I was at the dermatologist today. Despite my age (I am forty) I don’t have much in the way of wrinkles. I don’t have anything deep that can’t be managed with retinol and sunscreen.
I started Botox this year only because I was literally the only one I knew in my age and social cohort that wasn’t doing it. I thought this was a good thing.
But it has recently struck me as sad that I don’t have laugh lines. You’d be hard pressed to find me smiling in any pictures. The thing with tamping down on emotions is that it works in both directions. I don’t get that angry either. I don’t have any laugh lines but I don’t know how to scowl either.
I had to be moved and instructed into position today to get Botox as I couldn’t scowl. What kind of person doesn’t know how to scowl? Isn’t the joke that resting bitch face is the default for white women?
If I don’t smile I won’t get laugh lines. But I’m not angry and so I’m not scowling either. When cut down on variance you cut out the highs and the lows. You lose the good and the bad. And that’s its own form of nihilism. Which we’d do all well to remember. To be shielded from life showing on your face requires quite a bit of resources.
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”
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.
I spent the day on binging a monomyth in service of focusing some attention on where we might be going if this is in fact a Cambrian explosion era. If you need a synopsis I’ll extract it from Twitter if I can find the toolsets. If you know the toolset please share them.
The fellowship of the ring will not doom the hobbits to torment and death
My assumption that property rights underlined some of this still stands. If you’ve been holed up in Middle Earth (me too nice place unclear though unclear if I’m a Hobbit or an elf or a dwarf or a wizard or an orc Or Tom Bombadil) everyone thinks Mordor somehow their pet theory or sin. It is industrialism or fascism or some combination of horrors because history becomes legend and legend becomes myth. I don’t know. Ask an autist.
Hug a hippie. Be kind to a hipster. But fight to the death for the hackers. Or pick a princess who likes trade disputes in the galactic empire. I can’t translate all the monomyths in one day.
I’m in the Balkans for a few weeks doing some scouting and visiting with friends and colleagues. The western Balkans including Albania, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegro are known for their occasionallycolorful participation in cryptocurrencies.
These negative experience with currency instability, government corruption and sociopolitical unrest has led to a desire to experiment with transparency and decentralization amongst the region’s youth.
In an editorial in Bitcoin Magazine the founder of the Belgrade Bitcoin Hub summed up the “why”
As a result of years of unfulfilled promises from regional politicians, people of the Balkans are hard to convince about the long-term benefits that can be realized by adopting Bitcoin in one’s life. A low time preference way of life to most people in this region is associated with disappointment and the lowered standards of living that have happened many times before.
I got myself stuck in downtown city gridlock today. Abs boy am I glad I rarely have to navigate the kind of bumper to bumper traffic of an overbuilt city without a grid. It is no picnic.
There is a category of city that has little in the way of urban planning. They may have legacy of a time with much fewer cars when only a small portion of the citizens could afford to drive.
As cosmopolitan creative classes become wealthier they too want to be able to drive in their city. The money pours in to invest in newer developments and more modern amenities get built. But they never really solve the lack of a grid or roads built for driving.
A lack of proper investment in public transportation only compounds the issue.
Attempting to criss-cross a mess of cars, motorbikes, scooters, and couriers all competing against each other with few clear routes is a slog. I hope I don’t have to repeat it again but I fear this is a permanent feature of some cities.
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.
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.
Her generation’s history of counter culture and inevitable rise to power has many cautionary tales we’d do well to review. The limits of starry eyed optimism and the cold hard calculations of power play out in every generation, especially as they age.
I recall her support of Ross Perot in the 92 election only to find us swept up as a country in the Clinton victory. The Clinton repurposing of a 1977 Fleetwood Mac song as its campaign anthem remains a vivid aesthetic memory from my young childhood.
Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow Don’t stop, it’ll soon be here It’ll be better than before Yesterday’s gone, yesterday’s gone
The oddest element of this memory is that while the Clinton victory song may have won as core memory, the deeper aesthetics of the losers have a more visceral hold. My mother’s favorite song was actually used as Ross Perot’s campaign song.
Maybe I’m crazy too. Maybe we all are. Because Perot, Patsy and my mother got to the punch of the Clinton victory and America’s love affair with thinking about tomorrow.
I knew you’d love me as long as you wanted And then someday you’d leave me for somebody new
I figured I’d earned a a little treat as the prior day of news and social media has been somehow equally tiresome. If you like audio, AI Breakdown Podcast quotes me at 20:00 on why I’m skeptical of regulatory capture masquerading as ethics.
At least yesterday, I’d had the good sense to take a walk in nature. I suppose in all things one should seek a balance in one’s life yes? In which case a little chaos is fine here and there. As the kids say, let her cook!
I’m extremely frustrated right now. I didn’t get much sleep last night. I won’t get into the details, but it’s mostly because I was overstimulated by a very long workday after what was a very productive week.
I didn’t think it would matter if I was a little fucked up today from overexertion yesterday as I didn’t have any major obligations.
Except I got invited to mid-morning to something tonight. I wasn’t obligated to go but really wanted to do so as the guest of honor may end up having a significant impact on my life. And I’ve had an interest in it which I’d expressed months ago.
Now I had strong interest in attending as it won’t be a repeatable opportunity. So I wanted to push myself to go. I did my best through the afternoon to rest and prepare myself. But ultimately my body just couldn’t do it.
I cascaded into a migraine from the smell of my husband’s cologne. All my efforts to try to be restorative with the few hours of my afternoon were gone through a single small instance of environmental stressor. An obvious sign that I shouldn’t be going anywhere if something small could set off symptoms.
Now I’d like to say that I could have made it if I’d slept more. Maybe if I’d not worked so many hours yesterday. But I feel good about the things I prioritized yesterday.
But I am so fucking angry that I couldn’t have been given a little bit more notice as I would have found a way to make it. Literally even one day would have been enough so I could prioritize sleep.
It’s obviously no one’s fault. I’m simply furious that in an effort to budget my energy and physical capacity for what was my priority yesterday, I couldn’t find any remaining capacity today.
I guess the lesson is that if you want me to show up please let me know at least twenty four hours in advance. Or even just the night before.
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 my focus on revanchist populism, but the good of the many versus the singular hero is a subject of fascination for both fascists and socialists alike. Costin Alamariu has set the warrior master return traditionalists on fire as he’s come out from under his nom de plume Bronze Age Pervert with a complex overview of the tyrannical Athenian philosopher kings and their cultivation (yes he means eugenics) of antiquity’s aristocracy.
Everywhere I look, we are all debating whose rules matter, from Nature to God to man, and how we should use that authority to determine how we organize. It’s a bit surprising to see intelligentsia overcome with fervor for the proletariat and the aristocracy when you’d imagine both classes look back with disdain at the academic class.
It’s a ping ponging back and forth between the individual and his wider group responsibilities to his people from every ideological direction.
I see it in Luke Burgis and Freddie DeBoer’s concern with mimetic collapse and the recursive artistic malaise. If our system produces no truly novel art is it a failure of our elites to pursue excellence? Is it among our elites where genius and high culture produced? Or is it the opposite? Do we seek out frontiers when pushed from the boundaries of those who build and work?
As a post enlightenment matter, a petit aristocracy of the technical bourgeois is the most balanced of the positions between the masses yearning to be free and recognition of a desire for leadership earned through meritocracy lending a guiding hand.
As a journalist, Noah Smith is coming from a more intelligentsia orientation but the message of progressive futurism is coming from the patrician side as well. A venture capitalist like Marc Andreessen might not see himself as an elite aristocrat, coming as he did from humble beginnings, but he’s the standard barer for the titan class advocating for technological accelerationism.
