Tag: Commitment

Categories
Culture

Day 1557 and Care and Maintenance

The first stress test of our brave new order has arrived and the markets are pissed. Millennials will notice it shortly as tariffs are hitting Internet native homoglobo products particularly hard.

Many bills are coming due. And when you’ve let things go for too long it’s hard to maintain your current needs let alone build for new ambitions. America has a lot of debt and it’s time to crash the dollar.

But perhaps we can’t take care of anything in our lives and the currency is just a small part of our issues. The tariff crisis is a symptom of a wider issue of value in our own lives. We don’t treat any of the things in our lives as if they have value.

“Can the average house be maintained by the average person?” sounds like a nonsense question at first blush but I think it’s an important one?” Simon Harris

This is a problem across all areas of our lives. We don’t know how to maintain anything. It’s not just housing. People don’t know how to care for wool, leather or textiles any longer.

Many items in our lives are meant to last with care and maintenance. But these skills aren’t passed down any more. We stopped mending at home and it’s bubbled up from there.

Categories
Startups

Day 1534 and Certitude

I’ve been busy with a founder who is running an astonishingly competitive seed round. Let’s just say I’m glad I wrote the first check.

I back founders long before it’s possible to have any certainty. I have accumulated enough signal and taste over twenty years to feel like I know when someone has what it takes to try their hand at a startup. It doesn’t mean it will work but I always believe in their capacity to do the work required.

Proving that out is probably the work of millions of pages of business school papers. No wonder we are complaining about the lack of builders. Wouldn’t it be better if we just put those resources into starting actual businesses instead of theorizing?

I’m a huge fan of always being a bit entrepreneurial. The much maligned “side hustle” that millenials and zoomers maintain out of necessity has its upside.

I like all scales and all kinds of business. Alex and started dating thanks to a swap on an Airbnb rent arbitrage. I’d let someone book dates for my apartment when I was supposed to be out of town. Trip dates change. Alex offered his apartment up if we split the profit. We’ve been in business ever since.

I’m working through a new local business plan we think will have community benefit (both in terms of job creation and service offering). Am I certain it will work?

Actually more certain than you’d expect this small scale that we can boot something up. Startups are much harder to judge than an existing business model with a new offering.

Incidentally if you are in Montana and looking for a medical grade hyperbaric chamber oxygen treatment we should have ours in a month or so.

Categories
Culture Politics

Day 1533 and the Long View

One of the oddities of America’s tax system is how much it comparatively penalizes those who make a high salary over those who earn by investment gains.

I’m sure some neoliberal could give a polished argument about about marginal tax brackets but we absolutely hose high W2 earners relative to capital.

Maybe Americans aren’t so sophisticated about what this means but it seems folks got the gist of it. Older generations owning the S&P and their home found that to be a better investment than just working for a living.

The message seems to be if you have a salary at least try to be a partner in the company yeah? Thats how bankers, lawyers, and other professionals did it.

This is a very boom boom when it works and gets very ugly when it doesn’t.

I find it odious that we tax high earning labor. It stifles social mobility by keeping wealth out of reach of the professional class. The government decides how their money is invested. That makes it much harder to take the long view. Clearly the generation above us didn’t always do so.

Categories
Startups

Day 1518 and FOMO

I’m not fit for travel this week as I’ve got a couple physical issues that would do better without additional stress.

I am missing an event for a startup that is close to my heart. Being the first person to believe in a company and a founder is a special thing.

The people who said yes first on my own companies still years later mean so much to me. Their opinions still matter to me and succeeding for them remains a goal across decades and investment vehicles because that faith is so precious.

Being a part of someone’s story is risky. Especially on the first chapter you don’t know where the story goes. And that’s the beauty of it. Faith when there is nothing to go on.

I want more than anything to be the first believer. To see what no one else can. That’s part of my drive in investing. To be early is rewarding beyond the finances of it.

