Tag: Attention

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Culture Startups

Day 2002 and Rolling Calls

One of my extended family members owns an agency where they represent some well known talent. I learned a lot from them in both my childhood but as I came into my own as a business person.

They were basically always on the phone. When I was younger it was in an office with an assistant (who I got to know and watch grow into a career) but these days being on the phone is a far more mobile affair.

This practice was referred to as “rolling calls” where the agent and assistant are constantly going back and forth like a switchboard operator with the set of people needed to get a deal done.

Agents were big early adopters of the BlackBerry and rolled those calls straight into the iPhone. Being of an older generation talking was the way call rolling worked with a side of email delivered by your mobile device.

I’d say it’s probably as much a voice game as it is a text game now. My version of rolling calls is rolling Signal chats and Twitter DMs. A couple of good group chats self organizing can make your day really fire. So I’m rolling calls except I’m rolling chats and texts. It’s still basically the same job. We ping until we find the person who gets us to the deal. And then you close.

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Aesthetics Culture

Day 1999 and We Are Going To Party Like It’s 1999

I’m so old I viscerally remember the Y2K panic that ate up the emotional bandwidth of the American media class who then stoked fear into the hearts of the doomer classes from system administrators to evangelical millenarians.

I was very much online during the Y2K era though I didn’t start blogging (unless you count girly message boards or Geocities) till much later. I was however happily a cybercore hippie girl. If you want to feel jealous and are a Zoomer, I owned a teal iMac G3 and iPod. So I it delightful that a younger generation has decided to dust off some of the silliest times of my youth and refurbished them into Instagram and TikTok aesthetic trends.

What is less funny is how much past fear mongering over technological doomsday scenarios look exactly like our current ones. I remember the simmering fears, the debates over types of damage, and extensive coverage of weirdos who were preparing for a kind of end times.

It feels familiar to how very extreme our reaction to artificial intelligence is being portrayed by both the media and its wildest singularity evangelists. I say this as someone who readily calls themselves a doomer so it’s not a milieu that’s foreign to me.

Here is a brief synopsis I patched together from a Perplexity query with links included if you are too young to remember it.

The Y2K crisis was the feared failure of computer systems when dates rolled from 1999 to 2000, because many programs stored the year with only two digits and could misread “00” as 1900 instead of 2000.

In practice, it became a major prevention project rather than a disaster, with governments, banks, utilities, and other organizations spending years fixing code, updating hardware, and testing systems before midnight on January 1, 2000.

The most dramatic predictions were widespread power outages, banking collapse, transportation shutdowns, and chaos in critical infrastructure, but those outcomes did not materialize at midnight. More extreme claims, such as nuclear systems failing and detonations occurring, also did not happen.

Instead, the world saw only limited glitches, such as small database errors or minor local issues, not the civilization-level breakdown many feared. The unusual part of Y2K is that success looked like nothing happening, which is exactly what the preparatory work was meant to achieve.

So here I am on Day 1999 of writing every single day, and I’m waiting to turn over into my own 2000th day. I have no anticipated bugs for that event. I stayed up till midnight with my mother walking the main street of our town with a bunch of others waiting to see if anything happened. Nothing did so we drove home.

But it’s enjoyable to remember the kind of disasters that were predicted with such anxiety ended up being problems we worked our way through. We keep at problems by naming them early. Humans intervene and we change our behavior. That’s something you celebrate about us as a species.

I am excited to have achieved such long tenure of daily public writing because much of it covers we have worked our way into a new panic that I’ve been watching for over twenty years. Singularity thought and the extropians have been part of my daily internet diet for quite some time. I think we will find a way to survive this too. Though I grant it sounds a bit more complicated.

I’m sure 1999 me would be proud of the strange futurist I became in my adulthood. I doubt she would have expected that I’d be investing in nuclear power or that I’d have managed a career in cosmetics as a side quest. This is actually a side quest another nerd pursued. I don’t even wear makeup in 1999. I occasionally do in 2026. But if I need to party my way into the singularity I’ll probably at least wear lipstick.

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Emotional Work

Day 1998 and Daddy Issues Post Mortem on Father’s Day

It’s my first Father’s Day since my own father passed away last year. I never had an ideal relationship with my father in our daily lives and in death this did not change. I was blessed with a complex father and his gifts outweighed any failings in the final tally for me.

Despite our complicated relationship, I credit my father’s example for much of my professional interests and ultimately my success in my career. My love of technology came from his love of technology.

