Author: Julie

Categories
Aesthetics Internet Culture

Day 113 and Competence

I’ve never found it amusing to watch people be incompetent. The fool isn’t funny to me. Television shows with shitty protagonists who can’t do their jobs, and don’t care, make me sad. I don’t find The Office enjoyable. I never understood Arrested Development. I didn’t even attempt It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. The shows I gravitate towards are the ones where people want to make good things. Where the competence is the point. Shows like The West Wing, Star Trek, Mad Men, or The Expanse, where striving to be better is either the core virtue or the central tension.

I hate watching dysfunctional workplaces. Shows where the protagonist is fighting against bumbling bureaucracy don’t inspire laughs for me. They make me want to avoid ever being in a large organization. I still fear organizations like Human Resources. The pop culture obsession with being a knowing cynic makes me despair. How is it better to know something sucks, but rather than try to make something better, you laugh about how it all sucks? It’s not fucking funny to me. It’s sad.

I don’t know when America culturally made the transition from believing those at the top had earned it to knowing it’s all a charade but it certainly wasn’t in my lifetime. When I came of age Clinton was already a liar. We knew the history of Vietnam and Watergate so why anyone gave a shit about a blow job was beyond me. The trend only continued with the aftermath of 9/11 and our forever wars. The Obama era seemed like it provided a reprieve for people at least pretending like achievement was a virtue but the backlash was so severe I worry that was actually a fantasy.

I wonder if the “fool” or the jester archetype has become our default aspiration. If entertainment has decided its simply more appealing to play for laughs than the boring tedious reality of building stories around competence don’t get made. We don’t see the inspiration of good work.

Which sucks as being competent feels amazing. Sure I play for laughs and shitpost on social media but I want to assure you that none of that feels as good as doing work well. I don’t care what kind of thing you are making. It can be a meal or a billion dollar company. The satisfaction of competence is deep. No laugh I’ll ever get from a shitpost will ever feed the soul like a real achievement. A sincere creation hits different. Not to say that humor has no plays or that a shitpost doesn’t have virtue (I will and have gone on at length about the creative necessity of shitposting), but that being a fool isn’t the only enjoyment in life. The enjoyments I relish most are where I’ve shown myself to be competent. And I like watching others be competent as well. So please share your accomplishments with me. Even, or especially, the small ones. I think it’s just great.

Categories
Startups

Day 112 and Unknowability

Human minds seem to prefer predictably. The back brain craves knowing what is coming even as our flighty consciousness seeks novelty. Talk about a tension that sucks. We’ve all seem just now much this is a recipe for misery when you live in a world with no predictability but easy access to low stakes novelty during the pandemic. We are twitchy, bitchy and miserable as we have no idea what our world will be like but we can dopamine drip our pleasure seekers with social media, food and substances for an enjoyable now.

I’ve written at length in this experiment about my frustrations with unreliability especially when it comes to my own body. It’s one of the hardest aspects of managing a recovery from an autoimmune disease. I need to be mentally strong enough to not let bad days shake my routines so I keep building towards the wider goal. I can’t be distracted by one data point. It’s about movement towards the goal. Ironically this is a skill I learned from startup life.

While the entire planet is getting a crash course in unpredictable futures now, startups are defined by their desire to solve problems that don’t yet have defined solutions. No one in a startup knows if the predictions will be right. If they are working on something that will have the intended outcomes is unclear. You work on faith. You trust that over a longer time frame the daily tasks and routines you push (sometimes we give them dumb names like OKRs to fake a sense of control) will actually get you where your mind’s horizon sees.

I sometimes wonder if those with religious faith would do better on average in startup life. We have some degree of comfort with the inscrutable. Mysteries are sources of joy rather than fear. We trust that there are things beyond our knowing and our control and yet we must live on despite that.

The obsession with data and trend lines and the potential for prediction, surety or knowing amuses me. Sure sometimes you can plan a lot. You should plan. You have some inputs that consistently deliver the predicted outputs. Your best guess are better than other people’s facts (thanks Spock!) But if it were all so neatly defined there would be nothing new to create. We wouldn’t be able to build value. It’s the undiscovered country that we seek.

In faith, in life, and in startups you must manage your squishy human mind that is constantly tortured by its own biology. We want to know and we want it to be predictable. But we also love the tickle of a new experience against our dopamine seeking biology. The spike of pleasure we find pleasure in the newness. That’s why we do it. And it’s on us to balance the tension between our need to predictably build and our addiction to novelty. Manage that and you may get far in your journey. Or it’s a miserable sine-wave that makes you nauseous as you go up and down trying desperately to bring the future forward between impulse and planning. It’s usually both if I’m honest. So if you don’t enjoy roller coasters I wouldn’t get on this ride. But if you do well you just might see God.

