I am feeling really good about my instincts as of late. As crazy as things are in the wider world, I am experiencing smooth sailing. I trusted myself and I seeing the rewards.
As I consider my capacity to be present I feel good. My attention is well calibrated and my broadcasting is bringing in the right people.
I’m going to trust that I am allocating my time wisely and that I will get the results I am looking for if I continue to trust my instincts.
I trust my ability to be present now. I wish I was less present in some ways. I’ve learned to be present to the ways of the internet in particular as part of my general capacity with the signs and signals of those who communicate with words. I try not to show up in person too much anymore except for my own neighbors.
My capacity to be present waxes and wanes with the attention that I give to the margin. And I like to be present for the weirdos. I am not as detailed as some with effortful thought pieces but I pay very close attention. I diligently note and revise bigger trends here in public. It’s not my job to endlessly footnote it for everyone. That’s thankfully now in the hands of artificial intelligence.
I trust that I notice things when they need to be noticed and that I will curb my attention away from those who do not use me well. I will so rarely take it personally when someone tells me I do not serve them. The favor is usually returned when I say a hard no but I rarely have to give it. The average isn’t that persistent.
I do not wish to be become significantly more scaled than I am now in terms of presence with people. I am picky and I cultivate my taste and I believe I’ve built trust with the people who intend to build things. I will continue to be as widely available to them as possible if they do even a modicum of homework. My experience is not free but I do not horde it.
I believe I’ve shown my capacity to pick not through momentum or hype but early presence. It’s a long road and I’ve got the patience to walk it for decades more.
I leave you with a thing I noticed today from someone who is very effortful and has been for much longer than me. How we distribute our attention matters even in the most intimate of settings.
Attention without feeling, I began to learn, is only a report. An openness — an empathy — was necessary if the attention was to matter
Mary Oliver on Molly Malone Cook in “Our World via Maria Popova at Marginalia
I dislike days where I spend too much of my energy doing stuff as it prevents me from spending time synthesizing stuff.
Of course, and I hope this is obvious, the opposite problem is much worse. If you spend too much time synthesizing stuff then you run the risk that you don’t actually do stuff.
You’ve got to keep your skills sharp with new conditions on the ground but you have to intake as much information in your field as possible.
“Sorry I can’t” is a strong signal. It means you are engaged in the productive middle of focus. Family is a productive middle of focus. Your business is a productive middle of focus. Your friends is a productive middle focus.
Maybe you picked something to focus on that someone powerful wishes you didn’t. Maybe you sold your focus to someone else. Maybe you are on the clock to a wider goal. The calculation of how we do that is best left to market forces in my opinion.
I will redirect my attention for someone that asks and shows me the incentives. I think it’s a worthwhile balance. If I believe my focus being redirected can help someone else execute on taking action I’ll do so. That usually means saying to someone else “sorry I can’t”
For as much fluidity as my daily writing habit has achieved, I can still get caught up in a synopsis. I have relieved any pressure to make a daily dispatch (which took some effort) but a quarterly or yearly one can get me to glitch. I like to add more information to my modeling like any self respecting nerd. As much as information integration looks effortless it is actually a laborious process. I read tens of thousands of words every single day.
Now I do work from a strategy. Which means I only adjust my tactics on a weekly or quarterly basis. And I will not be sped up on assessing the character of individuals or the caliber of their ideas if I can help it. When I need to move fast I have to do it within the guardrails of what I believe to be right.
And it’s important to remember that heuristics some heuristics don’t need regular updating. Moral codes shouldn’t need much updating. Maybe you believed the wrong layer of abstraction and have to change your priors to align with your moral code. That’s totally fine.
But you shouldn’t be changing around your code of ethics. That’s how you get criminals. Arbitrage is never permanent. Criminals can have a stronger moral compass than business people or religious institutions. This fucks with everyone. I cannot account for all sinners nor most demands for purity. I can however hold myself to my own standards and so should you.
I do what I can to telegraph my own belief systems and where I derived them. There are lots of signifiers I leave in my wake. I am a Christian. I am a capitalist. I am a Protestant. I believe in markets and judicial review. I believe some things are beyond market but all things are subject to forces beyond our control. That’s how I ended up picking Calvinism as a sect but it’s pretty niche.
I’ve believe luck is just opportunity meeting preparation and you can do a lot to increase opportunities and even more to increase preparation. I don’t like rentiers but I do like the bourgeoisie. Property rights are good and regulations are only as good as the people that make them. That’s why we I’d prefer we have fewer laws. We must act deference to our own failings as human but never so much that it harms our capacity to organize.