I loved him so much. I always feared I loved him more than he loved me. That fear led me to shape myself to appeal to his preferences so I could more easily fit into his life and how he spent his time.

I took up his work, his hobbies and his ambitions. I never felt I was enough to sustain his attention just because I was his daughter. So I made every effort to be the ideal Daddy’s Girl. I knew he was proud of me when I achieved something he valued.

I don’t think that his disinterest in spending time with his children was a reflection of his feelings for me or my brother, but rather his own preferences for living his life. His love was unspoken because that was his way of being.

He had an outward orientation to the wider world. He loved the comings and goings of world affairs and its impact on business. He loved to golf and travel. He was an avid reader of books, periodicals and newspapers. He took great joy in seeing more of the world than what his childhood has offered him.

He only turned to family at the very end of his life when he took stock of his decisions and their consequences and found he had some regrets. We did our best to reassure him of our love. I told him over and over, I forgave him for anything he felt he had done wrong.

I loved him for who he was no matter the imperfections or mistakes. His humanity was enough for me. Any anger, sadness or resentment I had as a child was let go through my adult life as I worked to become my own person who didn’t wish to carry certain things forward.

My life turned out so beautifully in no small measure because I strove to be part of his world. I may never have fully succeeded with him, but I succeeded in the wider world which is an amazing gift to pass on to your child. .

I prefer to think the best of my father, as I believe he did the best that he could. I’ll never know if my interpretation is correct. As in life so in death. He remain/ as distant and unavailable to me as always. At least now it’s permanent and not a function of my short game or my latest success.

My grief for his loss (which started long before he left this mortal realm) will always be a part of me. Just as the love for technology and the building new things will always motivate my life’s work. Our blessings are contoured to the shape of our lives. And I am happy this is the fit of mine.

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Emotional Work

Day 1989 and Leaving Milestones Without Markers

My own family was never much for celebrating holidays or milestones. Birthdays, graduations, anniversaries (such that we had) tended to go unremarked upon as I got older.

We were never a gift family, so I think this distancing worked out for the best. The commercialization of life’s important moments, especially religious holidays like Christmas really bothered my mother in particular.

We have a rule that no one should buy a gift out of obligation but only if one spots an item and feels moved to buy it for someone. We treasure gifts with meaning much more than an item bought out of a sense of duty to a date or relationship expectation.

Today happens to be a birthday in my immediate family and a “big” one in the sense that it’s a year people often like to celebrate. They have asked that I not make much of the day as it is their preference to keep things low key. Anxiety can even creep in from putting expectations on the day and I’d never wish that on my most loved.

I have a truly blessed life with a wonderful close family in my immediate family. As the circle extends perhaps I can gripe (and who doesn’t) but my nearest and dearest are everything to me. The love they show me, the patience with which they grace me, and the love the accept from me are my reasons for being.

So if a milestone needs to be left without a marker to make them happiest I will do so. I do not wish to impose any of my feelings upon them. I want only to lift them up. My love for them is without expectation.

If being anxious and hidden is their choice I love them. If it is being peaceful and alone that brings them joy I love that for them as well. Whatever I can do I shall. My life matters in the tight weave of the tapestry we have made of our life together. No markers or milestones needed.

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Culture Travel

Day 1978 and In And Out of Reality

The “circuit” of conferences, events, parties and social goings on can make you feel like a consummate insider or give you social anxiety. For some of us, a given circuit is an exercise in social overwhelm, and for others it can be highlight of their calendars. It takes all kinds.

The “circuit” is a part of life for every industry. For some it’s a bit more glamorous; oh yes I’m off to such and such fashion week for cruise. And for others it’s much more pedestrian. A cash bar with drink tickets in a Courtyard by Marriott surely does the trick for state level budget professionals.

At a certain point, you realize there is always another room and a better party and a circuit inside the circuit and you get rid of the highs and lows of the experience and simply learn to live with the iron law of the circuit and schedule life around various aspects where real life and circuit life intersect. Everyone is on some part of the circuit.

Many places are aggressively part of the circuit. My hometown of Boulder lobbied hard to take on Sundance from Park City. I was just in Deer Valley above Park City for a new crew of energy policy folks. Swapping Hollywood schmoozing for nuclear energy seems like a wise move though I don’t know how Boulder will handle an event of that size.

