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Emotional Work Travel

Day 1026 and Failure Modes

I’m not sure my current traveling is yielding the success I’d hoped. A bumpy road of geopolitical chaos, physical stress and emotional work has made my time in Tallinn harder than anticipated. I don’t want to call the trip a failure as I doubt anyone is paying enough attention but me to notice. I didn’t […]

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Culture Politics

Day 1025 and Petit Aristocracy

A swirling milieu of discourse has brought a renewed focus in my inbox & timeline on what constitutes the pursuit of excellence; that old Socratic dichotomy of the individual human’s personal virtues and his role as citizen in the wider communal project of civilization. The tensions have never felt so taut to me. Please forgive […]

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Emotional Work Politics

Day 1015 and Selfish

I think we are entering a selfish age. High trust societies are built from cooperation. When we get more through coordination than we do from conflict we have an incentive build more. Simple supply and demand can teach us a lot about improving the bargain of trusting each other. Coordination suffers when trust goes down. […]

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Culture Preparedness

Day 986 and Risky Business

I’ve been giving a lot of thought to how we see risk the past few years. What is an acceptable risk? What are the boundaries of risk perception and how much variability is there between two people? How much of those tolerances are innate versus cultural? Can you consent to risks you don’t understand? Philosophers […]

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Culture Internet Culture

Day 977 and Insecurities

A toxic morass of content has been circling on Twitter and corners of the chattering classes on TikTok, Substack, and podcasts that I’ve taken to calling gender bait. Topics like “body counts” and the relative degrees of acceptable promiscuity in women (as little as possible) is everywhere. We are main charactering single women for sleeping […]

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Community Internet Culture Politics

Day 973 and Reinforcement

I’ve spent a lot of time this summer thinking about who gets to decide the boundaries of society. Automation of civic and cultural life has been happening at the speed of capitalism. It’s about to happen at the speed of artificial intelligence’s processing power. At least during most of techno-capitalism, corporations and governments were still […]

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Emotional Work

Day 959 and Averages

I did not react to a drug in an average way. I’m really pissed about it. I went in so confident based on what the studies has shown. We’ve got this fantasy of science and specifically medicine that has very little appreciation for what it does to outliers. We discuss what’s most likely. What’s average. […]

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Emotional Work

Day 921 and Unseen

I don’t really have the stomach for writing today. I realized recently that I’ve been accommodating several people I love so far past the boundaries of what I consider physically and emotionally tolerable, that I had some medical issues over the weekend as my body broke down by literally having thin skin. Ironic. I am […]

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Biohacking Community Emotional Work

Day 918 and My Attention Budget

I wrote about the realignment of attention budgets as social media experiences a walled garden fear response to artificial intelligence’s looming tsunami of low cost content. I myself am going through an exercise of ruthless prioritization of my own focus and find. As in any portfolio, write downs are inevitable. It’s easier to write something […]

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Emotional Work

Day 908 and Joyful Grief

I’ve had enough emotional and mental work to know that grief is a complex and personal process. I knew as the death of a close family loved one came on the summer solstice that I needed to grieve. I revisited the frameworks. There are the three Cs (chose, connect, communicate) for a simple framework to […]