucky and smart and open minded a straight line can appear through what was other completely disparate things. It’s funny that we call putting a line through things regression right? Simplifying things is funny like that.

Learning to act when you see a through line is almost all of the battle. “Noticing things” is only useful insofar as it something you take action on.

I felt as if I had no clear path at all yesterday on anything and then today I did. I didn’t see some kind of perfect Delphic vision of the future. I just realized that work I’d set in motion three or four years ago has yielded results and if I was able to keep going with other people who saw it too then I had done what I could.

Categories
Chronic Disease Emotional Work

Day 1192 and Stasis

I am not feeling well today and used all the capacity I had to simply push at the edges of my universe and scream a bit into the abyss.

Screaming into the abyss is my pet name for being on the internet. Mostly Twitter. I know it sounds stupid.

Sometimes there are actual people on there still which is a small comfort. Just telegraphing into the universe that you are a “live one” is half the battle of bringing the future into the present.

I know it sounds like a stupid way to bring in resources and deals and alliances but it works. Make of that what you will. I’ll get on a phone call now and again if you are really compelling and intelligent. I spent some time on the phone with one of my favorite people and it was more energy than I would have anticipated.

Sometimes that’s just how it goes. There is only so much you can do when your time horizons for results are measured in a ten year cycle anyway.

It’s occasionally embarrassing to admit there are days I don’t have the energy to manage what what I eat, how much I exercise, whether I bath or do farm chores or otherwise manage the work of physical reality.

A few days of the month I do the absolute minimum to manage stasis and I honestly even that was a stretch. But like the classic Monty Python sketch of another era “I’m not dead yet!”

Categories
Emotional Work Homesteading Startups

Day 1191 and 90 Day Horizon

I feel like I’ve got a decent grip on the directions that have captivated markets and where the next decade of opportunities will emerge. My long term confidence on managing through chaos remains the same. Focus on resilience and adaptability.

I feel as if repeat myself constantly in the ways that I live this through my revealed preferences.

In more local “place” resilience we live on land we own land in Montana with our own well, water rights, and powering our energy needs off a large solar grid.

In broader macroeconomics terms, I invest in decentralized ecosystems like Bitcoin, open source software projects and compute exchanges. Hell, I was even the first check into a nuclear energy company last year. Energy and networks matter.

Yet I have no idea what I intend to do with my next couple of months or where I should even spend my time except “keep doing what you are already doing!”

I’ve come to some crossroads on my attention and the decisions I need to make in the short term feel challenging. I’ve never had more opportunities in front of me and it’s exhilarating. But I also don’t feel like it’s clear how to best allocate my attention in the very near short term.

But I also don’t have high confidence on what I should be cutting out or bringing to the forefront in the next 90 days or so. There is simply so much happening (and those effects are potentially existential) that it’s a struggle for me to say “fuck it we ball” to what’s in front of me. What ball? What am I saying fuck it to? Is it a fuck no or a fuck yes?

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 1190 and Fantasy Family

“Do as I say not as I do”

The value of an involved family versus the value of an independent life are not being well reconciled for middle aged millennials and their aging Boomers parents. And it seems to be the source of much hurt.

The sadness of misaligned values

Fantasies of a good family life that the elder generations did not prioritize when parenting their own children are now cropping up everywhere in culture.

“Do what we want you to do not what we wanted to do”

Nowhere is this potent than on the topic of grandchildren. I’ve never had a a lowly reply go as viral as this one.

I understand how much it hurts to have family tell you they value something when they have acted completely contrary to that.

The biggest mismatch I’ve seen with my friends and their parents has been the hope that their parents would take grandparenting more seriously and being devastated when they simply don’t have any interest.

Now guilt & shame over past failures can be overwhelming as someone approaches the end of their time on this earth. Maybe the freedom at the end of life is more important than time with the next generation. Maybe those grandparents don’t want to be close to their grandchildren. Maybe they didn’t want closeness with their children in the first place. Or maybe some people only want relationships on their terms. I don’t know everyone’s personal values.

If a family didn’t live their values with their children when growing up then it’s hard to expect alignment on preferences that were never shown but only told.

I know it hurts to look at these issues in the face. Maybe it shouldn’t surprise millennials that not everyone in our parent’s generation wanted families and children. Maybe it shouldn’t surprise the elderly generation their values have to come with actions.

But coming to terms with failures in our own past is inevitable. And it’s wise to see them, own them and move on. I’ve now seen the values misalignments in every type of family. Married for 40 years, thrice divorced, mixed modern families, upper class, lower class, working class. All families have self deception on what they actually value versus what they say they value.

Families can claim something is important but don’t act like it. Acting like something is important makes all the difference. If you feel misalignment in your own relationships remember both parties have to change and find the relationship that they actually want.

Categories
Emotional Work

1189 and The Expense of Choice

One of my most American traits is how much I prioritize making my own choices. I am not contrarian for its own sake, but I prefer to freely align myself with what I value. I don’t make a secret of my revealed preferences and I am not afraid to associate with people who have different values.

We’ve had a lot more freedom of choice introduced into our lives during the Great Dislocation. Past narratives around family and work are beginning to feel more options. Paul Millard’s Pathless Path took off as work from home introduced significantly more flexibility into professional life.

Internet take-have Matthew Yglesia’s framed the problem of too much freedom around work as a Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor situation. Having a job that structures your life is a benevolent authoritarianism that people aren’t brave enough to admit they prefer.

I think this is a kind of snobbery that elites like to pretend is subversive. I’ve met many types of people from all kinds of classes, backgrounds, and competencies who thrive with more agency.

I am being exposed more often to people now who struggle to self regulate and take responsibility for their life but mostly I spend time with competent people.

This isn’t to say that structure is unimportant nor that work doesn’t provide some of it. I personally value routines and rhythms in my personal life because I’ve chosen to do more independent work outside of larger organizations. My work has to be held on course by my choices.

I won’t say it’s easy as none of my day to day choices matters in the same way that making the big yearly calls right does. I know I have to take the time to invest in myself so I can make those calls. I don’t have a wider organization setting the direction of my life or my day. So the only benevolent authoritarian is myself.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 1188 and Existential Stability

I’d like you to consider that our current culture of safetyism is not trying to provide you with any actual safety but rather a pantomime of one. Security theater. And this is why we see whole generations of existentially insecure “adults” trapped looking for more signs of stability.

People aren’t really looking to be economically stable before they start families; they’re looking to be existentially stable.

Luke Burgis

Luke Burgis rightly reminds us that the only existential stability that exists is one in which you make decisions and take responsibility for the consequences.

Yes, sometimes consequences can be quite dire. No, you cannot put off making decisions until you have 100% certainty though I hear the restaurant at the end of the universe has a great drinks menu. Try the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster.

Douglas Adams “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe” the sequel to The Hitchhikers’s Guide to The Galaxy.
Categories
Emotional Work

Day 1187 and No Joke

I don’t really care for April Fools. I can’t say I live in a time where I’m looking for additional cognitive overhead. And yet I am laughing all the time.

It feels a bit silly but sometimes I’ll just lose my shit laughing. Objectively funny things are happening as non-normalcy continues on. The Normie Restoration is upon us. And it’s just fucking funny.

If it feels impossible to pay attention as responsibilities mount then you already know you will cut back. Close the aperture. The return to living your own life. I’m sure they will enrage lots of people. Which is often the sign of a good joke.