Meanwhile, I learned that Athens is booting up a new technology conference that I just missed. Right before summer high season is an excellent time to bring folks down to the Mediterranean before jumping off to private islands and yachts.

I wonder about other mainstays on the circuit sometimes. Austin won’t host SXSW forever one imagines. But where should it go and should it split up? March will never be the same.

Burning Man is changing, maybe forever, and even storied camps are selling their vehicles. It’s a great week on the circuit and that time will surely be coveted. If I were Wyoming, I’d been keen to extend folks out from the Federal Reserve contingent within the western region but one doubts Nevada coordination with Wyoming is a top priority amongst old party hippies and economic enthusiasts, but you better believe the overlap includes a few folks.

Not that the circuit is a geographically constrained issue for most people on the most serious aspect of the circuit. And if it is you probably fly private or have excellent transit logistics. Bouncing from Fashion Week to Word Economic Forum isn’t a huge stretch if that’s your world.

I’m thinking about the circuit because I was on a chunk of business that was circuit related most of the spring. There was a brief pause in international traffic as the Iran situation worked itself out but everyone seems to be back to normal travel again.

The friction of coming in and out of reality is surreal. The circuit is not exactly part of normal reality as if you only participate in a few events it is the unreality of your calendar which makes it so special. If you live entirely outside of reality, it’s not quite so special.

I myself always find reality special but the dip in and out of unreality is jarring. I find one foot in each is hard to manage. I’m in unreality at the end of the circuit. And I need to reach again for reality even on vacation in unreality land.

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Biohacking Chronic Disease Emotional Work

Day 1964 and We Are Who We Tell Ourselves To Be

No one likes a gloomy Gus. The downside of chronicling a chronic disease is the risk of seeing yourself as only the illness. Then other people will see you that way too. And so your identity becomes tied with only one of the many aspects of your life, and often the worst one at that.

Thankfully most humans are centered enough on themselves to forget the occasional gloomy reality from someone outside of their daily lives.

But repetition becomes reality, and eventually we are who we believe ourselves to be because others believe we are who we say we are too.

I came across a startup who is working on one of those classic swamp problems that seems like a great idea until you are well and truly stuck in the muck with bad incentives and no good solutions.

They want to use artificial intelligence to help patients with chronic diseases or complex medical cases to codify the many little details that might add up to the clues that crack the case.

By tracking subject inputs (unstructured data) and overlaying it with the other biometrics gathered by wearables and bloodwork they can help patients. I’ve seen hundreds of variants of this over the years.

Alas this new startup seems to have discovered a flywheel for marketing that relies on the problem I began today’s post with. We believe what we tell ourselves we are and eventually other people will believe what we believe.

They have chosen to market the app with illness influencers. Yes, that’s an actual category of influencer on TikTok and Instagram. Hot girls all have vague chronic illnesses these days haven’t you noticed?

And so a community forms and reinforces the identity that they all share. They are sick. And that makes them special. This gives life meaning. And did I mention lots of pretty girls have the most esoteric and exiting problems? Click to join now!

I find this to be a troubling, even borderline dangerous, approach to anchoring a community meant to help patients advocate better for care with their own personal health records. The incentive to remain with the privileged identity that makes them special only increases over time. Women reinforce themselves into intensely held identities all the time.

I thought about reaching out to them but I don’t want to get tangled with this problem. It is one for professionals which neither myself nor these founders are aside from everyone being a patient with chronic illness.

I do not wish for my identity to be the sick woman. The woman whose life was upended by a fertility protocol gone wrong in the early years of her marriage and in the prime of her life.

It’s one aspect of my reality. I do want others to be saved from my fate so I share it. But it is not who I am. Julie is not a sick woman. Julie is a complicated individual with a beautiful life and family and portfolio.

I had my own glimmer of hope today. Though I have repeated my troubles with my medical history I have never felt it was my identity. I’d happily give it up if I find a path to wellness. And I spend so much of my life trying to walk out of my troubles.

I have walked many side roads and pursued quixotic quests to find health. And some days I even find it. Today I got very good news on a fresh round of bloodwork. I’ve felt recently felt well thanks to some changes and an aggressive pursuit of new modalities.

I never want to get my hopes up too high as this effort has been a rollercoaster of ups and downs. But I won’t let go of the hope. The mere idea that this chapter could close and I might be a healthy woman is an identity I’d gladly welcome. And I’d wish that for anyone who takes on illness as a part of their identity.