Categories
Internet Culture Media

Day 111 and The Attention Economy

I like media. When I first moved to New York I had big dreams of getting hired to work at Condé Nast. This was almost immediately crushed by the reality that I was of average financial wealth (I moved to the city with about $500 and lived in a women’s SRO), not from a noteworthy family and notoriously poor at respecting authority.

But I was lucky enough to arrive in the media capital of the world just as blogging was turning into a cultural phenomenon. So it turns out I didn’t need to work for some bitchy queens to get a toehold in the industry! I was also wise enough to realize there was absolutely no fucking money in media early on so I watched many of my peers climb the ladder in new media jobs without being a member of the media myself.

I found ways to make money on marketing, branding, e-commerce and new media businesses. It was a lot more lucrative. Consequently I now have a large number of media friends (disclosure time) without any of the cultural baggage of being in media. Unless you count the time I was the first person to livestream fashion week. Which I didn’t technically have credentials to do but it got covered in Women’s Wear Daily.

I’m really grateful I never got suckered into actually being in media as I’d probably be broke, miserable and exhausted. And then if I admitted I was exhausted I’d have a bunch of the older generation of media folks dunking on me for saying that. Which is how I got into a shitposting thread with Glenn Greenwald today. Who I think might actually be in on the joke about grifter click culture.

If you don’t work in media I think you’ve got an inflated sense of their power and independence. It’s actually hard to make any money so you are always living at the whim of executives and editors. Most of them got into the business to tell crucial stories (naive but like good) and are stuck living at the mercy of a business that isn’t that lucrative.

A lot of bad faith arguments get made equating institutional power to individual power, and while it’s true having the power of the New York Times behind you matters, it’s also true that any random blogger like me has more freedom to pursue ideas than a staffer at a newspaper. So I think it’s sort of a reflection of insecurities anytime anyone gets worked up about media power. Especially if you know better as some of the older media folks like Greenwald do. These beat reporter exist in hierarchies with bills. They don’t have the freedom to shitpost like me or Glenn Greenwald. We are wealthy and independent. Beat writers are fighting constant turf wars just to stay employed.

It can also be true that beat reporters have to fight a constant battle for attention and clicks in order to stay employed. This means we get culture warriors and posturing. But both sides of each debate are engaged in a kind of elaborate attention grift. So when Taylor Lorenz or Glenn Greenwald or Matt Taibbi sucker you in with a position on who is most virtuous the answer is whoever pays them. And guess who is paying? You and me. Our attention is getting monetized into all kinds of nifty revenue streams. I know this because that’s how I make my money. So next time you get worked up about the evils of media asking yourself why you are paying attention and who is benefiting.

Categories
Chronic Disease

Day 110 and Weed

As it is 4/20 I thought I’d share how introduced THC into my medical regimen. I suffer from an autoimmune condition that manifests as inflammation in my upper spine making me an excellent candidate for medical marijuana. As a libertarian I’m pro-legalization but I likely wouldn’t have chosen to use THC recreationally except that it happens to be a drug that has demonstrated benefits for my condition and is comparatively less dangerous than other pharmaceuticals I am also proscribed (namely opioids and high dose NSAIDS).

For some context, despite being a native Coloradan I had never smoked weed till this year. As a kid it just didn’t seem appealing (that’s what hippie boomers do), and to be candid as I got older I didn’t love the idea of tying a health need to something that wasn’t legal. I lived in New York for the past 15 years and while I could have had medical marijuana prescription I was frankly too intimidated to try. Without legalization I never would have attempted it.

Since moving home to Boulder during the pandemic I’ve been experimenting with different THC strains as well as combinations of THC and CBD. I’ve purchased a PAX (an expensive vape), worked through different flowers, butters, shatters, edibles and tinctures. It’s been enormously expensive (probably getting to be over $1,000) and demoralizing as quality, impact and consistency is variable. This despite living in a state where it is completely legal and has the foundation of a consumer culture where you can walk into any dispensary to receive quality advice and purchase wherever you like. Weed has a long way to go before it’s reliable in the way that other pharmaceuticals can be.