And so tonight I’ll have FOMO, or maybe just MO, as I will be missing out as Valar reveals Ward One. I feel like I live a pretty cool life if it has been writing checks into nuclear reactors. Hopefully soon I’ll be able to see it in person.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 1513 and Forcing Function

I’ve not in one thousand five hundred and thirteen days of writing in a row set forth a m standard for how I might quit. Four years (or 216 weeks) is plenty of time to come up with a criteria for making a decision.

I have in that time embraced the haziness inherent in self trust. I’ll just know when it’s time. That’s obviously a rationalization. I assumed that circumstances would decide for me which meant I’d never need firm criteria for stopping. It would just happen.

Given my health and the general state of the world surely in this long timeframe some calamity, crisis or mishap would keep me from writing one day and that would simply be that. The chain would be broken.

It has not yet happened. No forcing function has stopped me from my writing practice. And I’ve not yet set worth anything firm about how I’ll know.

So far 2025 has tested me. There are many short posts. I have been hampered by health and home issues which sorely make me want to give up some days.

I’ve tried to included more sporadic “linking and thinking” to make my writing space more blog-like and less essay oriented. Backing away from narrative forms is a fine way of introducing flexibility into one’s writing.

I can’t help wondering if I should introduce a forcing function and create a set of criteria for when I’ll stop. But the truth is I’m scared to give myself a clear way out when I’m struggling. Perhaps it’s better to keep that trust that I’ll know.

Categories
Chronic Disease Emotional Work

Day 1506 and Breaking With Convention

I am in a challenging spot at the moment with our household mold issue and my attempts to accelerate changes in my care protocol for my autoimmune condition.

When things are challenging physically I find myself in tension. I want to share and be open in my experiment to write every single day. I am afraid that I’m doing nothing but share weakness by doing so.

I don’t want to telegraph only strain, illness, and struggle. Sure things are hard at the moment, but I am more than my current local minima conditions. Things are quite good.

Just because I feel too weak to articulate all the areas of strength doesn’t mean they don’t exist. I just can’t put them front and center right now.

This frustrates and even angers me. Large long term projects and investments are thriving and rather than focus on those I am curling into the fetal position and wishing I could disappear until I’m able to advocate loudly and proudly for my wins.

Categories
Aesthetics Politics

Day 1481 and smh

When I got started with my daily writing project I knew there would be days when I did not want to write. Today is one of them.

I actually expected “ugh no want to write” days to be more frequent than turned out to be true. I’ve bitched about it 51 times which isn’t a lot in the grand scheme of things.

I knew I’d find a way to force the issue just as I had made other habits a part of my life. You really can make almost anything a habit if you are so inclined. But I rarely have to force habit. I just do the thing till it’s either a habit or it’s clear it’s not for me. They say it’s 21 days but I’d give it more like 100 to be safe.

Things I just do every day include applying facial moisturizer, brushing my teeth, squatting (no not just on the toilet I mean the full body compound exercise), taking my vitamins, Tweeting, playing a stupid pay to play Chinese mobile game, telling my husband I love him and opening up my mobile content management app to write this post.

And yet I am in a real “smh” place today with my attempts to find meaning in any of my habits. I’m disappointed in more than a few things. It’s all very Cthulhu and Antarctic cold vibes for me today. Sure it’s -20 in Montana but it’s very sunny so it’s cheery dread.

Anyways, the interregnum is over, we have a new President who is an old President and everything that is new is old and everything old is new again.

The entire Arnault family showed up for the inauguration so Dior’s New Look is back. Does that make this a post war moment? Did we live through a cultural revolution and not even notice? Smh.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 1474 and Process over Outcome

It’s hard to trust, well, anything. The uncertainty of the near future looks like the uncertainty of the far future right now.

It feels as if one is in a fog so thick that you can’t see your own hand reaching out to touch something at arm’s length let alone glimpse gjr far horizon

How do we set goals and work towards outcomes in that kind of world? I find it unsettling despite having years to prepare for a more chaotic world.