Categories
Culture Internet Culture Startups

Day 1946 and Cultural Appropriation Wars

I wish I hadn’t signed online today. I participated in the basest form of attention grabbing virality as I needed a distraction from Bernie Sanders “America and China Need to Stop Artificial Intelligence” press push colluding with the “foot in mouth” disease of Silicon Valley.

So naturally I got caught up in bizarre intrasexual and intersexual competition schemes. Two absolutely bizarre stories dominated the feeds. The first is Asian women in California and the appeal of the ABG. The second is the alleged fantasies of an Indian banker who wanted us to “believe all men” but like Penthouse letters, it seems too good to be true. An Albanian baddie at JPM wouldn’t be that careless.

No clue what I mean? Let me urge you to stay that way. But I’ll put down some thoughts.

If you are a Subaru driver and Vin Diesel fan, you may dimly remember that they were once rice rockets and not lesbian all terrain vehicles. California has diverse homegrown culture of Asian American women who embrace bad boys, fast cars and their East Bay neighborhoods.

The controversy? The ABG culture is being appropriated by striving Product Mommies who believe their B2B SaaS baes will enable their inner Asian Baddie Gangsta ways. I am not from this culture so I can’t exactly say. I think it’s fine if you want to improve your looks in search of a specific aesthetic. There is even an event you can RSVP to attend.

Now the other horror show I mentioned is about intersexual competition schemes from a different Asian culture. Ink has been spilled on western portrayals of the sexuality of Southeast Asian men, specifically how Anglo culture emasculates them. Well, that’s how the story started out.

It began as a “believe all men” tale of Indian man who was a direct report to a blonde Albanian woman at an investment bank. He alleged being forced into sexual contact with his female superior and it is so salacious my best recommendation is to watch it via anthropomorphic fruit. Well, the internet moves fast.

And as the day went on it turned out that it might be some very lurid erotica written by a rake and the very attractive blonde Albanian banker has in fact had her good name besmirched.

Now why am I associating these two stories? I think that identity in Anglo-American dominant cultures has often flattened the experiences of assimilation into our melting pot. London, New York, the Bay Area all have unique flavors of this blending.

And a cultural niches like East Bay Asian gangster baddies (Los Angeles also has its own variants) being consumed as an identity by other Asian cultures as a way to “be bad and sexy” seems harmless. But it’s also consuming a culture you didn’t create. I understand the annoyance.

The upsetting story coming from banking may be a very different way of embracing and reinforcing sexual narratives for southeast Asian men, but it is still fundamentally a story of belief about sexual identity and how it gets used in the workplace. H

ad it not been so incredibly salacious, we might have considered his side of the story a little bit longer, but it is now a piece of culture that reinforces some of the most negative perceptions of southeast Asian men.

Everyone is free to form their own identities and preferences, but it’s a fascinating day when the two major stories running rampant on social media are examples of constructing westernized, fetishized identities to get ahead.

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Startups

Day 1936 and Life Inside The Jackpot or I Remain An Optimist

I did not expect to spend so much of my time on politics. Or maybe that’s the wrong word. I look being in voluntary service to American governance as my civic obligation. It can look like politics even when it’s mostly trying to be helpful to the running of our polity.

After 2016 I felt regular citizens like myself needed to recall Kennedy’s patriotic inaugural address from 1961. “Ask not what your country could do for you, but what you can do for your country.” America is a complicated place but we get a say in it. And I’d like to help people understand what I know so it might be useful in serving America in very strange times.

My mother loved Kennedy’s profiles in courage. Boomers have beautiful mythos on facing the new world together. He was the first president born in the 20th century. The social compact of America changed quite a bit then. I wonder who the first president born in the 21st century will be. Maybe it will be another young Catholic man.

The optics of progress aside, it was clear as a new generation in Kennedy’s era took on a new obligation to come together when the American experiment felt at risk. So much about who benefit from the military industrial complex rested in the transition from Eisenhower to Kennedy.

I think the context is a little different when progress feels inevitable. Our moment is scary. Though the Cold War was not primarily optimism. They experienced as many breaks with institutional trust as we do in 2026.

Tines are different but I do not think the prescription is different. We owe it to each other to embrace change together. What can we do for America?

I am not the son of a mobster nor am I a nepo-baby of America’s great cultural surplus. I wish. I’m not presidential material or Tiktok star material.