I’ve found that CBD on its own doesn’t impact me in any positive manner. But CBD when combined with THC seems to have a reasonable analgesic effect. And I do notice I feel better the next day. For me it’s roughly comparable to taking a double dose of aspirin. Different strains don’t impact me much though I experimented with indica and sativa strains own their own as well as mixes. Indica supposedly has more of a body high versus the mental high of a sativa. The only aspect I really noticed was it’s a challenge to notice a body high when vaping. This makes me have a slight preference for mixed as without a mental high it’s hard to judge impact and dosing.

Interestingly I don’t seem to get much of an impact from smoking or vaping period. Which is weird but I’ve got a weird body. I’ll need to Vape for an hour straight to get any noticeable impact. That’s made me much prefer edibles as it’s less time consuming and more controllable. I’ve been leaning towards a hybrid tincture or gummy that is a 50-50 mix of THC and CBD. THC on its own doesn’t seem to cut down the inflammation pain in the way a mix does. It really seems that the more you break out individual terrapins the less effective it is at driving a result.

My absolute least favorite part of using THC is the high. If I could see a reduction in inflammation and pain without THC and only using CBD I would be thrilled. But CBD just doesn’t on its own for me. So I tolerate the high that comes from THC on bad days. I can’t take it during a work day as it does slow me down mentally. I can workout while on THC and it has really improved my capacity to weightlift as exercise improves inflammation so it is a virtuous cycle. That is if I don’t accidentally push myself too hard. That’s a real danger when you feel better than you actually are. Pain killers of any kind are both relief but it’s helpful to remember tier the pain isn’t gone it’s just subdued.

All of this should be caveated with I don’t take very much (generally 2.5mg but sometimes up to 5mg) it’s not a daily drug. I use it as needed when I’m in worse pain than my regular prescriptions don’t cut it. This is all personal and I don’t recommend anyway try out any drug without checking with your doctors. But honestly I’d rather use THC than Tylenol. So happy 4/20!

Categories
Chronic Disease Chronicle

Day 109 and Medical Outliers

Watching the frenzy around vaccines has been an emotional experience for me. A lot of people are making assumptions about the private medical decisions of others. I’ve been watching friends “believe science” and discuss bonding over their jabs. And I’ve been watching friends caution that perhaps we should keep an eye on the long term effects of novel therapies and weigh the costs. The most frustrating aspect has been that everyone assumes that I am on their side. That I’m normal enough to have an opinion that is based on political affiliations and not one informed by my status as a medical outlier.

I guarantee you that my feelings on medical procedures are more complex and nuanced than any zeitgeist narrative thanks to being a medical outlier. As I’ve watched worried well and vaccine skeptics look to bond with me (especially those concerned about side effects or long term impacts) I find myself frustrated. It’s not that likely your concerns are mine. The chances that you as a healthy person with maybe a few issues are also a medical outlier in the way I am is unlikely. Like trust me you’d know it. You’d know if you were actually unusual. It doesn’t fucking sneak up on you.

I’m literally outlier. By definition I’m at the fringes. It’s not a surprise when shit goes wrong as weird medical shit tends to let you know. It’s not a vague concern about something that might happen. I’ve got blood work and specialists. I watch my markers like a hawk to see how much we much we push my immune system quarter by quarter.

I want to discuss my decisions for my own safety and what I’ll be doing but it just doesn’t seem, well ironically, safe. Too many people are too polarized and frankly paranoid. Most of you don’t have to worry about the stuff I worry about. It’s just not that likely you are going to experience the kind of autoimmune system cascades that are a real risk for someone like me. It’s a one in a million kind of thing. So equally it’s possible what is very safe for those millions is a risk for me. I wish it weren’t.

So I would ask folks to please take some care with privacy and respect when discussing medical conditions with anyone. Especially if you know they have something complex or long term. Other people’s assumptions about what I can or cannot do makes me feel alone and sad. Don’t let your politics or your fears invade the space of others who may not be so lucky as to have the same choices and opportunities. I promise we really appreciate the empathy and kindness.

Categories
Chronicle Internet Culture

Day 108 and Energy Vampires

Recently I’ve been watching a mockumentary about vampires living in Staten Island called What We Do in The Shadows. It’s surprisingly funny for what you’d imagine is a set of basic gags. My favorite running joke is a type of vampire called an Energy Vampire. Everyone in the house is your standard drinks blood loved forever vampire except “Colin Robinson” who is an energy vampire. He lives forever by draining the life force out of people. It’s the most common type of vampire.

As you probably guessed Colin Robinson is meant to remind you of vampires you probably have in your own life. The show runs heavily off “boring” jokes but the real kicker is how energy vampires are perpetual victims. Colin Robinson is always sucking you in with pity and apathy. Energy vampires prey on your emotions.