I don’t think folks were ready to go back to work today. I know I wasn’t. Everything felt a little bit “and they are off” starter gun pandemonium. Too many issues and too many people were smacking into each other on all forms of social media. It felt a bit Welcome to Thunderdome on every distinct algorithm I watch.
The first workday of the year seemed to catch me off guard personally because I don’t really recall how the last two weeks disappeared so quickly. I blame it on general exhaustion and poor health but also that I didn’t intend to take any time off. That was probably a mistake and I should have done a feel decouple from the world for at least a few days.
I am quite sure I am worse for wear and need to find a way to get offline and recover a bit more before I’ve got to earnestly launch into the year. I have too much to accomplish.
The persistence of my daily writing habit has helped anchor a sense of self that I have enjoyed cultivating. I am the sort of person who sticks with things.
I’ve been in the process of excavating and rebuilding my sense of self over the last few years. Many others have gone through similar journeys during the pandemic years. I feel lucky to have captured some of mine in writing. I like who I have become as a result of it.
I like seeing that I have reinforced positive and optimistic aspirations for myself year over year. I hope it shows who I am to other people through my revealed preferences. My actions speak louder than my words even if some of my actions are shown through words.
I do not have any New Year’s resolutions for 2024 that I didn’t already have for myself in 2023. I’d like to keep the good things in my life, pray for willingness to improve upon the bad things, and remain steadfast in the commitments I have.
I feel as if I spend a lot of time reassuring people that nobody has a clue about what happens next and that’s fine.
Even the brightest humans are still basically dim witted simians barely managing our fragile wetware as our environment provides constant destabilization. That we even survive that set of circumstances seems a pleasant surprise. Humans are adaptable.
I have typical fears about muddling through life but my existential angst remains in check. If I’m in a simulated environment running a set of programs given to me by God or a random super intelligence what does it matter to me?
I’m here and I like it enough to continue being alive. Sure I’d love to find out the mystery of consciousness and the nature of reality but if don’t I am happy with my lot in life. Whoever programmed me did a fine job. Thanks Mom and the wider memetic cultural movements that made me.
Trying to balance everything coming at you at the end of the year isn’t easy. Joy at accomplishments and time together are the goal for family time.
But the experience is overlaid with wrapping the year and planning for what is sure to be an intense year to come. It can feel somewhat paralyzing when I consider it.
I felt like I had to sleep off a lot this weekend . I crashed most of Saturday. I seriously slept 11 and a half hours. And I did feel better.
I’m looking at an intense year and I am afraid. We can’t lose some of the battles. They are winnable ones but it’s going to take a coordinated effort from many of us. In the spirit of the Christmas season, I pray for miracles.
Ego protection is innate. Humans have quite the capacity for engaging in defense mechanisms. As I do my end of year reviews to see what I have accomplished and where I have failed I see my ego everywhere.
The types of ego protection that plague me tend to be with those all too human relationships that are closest to me.
I had to admit to myself that I’d been engaging in entirely unproductive approaches in a close partnership. I wanted more from my partner and I’d express it again and again, but I didn’t seem capable of demanding the outcomes I needed. This was unproductive obviously.
Hard feedback was given to my partner. I had to look into my own motivations for enabling a cycle of letting outcomes that didn’t match our goals occur. My own part in it mattered. We had enforced errors, self doubt, fear and all the other typical buggaboos you might expect in a hard situation.
It can be hard to simply address the hard things head on.
Emotional reactivity is part of our autonomic nervous system. It’s not always right. It’s only sometimes right. And learning to tune it is part of the fun. You want to improve your heuristics over time. You will get more clarity on the world and your place in it. If you wish to persist in feeling anxious and uncertain being passive will have that effect. It literally hurts you. You have agency in deciding to address how you feel head on.
Day 1072 Head-on
I try to direct my attention to where I have natural advantages. I’m sure you’ve seen variations on the theory that if you are gifted with a talent then honing those talents with hard work is the rational path.
If you are a 5/10 perhaps you can’t reach beyond 7 of 10 with effort, but if you are a 7 you can probably put in the effort to be an 8 or 9 and achieve great things.
I don’t mean this as an argument for not putting in the hard work to improve where you lack talent, but rather that hard work can compound for even greater rewards when applied to your talents.
No one ever enjoys being bad at anything, but it’s worth remembering that aptitude can and ought to be honed. I don’t always love seeing the areas of my life where I suck. I was in the past very inclined to beat myself up over it. That is the path to not improving anywhere in your life.