I do have some singular cultural advantages. I am a regular person from slightly unusual circumstances that happened to enjoy some upwardly mobility which let me to participate as an equal in an important transition point. I am actually rather surprised to matter at all. But I do and I intend to advocate for America succeeding together in this change.

I do take technology as a force in society seriously. I believe surplus is an amazing thing. My life is completely different than my biological history. Given how my human DNA was programmed and what I can do daily beyond that you bet I take artificial intelligence seriously. Material progress is real.

I take the physics of demand seriously. It seems like not everyone is confident we can speak to the general public about what it means that the technology industry has found a way to automate itself. It is a scary thing to say. And we begin with ourselves. It is actually our jobs that go first. If we believe it can be better on the other side of the Jackpot live like it.

And I do. I live a little further from civilization for the peace and quiet and because I am a little uncertain. But artificial intelligence’s new incredibly malleable models have changed my capacity by an order of magnitude. How wish I could have had this when I was a software and cosmetics founder.

I am a heavy user of all the hosted commercial models because they are in fact very good. I can do so much more across all the areas of life where I have to figure things out on my own.

I have health problems that are expensive and challenging. I’m lucky to be able to explore extensively the web of issue that drive having a body which has decided it must overreact. And I am in the process of fixing it. In ways that I’d never have had access to before Claude or ChatGPT. I have comfortably setups in spreadsheets and web apps and we can map years of bloodwork and experiments.

I think America is having an autoimmune reaction to the idea of automation as the end product of artificial intelligence. We sense it as a threat and it’s both terrifying in its potential but also a bit of the optimism has waned as the culture of technology fails to engage the mainstream as normal or even beneficial.

It’s the same process of making life better we have run. We took all our brain power to make our physical jobs easier. This has largely been viewed as a benefit to everyone except by strict biological determinists. Bronze Age romanticism is just that.

Thanks to progress in mathematics, we can now make knowledge that was extremely expensive to find, query, and organize as as accessible as asking an expert a good question.

Which is actually still tricky. Most Arthurian legends seem to resolve on knowing what to ask in order to receive wisdom. Knowing what to ask is not easily solved by mathematics. It’s not actually a cheat sheet but rather a powerful way to enable yourself. If you wish to take on that responsibility.

I feel I am somewhere between Hill and Valley in that I work in this world and I chose to become civically engaged. And I am concerned about where we are at. I am genuinely an optimist though as I think humans are so very adaptable. So I try to translate between the tribes who run our system and the tribe of people who make the systems run by the first tribe.

Maybe it’s be being somewhat in between that lets me be a node between the hill and the valley in America. Or as others frame it as a tripartite of Athens, Jerusalem, and Silicon Valley. I think that’s a bit grandiose only because maybe empires run on roads and plumbing but let’s not get forget that power is diffused in a network era. Every node that can route information has power.

The criticisms technology rightly takes from our body politic is that we are going quite fast. I know. I am inside the Gibsonian Jackpot with you. And I know it’s hard to believe that living through the change can be good even if we have inklings of the way life is already better right now. So we have to work together to figure it out.

Categories
Homesteading Preparedness

Day 1932 and Who Took Off Their Snow Tires Early

We did not have much of a winter to speak of Montana. Sure, Farmer’s Almanac predicted a lot of snowfall but even such an august institution can’t always get it right.

We got almost no pre-season snow fall. Which one can shrug off. We dutifully schedule our snow tire switchover at the end of September anyway. Alex bought his lift tickets with high hopes for a good ski season. Then the openings of our local mountain and Big Sky looked dicey. And yet still we hung onto hope.

We had no white Christmas. The deep freezes of January usually come with snowfall. It was grey this year. February would surely come through right? Alas wrong again. March did not go out like a lion. There was little water to whip up in our non-existent bay. And so, in April we cried and our hopes stepped aside as we waited for pretty little May.

People began to take off their snowtires. This just wasn’t our year. Spring would arrive early right? Any hopes of good days of powder were thoroughly dashed. It was over till next year right? Wrong!

The weight of wet snow

It snowed a big wet mess of deep sloppy powder on Good Friday. Hooray! Indeed it was a good Friday. Except, oh no, our snow tires are off.

Then, last night, when no one honestly believed the forecast for 6-10 inches one bit, we went to bed expecting a normal day. The days had already begun to lengthen substantially. Birds were hatching and the green was growing.