As you might expect they have an episode about social media and Colin Robinson gluts himself on the low quality but copious amounts of energy available. There is also a troll joke. It’s pretty funny because it rings true. One accidentally viral tweet and suddenly your energy is being sapped by a crowd of vampires. The extremely online eventually pick up some Van Helsing skills to keep their energy from being drained. I like to think I rarely spend time online without my garlic, holy zingers and reply through the heart stakes.

The real issue is when you discover you’ve got an energy vampire in your real life. I recently realized someone was draining my life force. I thought they were a friend but a set of misunderstandings I finally realized they’ve been sucking me dry for years. They are pretty good energy vampires as I actually thought I liked them quite a bit. It took one overdrawing of my energy to wake me up to the reality that their tactics exhaust me. With the energy vampire metaphor you can enjoy a laugh as to whether this behavior is malicious or not. Energy vampires need to feed! But the end result is you feeling shitty.

As much as Colin Robinson jokes amuse me I do think I need to keep my energy vampire away. Their last feeding left me feeling tired and obsessive. I let the shitty feeling they induced in me upset other people close to me. And that’s just fucked up. Then energy vampires get even more energy. So I’m going to try to keep them at bay. I don’t need to prolong the life of someone feeding on me and I certainly don’t need to waste my boy immortal life as someone else’s emotional food.

Categories
Chronicle Politics

Day 107 and Mountain States

My family made its way to Colorado in the 70s. That makes my brother and I second generation. While we may not have deep roots it’s not arriviste either. This is a concern as roots matter now. Every western state seem to worry about the influx of Californians on their culture. My family participates a bit in this too. Despite me having spent the last 15 years in Manhattan I have plenty of opinions about policy.

So I was fascinated by a series of essays showing what was driving the changing demographics of mountain states and who are actually the California carpetbaggers.

The thesis of the tweet storm by David Neiwart that drew me in was that Tucker Carlson and the recent obsession with replacement theory (in this case Mountain state “natives” are being replaced by liberal Californians but it’s actually code for brown people) was actually ass backwards. It’s the white evangelical population who have been moving from California and resettling in the mountains West. The actual demographic taking space from folks already there isn’t California liberals it’s California conservative!

In Colorado the urban areas of the front range won out over the deep red of the western slopes. Other states in the mountain west may have gone red but we managed to be purple without turning into a California hellscape. So our influx of red have blended with new urban blues for a relatively well governed state.

I do find the entire crisis over those coastal elites coming into the mountain states to be pretty funny. As if the politics of the west were ever really totally homogeneous. Plenty of towns have been liberal and we had Democrats and Republicans representatives. This need to always push narratives of polarization doesn’t do anything for the American people. It’s just more bullshit to entrench for us in our corners.

My politics are traditionally Western states. I’m a small government libertarian and I’m also inclined to let people to do what they want with who they want. Going too much to either side just doesn’t appeal to a lot of mountain state folks. I won’t vote for the Republicans till they drop the fascist populism so while I’m not thrilled by Democrats they have my vote for the moment. Maybe the western states are the moderates we thought were a fantasy all along.

Categories
Chronic Disease Chronicle

Day 106 and Perceptual Drift

I often find it easier to talk about the darker parts of my journey from chronic disease once I’m already through the worst of it. If you are hearing about my long dark night of the soul it’s probably because I can see dawn breaking.

Maybe it’s because it’s hard to discuss the challenges when you are in the thick of them. Having any amount of perspective when life is at its worst is a skill reserved for religious scholars and internet advice gurus. The rest of us just try for hindsight being 20-20 at best. I admire the stoic philosopher types but I’m generally just happy to be able to survive rough days with a minimum of pain and angst.

It’s likely this tension between a better current reality and the heaviness of past challenges that made me so confused by the reaction when I posted about the envy I felt towards people who live healthy normal lives. A number of people checked in on me worried or concerned about how I was doing. I didn’t get it. I had just been discussing how well I’d been doing so why was everyone offering to pray me me?

I’d come to terms with some of the sadness and anger I’d felt during the worst days of my illness because I was doing well. I’d been posting about how excited I was that I felt great, had clean bloodwork, and was seeing better days. It was because I was doing so well I decided it was best to ruminate on the challenges I’d experienced. I was on the other side of it. Feeling well and energized meant I had the capacity to explore the dark places. When I’m actually in a dark places usually all I can do is survive the experience.