I am learning to let go of grasping for specific outcomes and lean on process to bring me to outcomes. I work the problems in front of me. I maintain the protocols that work for me. When they cease to yield results I change as rapidly as I am able.

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease

Day 1471 and Lemons into Lemonade

I was so disappointed yesterday as I read over my most recent set of bloodwork and found my autoimmune biomarkers headed in the wrong direction.

I’ve been well controlled though my disease is not “inactive” or in remission. I manage it as it’s worth it to me to have a quality of life that includes working in technology as I want to be a part of making the tools that enable material progress in health.

Seeing things go in the wrong direction when my life is going in the right direction had a clarifying effect on me.

Not that I’ve been unaware that I must work at my health but rather it’s hard to always be working at health as it’s a matter of survival. But when you see a change in the data you act. I got serious and immediately went into action.

I’m so lucky to have to have access to an incredible community of biohackers. That I can ask someone who is studiously pursuing health in public is the best of the internet. I get the benefit of Bryan Johnson’s open sourcing his work. I’m doing an experiment with HBOT or hyperbaric chamber oxygen therapy and I learned from him I need it to be 2 atmospheres to be effective. This helps me plan and find hard chambers.

I can use Perplexity and Claude and even make my own personal assistant trained on my condition and my data is the remarkable thing.

I’ve found a new IL-17 inhibitor that looks to have twice the efficacy of my current one at the same dose. It was only approved in Europe but finally came on the American market. I was able to discuss it with my doctor immediately after going down a short question sequence on perplexity. You have so much power to improve your life now.

Shopping

I’d like to improve my V02 max and cardiovascular health in a way that works around my psoriatic arthritis and ankylosis. I have significant fatigue from the pain and obviously high impact isn’t in the cards for me. But I can try something like a DeskCycke. It’s even possible for me to do HIIT training with one. So I bought one. My goal is to improve my V02 by 10% in 8-12 months which shouldn’t be hard as mine is absolutely awful

Categories
Chronicle Emotional Work

Day 1462 and Year Five Begins

“We aren’t quitters” could be a tagline from a sports movie, a speech about the American people or your parent’s family philosophy.

Fortune favors those with fortitude. Grit sums up entire pedagogies of successful education and institutional cultures.

And here I am, one day at a time, continuing to log my thoughts for anyone who might care to read them on this public journal.

When I first began I thought the experiment to write every single day I thought would last a month. Then I thought maybe I could make it to a full year. Now I’m unsure if I will ever want to stop. I’m not even sure I know how to stop?

I’m less sure the narrative aspects of this log are as crucial to me as when I first started . I wanted to improve my capacity to write regularly so I set out to practice that creative process.

Having achieved my goal to write and publish each day, it may be time to evolve this narrative into a more traditional blog format from the past.

We used to include links, asides, and unrelated tidbits alongside narratives and storytelling in old school weblogs. I may try to try to include tidbits of what I am seeing each day as a way of sharing my context and inference process.

If the mood stokes for essays (as is my usual habit) that’s fine and if the mood strikes for a log of influences that is fine too. Year five has permission to be whatever it likes.

Current Reading

A gift link to a New York Times article on the China craze and the fifth and likely final generation that carried a dish set through a century only to find the status symbol it once represented is long gone.

Hannu Rajaniemi an entrepreneur and science fiction author has a new book Darkome about a world where with a corporate giant who invented a mRNA vaccine wearable and an underground of biohackers working to keep those vaccines and edits available online not available in America but thankfully I got a copy in Europe.

Interested in the “Don’t Die” movement? Time to learn all the ways cells die.

A history of learning how cells die

Why do we know so little history? Bogus airport bestsellers are one culprit. Or a bestseller anyone who took an AP history course “A World Lit Only By Fire” is mostly bunk. Turns out that’s common.

“Style is a magic wand; everything it touches turns to gold.”

– Logan Pearsall Smith