Fairytales aren’t meant to inspire you. They are meant to make you afraid. But fairytales aren’t real.
So there is no need to fear, even when it seems like the scary stories of our childhoods may be becoming real.
Simply marching forward through is all it takes to move to the other side.
I’m in a new and odd pattern of activity recently. I maintain a flow like hyper awareness on my rotation of professional obligations with little sleep for two or three days. Then I break to sleep with as little movement or energy expenditure as I can manage for full day. It seems to be working for me.
I would prefer to call this approach “fits and spurts” or “the lion hunts when it’s hungry” but that sounds more like a behavioral problem than a protocol. Which, given the endemic narrative civil wars against empiricism in the N of 1 gym bros, seems about right aesthetically. Experimenting with your body is your right.
I have made many shitpoasts about this culture after yesterday New York Magazine “are we having unrealistic expectations about the same traumatized dude” essay. I don’t know anyone involved in that particular situation but I take lots of biohacking tips from broken people because I am also broken. Physician heal thyself. Biohacker hack thine own protocol and or behavioral problem.
So any distinction between a protocol and a behavioral problem is perhaps unnecessary except for optics. We can do a wash coating of public relations speak but it’s a virtue to seek to serve your gifts while carrying your sins. I personally advocate for a minimum viable approach to this but omnia vanitas
We do what we can to fix and accept parts of ourselves that we cannot live with and pray we find wisdom as we accept our own hypocrisy and failures. I hope that I do less harm to others and most especially less harm myself. I do not accept any type of coercion I didn’t choose myself. Neither should you. Don’t ride any dicks unless that’s what you like.
I have gone through a turbulent reentry into the timeline over the past week or so, and have been steadying into its depths. I’m sure you’ve noticed the pops, pings, hisses and howls of psychological re-pressurizing. We are now at a comfortable cruising altitude for Julie. You are free to roam about the psyche.
A lot of people have been asking me for things. It’s been in a way that is both jarring and seemingly unconnected while simultaneously hitting the apophenia like a thumber hits drumsand on Arrakis. Thump thump thump. Attention is drawn. It has rhythm. Walking without rhythm so as to not attract the worm doesn’t seem to be an option any longer. I recognize your footsteps old man.
Let me try again. Imagine a beautiful woman who may or may not be available is at home during a rainstorm. She’s on her phone but has no need to go out. Everyone who thinks they have a chance texts her. Too much trouble to go out and hunt in the rain but if you’ve got a number maybe. Then maybe you take the trouble. The woman she laughs or sighs depending on the overtures. Sometimes she even responds. Her motives may seem clear to you. The motivation of her suitors may similarly seem clear. Maybe you can even predict. And yet chaos still exists in the hearts of men and women.
I am closing my aperture just as many others are opening theirs back up. Many do not like they see. No matter how much advance warning you may give people about trouble on the horizon if they are trained to ignore they will. Until they can’t. And then in the rainstorm they communicate with the people they can reach. Beacons in the storm.
I myself am less troubled by the rain. It would seem that we are in a moment where any number of timelines have diverged completely. Many storms are raging. The sun shines elsewhere. We continue to have our dead.
We’ve put up fences to keep the sight out. We put up sand bags. But you can’t stop the smell from all the fires. Maybe you can’t outrun the rising tides. Maybe you are a civilization level smoker jumper going from one fire to the next. Maybe an actual one. Maybe there are no weather metaphors that can be tortured into a form that reaches across to you.
The beacons I am responding to, as per usual, are not the ones you’d expect. I wouldn’t be a very good node in the network if I were too programmable but neither can I be so unpredictable that “it” doesn’t reach out. It pings. It pings. It pings. It calls out. It reaches out.
I try to collate my thoughts most days but I can’t do it tonight. It’s the eve of the Ides of March and I’ve got something to dread just like Julius. I will be tweeting bangers into the abyss and praying.
I understand Kafka now in a way that I didn’t as a teenager. That is all. Go read some Juvenal instead of seeing Dune 2. Pray the the gods of chaos that my people be spared. Good luck to the Windsors but mostly because we shouldn’t do to Kate what we did to Camilla. Let the stupid aristocracy fans enjoy that anyone cares about Burke’s Peerage. The Nikkei opens in ten minutes.
Do you want something for nothing? Maybe that’s human nature. I try not to be too cynical.
But then I am occasionally presented with information in which I must confront that some people are in fact fine with getting something for nothing.
“We live in a society!” I scream into the abyss. Maybe I’m the idiot and we haven’t actually agreed to fair dealings. Maybe I’m actually the rube.
I don’t want to give up on my high trust ways. I am not optimizing for the best possible outcome for myself. I care quite a bit about the greater good. Maybe I’m an idiot for doing so.
But I’d rather be an idiot and optimistic than a a brilliant cynic. It makes me unhappy to consider how many people are simply happy to be presented with something for nothing and never have to contend with its costs.
I have a strange gap between my self image and my reality. I don’t think of myself as a “consistent” person. And yet the data on myself I have collected over the years disagrees with this self image.
I don’t know if I’ve always seen myself this way, but certainly since my early adulthood I’ve seen myself as all over the place. I am not sure it’s even an opinion I should hold about myself but it seems well entrenched so has to come from childhood.