But I get that others didn’t see that now. They saw darkness and sadness and reach out to me with kindness. The love and support from people close to me and the messages and prayers from my internet friends all added up to me feeling like the good times will just keep getting better. If you are reading this I encourage you to share your journey. You just might get back the same love that I got. People are great that way.

Categories
Chronic Disease Chronicle

Day 105 and Envy

I didn’t have hobbies for a long time. People would ask me what I did in my free time and I’d give them a confused look and try to come up with a plausible activity like reading. I was embarrassed. Everyone else constantly doing shit. In reality, I didn’t have the energy for anything but work and taking care of life basics (and for a few years spare energy was dedicated to sex and dating but that’s different post).

I’ve been an on and off entrepreneur my whole working life. And if I’m totally candid I’ve had health issues that impacted my energy since I was a child. So while I have had things in my life other people would consider hobbies, they were slowly stripped from me. I stopped horseback riding somewhere between 16-17 when I dropped out of school. I told people it was allergies (which was true) but much of it was exhaustion. I was fighting just to keep up with obligations to education like taking tests for college and to prove I had learned enough to be considered a “graduate” by my school.

In college I was blessed to go to a school that wasn’t cool to have have parties. That made it easy to hide being too tired to socialize. Other students were in clubs. I didn’t join anything. I was thrilled to make it to my job (as a research assistant to a medical ethicist) and get home to my roommate and boyfriend to watch tv at night. I didn’t realize this wasn’t normal at the time.

Once I started my first company all I did was work. I had to socialize professionally so I spent a lot of time at fashion parties. While this is fun it wasn’t a hobby. I partied because it’s how I made my living. For a while I thought this meant I had a hip social life. Which was a nice lie. I had a glamorous job.

It started dawning on me around 24 or 25 after I sold my first company and had to relocate to San Francisco for the acquisition that other people didn’t live like I did. In San Francisco people hiked, did yoga, took classes, and all the other “bullshit” I looked down on. I looked down on hobbies not because I think work is better but as a defense mechanism. I was jealous.

All these people had energy at the end of the day. They wanted to do things! That was unfathomable to me. I could barely do work. How the fuck was I supposed to do stand up paddle boarding on the bay? I was not kind to people that had hobbies. I told myself (and they could tell) I thought they weren’t as good as me. Of course, now I realize this was the trauma of illness manifesting it. I couldn’t do what they did. Rather than feel sad or angry or some other productive feeling I decided I was better. All to avoid letting myself feel how angry I was that I couldn’t have that life.

I’ve come to accept that I still live more than most people even with limitations like illness. I don’t have to prove a good life with status markers like hobbies. Though I’m still fighting to get to complete functionality and control with my autoimmune disease. But even if I do get to a place where I can live normally I might still skip the hobbies. I’ll go straight for the pleasures like work. I’ve only got so much time so I may as well enjoy each moment with what I actually like.

Categories
Chronic Disease Chronicle

Day 104 and Having HP

When you live with a chronic illness a certain element of unpredictability is always there. As I’m settle into having a case that is under control (what I wouldn’t give for a term like remission but autoimmune doesn’t get terms like that) I find my body is more reliable. More days are good days and bad days can be papered over with drugs. And as an autoimmune case stabilizes you can take more risks to push through bad days without promoting a systems cascade. That means you can take more risks on a good day and have a positive outcome.

Today was a good day. It might sound strange but this was the first noticeable day where I worked a straight workday in over 18 months. I started off before 9am and didn’t wrap until 5:30. I barely broke for lunch. It’s not that I haven’t worked during my sabbatical and recovery months, but typically I try to keep a pattern of rest between work blocks. I doubt anyone feels great at 4pm but in particular I notice all my symptoms are at their worst in the later afternoon. Frankly people are onto something with siestas.

I’m honestly thrilled to have had an extended good day. I didn’t notice any major pain spikes at any point in the day. I can usually tell if I overdo it and need to rest. Sometimes it’s just a pain spike that forces me to lay down. That wasn’t the case today and even more excitingly I don’t think I dipped into any reserves to have a full day. I suspect I’ll feel fine tomorrow.

It’s honestly not that different from using up too much HP or lives in a video game. Sometimes you gotta do it but it’s expensive. And sometimes you go up against a boss and are like oh “huh” guess I’m stronger than I thought. Today I discovered I’ve actually built back up my HP. And I’ve still got all that old XP from years of grinding. It felt like I had misjudged the difficulty of a level I hadn’t played in ages. I was so sure I was going to get beat. But I sailed right though. And I’ve still got plenty of lives for whatever level I’m playing through tomorrow.