A heavy wet mess dumped onto our patio overnight

Clearly we were wrong. I tossed and turned all night as my joints bubbled and ached. I thought I was using a flare. But when I woke up it was clear my body knew more than my brain and the weather forecast was correct. It has snowed almost a full foot.

The hot tub needed to be dug out

Now the particulars funny aspect of all this is that Alex took the snowblower off the tractor yesterday. He needed to cut the side pasture down before new growth hit so the snowblower attachment was replaced for the trimmer. We’d let long grass grow and then flatten which required more than a riding mower. It needed the Deere to cut through.

So the front walkway was hand dug out but the drive to our road is going to remain snowed in for a bit. The sun will come out tomorrow. I did however have to reschedule a haircut. But that’s the price you pay for trying to get ahead of the weather. We never should have taken off our snow tires early.

Categories
Aesthetics Biohacking

Day 1929 and Lacking The Executive Function for Dysphoria

I am no spring chicken. That’s why we bought some spring chickens this weekend. I kid I kid. I do however have a forever 35 face. I come from a line of women who age well sure but I have very consistent habits.

I’m lucky to have an ageless look. My husband would say I have a forever 28 face as I somehow look better having crossed into my forties than I did when we met at 28. Meanwhile my husband has gone from boyish wonder with full head of hair to distinguished grey beard with a bald pate.

Now sure husbands are supposed to say nice things like “no honey you haven’t aged a day!” Except I really do seem to have benefited greatly from genetics and routine.

He may be right, not out of any urge to flatter me, but simply because some women do look better with a little age on them. I looked young with a rounded features right until I looked ageless somewhere in my late thirties.

Alex and I at 29 where you absolutely can spot my pre-retinol skin
Alex and I two weeks ago before touring the West Wing during our trip to D.C

I don’t look all that different when I compare and contrast between photos from then and now. I gained and lost as much weight as a Kardashian (more than once damn you prednisone and bless you semaglutide) but my face has somehow retained its plump without a maximalist approach without gaining wrinkles. I’ve lost the fine lines.

Yet the approaches are getting more and more maximalist by the year. The difference between a 2016 routine and 2026 routine is enough to warrant a fresh round of social panic and scolding complete with a Big Story from New York Magazine’s The Cut.

Now I myself have left comments on extreme routines for twenty somethings to convince them that it’s too early for Botox as you do want to keep tools in the box for when you need them.

I didn’t start Botox till forty and I’m grateful as I need much less now. I didn’t pull anything out either even when cut looks were all the rage. I’m glad for my rounded features now.

But I have added in more to my beauty routine as I age because I enjoy it. I found it humorous when a 31 year old pursing a doctorate in clinical psychology said out loud what I’ve darkly joked about with girlfriends for years. It’s really hard to be completely controlled.

For a year in my early 20s, I was also spending literally all of my money on a psycho 100-step skin-care process. Looking back, I didn’t have the executive functioning to be successfully anorexic, which is what I also wanted. But I did have the discipline to enjoy this complicated multistep ritual of the skin care. I found it satisfying.” New York Magazine

Now we can all joke and say she shouldn’t be in practice but I never felt I could pull off an eating disorder either even though I often wished I could. That eating disorders are dangerous enough to kill you isn’t the point. It’s being able to control your body enough that you can kill yourself that we desire.

I hated that no matter how much effort I put into diet and exercise I could never achieve the standards of waif like beauty put out in the heyday of Anna Wintour’s heroin chic era. Millennial beauty expectations were a bitch and I could never quite work up the control to hate myself. Sure I got really fit with a heck of a squat but I always had to watch every single macronutrient and instead of skinny I got lean.

And while I appreciate a good Molière joke about The Imaginary Invalid, weight was never the issue that got me in trouble. It was hormones that got me.

So I knew poor health with a healthy weight and I knew poor health with a lot of weight gained trying to fix the poor health.

I will never allow myself to get over the BMI band again to avoid the medical discrimination I faced when I gained weight while on prednisone.

Alas no my autoimmune condition was not mitigated even an iota by weight loss. I had it before I was fat. I got fat treating it. I still have it now that I’m at a healthy weight.

But the desire to maximize your looks and your health always intertwine with women. Increasingly it does for men too. Body dysmorphia respect neither sex nor gender. I doubt it will ever again.

Beauty is a skill set. And some of that skill set is now pharmaceutical in nature. And if we are honest, it’s been that way for a few decades. It’s just that everyone know about it now. The network age comes for us all.