I have a self imagine in which I see myself as physically inconsistent with almost no capacity to predict what one day to the next will bring. I take this to a bad place fast. If i I am inconsistent then I am unreliable. I can rationalize that to myself but I don’t think it’s actually true.
There are multiple indicators that suggest I am wrong in my self assessment. I am very consistent across a number of critical areas. This blog is a very public demonstration of consistency. I reliably put something up every single day.
Am I proving something to myself or am I simply refusing to see myself as I am? If I am consistent then I reliable in that it can be predicted with high confidence what I will do.
If I do in fact have high consistency and high reliability then why do not see it? Is it even important that I am predictable? Businesses like predictably. So do markets. Civilization runs on consistency. But do I run on consistency too? And what incentive do I have to see myself in one way and not the other?
I don’t have anything to say right now. I had an offline day in which I stayed in the moment and reflected.
Sometimes it’s simply a choice to be in the problems of a given moment. You could just not fixate. The frictions of any given day are a choice. If you choose to experience a problem more then once it’s not done teaching you.
I’m always hopeful that I’ll learn my lesson. That each time I’m “on” and experiencing the same problem again is because I’ve chosen to keep at the lesson.
Maybe it’s fine to get comfortable. The older I get the more I envy my stupid younger self who has the energy to be a total moron. Now if I’m a total moron my life stands still. I have to actively choose to learn from the problems in front of me.
And so as I chose to jump back into another round of action I can only hope I’ve learned my lesson. Truly sometimes I wish I was a faster learner. But then I see I learn at all and that’s not at all a guarantee. Plenty of people work hard at just staying in the same place.
Entropy tugging at our bodies erodes the coastlines of our personal boundaries. Hopefully whatever is reshaped by the pressure emerges stronger. Mostly it’s just cliff’s falling into the sea. In other news, I drove up a long coastal road and contemplated thermodynamics. It was lovely.
I am experiencing a waning in my desire to be online. Not because I don’t wish to be in the thick of things, but because I simply don’t have as much I want to contribute when I am myself under stress. And it’s all stress now unless you simply stop caring. And I still care.
It’s human nature to be stressed at the available problems. I’ve got access to all kinds of problems now on my phone. So I am stressed.
I don’t have any reason to be participating in any stress but my own at the moment except that I see a lot of available problems because I am always watching.
I’d rather pay less attention. But paying attention is what pays the bills. Ted Goia says we’ve gone from art to commerce to attention to dopamine
I suppose this view of information technology as unmitigated casinos of sin is true in a world of addicts. I don’t think we are all addicts. Nor do I think anyone who sells something addictive is a drug dealer.
I’m neither an addict nor a dealer but here I am selling and consuming information nevertheless. I’m not a Kardashian but I’m not a Buddha either. Maybe at best I’m Kim Kierkegaard. The sickness into death compels me to poast.
If we are all addicted to the constant influx of other people’s bullshit then I suppose the attention economy has moved to the addiction economy. We are addicted to the dramas of humanity and some of our dramas are more or less real than other.
Except I don’t particularly want to be addicted to anyone’s bullshit right now. I’m not even all that interested in my own. I’m sick of my bullshit. Why should I pay attention to yours? At best I’ll pay attention to the bullshit on Netflix’s Love is Blind. I don’t mind if it’s packaged for sale. I actually prefer it. At least it wraps in an hour.
I’ve got a few basic principles that orient my life. I believe humans can make decisions for themselves. I believe most of us aren’t at all good at it because we are reactive impulsive animals with just the barest capacity for reasons.
But that capacity exists and it has separated us from the animals. We shall remained chained to the consequences of knowledge. I understand the impulse to blame that bitch Eve. But we’ve got the apple of the tree of knowledge so it’s time to accept paradise is lost.
Anyways, good luck surviving the churn and try not to fuck people over. Good faith is all we’ve got. Try to deliver value and not suck more resources than you deliver. Bow to the thermodynamic Gods and climb the Kardashev scale. Or keep up with the Cardassians. Are you sure you know how many lights there are? Better Google it to make sure.
I’m not a fan of Ed Sheeran but this quote on the creative faucet came to me today through Julian Shapiro’s Twitter profile.
If you turn a dirty tap on it’s gonna flow shit water out for a substantial amount of time and then clean water’s gonna start flowing.
Ed Sheeran on Songwriting
As a fan of practice and repetition (you need only look at my daily numeric total for evidence), this metaphor spoke to me.
I do feel as if I’m currently in the wastewater phase of a few things. It’s just lots of shit and unrelenting in quantity. I imagine this is relatable to a lot of people.
It’s my hope that the clean creative waters will flow more easily soon.
I am in a lot of pain today so I’m not thinking as clearly as I’d like. But I have learned to be sanguine about misery over the years.
When you have chronic illnesses you can either become a victim to them or accept them as part of the tapestry of human experiences.
I have had a framing that I’ll butcher today as I can’t recall any past artful coinages. It goes something like one can be existentially happy even if one’s circumstances are miserable. The opposite applies as well. People can have happy daily circumstances and be existentially miserable.
I feel like that no matter how much I may bitch and moan about my life that I am ultimately happy about my lot in life. I’ve got nothing to complain about and when I do complain it’s quite likely that kind of misery actually makes me happy.