I write to help myself think. I didn’t realize just how much better I’d become at thinking through problems in my own life by becoming a more frequent writer but it’s been true.
If anything I thought it was the opposite. I thought if I became a better thinker I’d somehow also become I’d become a better writer. Lol, I had the process reversed. The video I link to below really hammers in the point. This video clip of Larry McEnerney, from the University of Chicago hit my mind like a fucking gong.
These clips are two of the best pieces of writing advice you will ever get about writing on the internet.
I promise.
It is so good we show it to our newsletter students.
If you are writing to help yourself think you produce content along one axis. It’s valuable to you because it’s helping you make sense of the world. My writing helps me think and that’s why I personally find it valuable.
It’s also a totally different skill set to make writing valuable to someone else. You are writing for an audience of yourself generally when you write to help yourself think. Writing so someone else understands it is a is horizontal problem to you writing to make yourself understand.
You may or may not have an audience but if you want one you have to make something valuable. But remember the first step in doing so is providing value to yourself. And much as it is painful to hear what you find valuable isn’t always going to be what others find valuable. And that’s ok because the first customer of your thought process is yourself.
Perhaps its a function of being an American abroad in Germany, but I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the social contract and the expectations we have for free association and collaboration.
Germany’s democratic socialism is abutting against the challenges of global market capitalism and cultural pluralism. And the strain is evident. Frankfurt is expensive and there are many competing populations from refugees to globo-homo cosmopolitans
I think only one in five people I’ve encountered appear to be native born German. It’s almost enough to make me feel like I’m in America. Which is to say I see the in-group and out-group competition clearly.
Different expectations for a civic polity can range wildly depending on the goal. We enable everything from humanity wide medical breakthroughs to individual physical health through incentives both individual and collective. And yes because I’m American I notice shit like who pays for parks and recreation. I also notice soda taxes. Choices are all around us and the incentives make it look like no choice at all.
Humans live at varying degrees of abstraction. Our capacity to go from whole to parts, and parts to whole, depends on education, temperament, intellect, emotional capacity and preferences.
Where our new living history takes us is going to depend a lot on how we design incentives for collaboration that provides benefits to participants that are transparent. Otherwise I’d be strapping in for more civilizational struggles.
My aspirations include us finding ways to collaborate across much wider destinies with as much freedom for all can be managed. I’m hoping AI and crypto go hand in hand. High trust and no-trust are our only options at this scale. But like any reformation it threatens the current powers and worldviews.
Amid all the panic about how artificial intelligence is rapidly replacing human work, we are hiding a dirty little secret. Humans are awful at breaking down goals into component parts. Anyone who has tried to use any type of project management software intuits this. Articulating clear, specific and manageable tasks is very hard.
Humans are inference driven, always integrating little bits of context and nuance. If your boss gives you a goal, the best path forward on it will depend on hundreds if not thousands of factors.
What’s your budget? What is your timeline? Who is on your team? Do you dislike someone? Want to impress another person? Is the goal to be fast? Is the goal to be good? Is the goal to be as good as possible as fast as possible with as little budget as possible? Trick question, quit your job if that last one true.
Knowing what we want, knowing the best path to achieving it, and knowing how the pursuit of those goals affect your family, friends, neighbors, enemies and adversaries, creates layers of decisions in a complex matrix of possibilities. This is easy for a machine to do if we’ve given them the right inputs, outputs, and parameters. Alignment isn’t all that easy.
I personally don’t believe most of us know what we want. Beyond a Giradian imitation of what our current culture deems valuable, and thus worthy of admiration, genuine desire is hard to pin down. And that makes it hard to have goals. Goals are required to have specific tasks. Specific preferences on how a task gets achieved narrow it down even further.
If I could simplify down every detail and desire and nuance and preference set and also align them with my wider goals, ambitions, and critical paths to achieving them you know I’d have it all organized on some kanban board. And if the AI can extract that from me and turn all my goals into discrete assignments and task chunks I’d happily go full Culture and let them run my entire life.
It’s been a beautiful week in the Gallatin Valley. Every single morning on my daily constitutional walk I notice new growth. Very suddenly we went from of melting & assessing snow damage to bright and sunny spring green.
The more northern latitudes get a shorter growing season (in fact we will get more snow) but the season is one of magnified intensity as our evenings stretch towards 10pm before the light is gone. And so on this first weekend of May we’ve begun taking action on spring. Hobby farmers spring into action.
Alex slicing open a bag of manure in our back pasture in preparation for tree planting A man, a hole, and a shovel
My husband and I have no idea what we are doing but with the true spirit of fuck around and find out we began anyway. Our running joke is that Alex is a #ManofAction as there is just simply so much more practically to do when you live on land for which you are ultimately responsible. It’s a lot of fun and very grounding.
And as you might guess the most liberating feeling in the world is being held accountable for yourself and your choices. So even knowing full well you are basically that dog typing on a computer subtitled “I’ve got no ideal what I’m doing” you carry on anyway.
I’ve got no idea what I’m doing Golden Retriever Typing
While I did a few laps around the pasture and helped with a bit of the lighter work my role was mostly to capture the fun and excitement of trying something new. We picked two apple, two plum and one cherry from Starks Brothers to add in after a fall planting of a number of apple trees. We’ve got no idea if any of this is going to take. We’ve read some books but that barely counts.
Our cyberpunk John Deer free of computer parts along with a few stages of planting
Meanwhile inside the homestead I’ve been doing some spring cleaning. I’ve been appropriately assigned gender formative roles as I actually enjoy keeping things attractive and beautiful. The closests need turning over from the wool and layering over to tee-shirts, sundresses, and linens. Alex mostly goes from button downs to tee shirts. Jeans are swapped for cargo shorts. Being a man is simpler.
Winter boots need to be put away and flats, sneakers and sandals brought to the front. Alex had more work gear and footwear as he does more of the outdoors work than I do so shoes are more Alex than me.
Heavy winter oil and moisture rich cosmetics will give way to lighter water creams and ceramides. I don’t change retinols but I may add in more C and lactic acid for turnover in the heat. Alex meanwhile gets away with a basic vitamin C moisturizer and SPF.
I alas have not dealt with getting my hair trimmed in sometime but the reminder that it’s time to cut off dead ends is ultimately a spring time ambition. Hopefully you had the good sense to prune in the winter. My husband is lucky enough to simply buzz his head. Happy spring everyone and may your rituals enjoyable to you.
Twitter has been so broken that it’s been a while since I’ve seen a context collapse happen to someone close to me. It’s been pretty fun. I’d almost forgot how ridiculous Twitter can be.
Now, of course, it’s impolite to drag someone on Twitter. But being upset that a professional fucked up a paid service is however kind of Twitter’s whole vibe. Being a cleaner is skilled work. You don’t put cast iron in a dishwasher anymore than you’d toss a wool suit in a dryer. But you can’t take knowledge for granted and Alex fucked up by leaving the pan on the stove.
Alex is sad for to have lost something he values. He is a talented chef and treats his tools with care. The seasoning came from a year of cooking. The skillet can be repaired but a year of cooking only gets replaced by a year of cooking. Loss is part of life.
But as this May Day viral Tweet indicates, any public display or experience that suggests you have privilege of any kind can quickly turn into a dim witted undergraduate seminar where it everyone is failing basic critical theory. Power is complicated.
I’m particularly amused by the jealousy on display as the reason we have a cleaner come once or twice a month is because I’m disabled. I have a chronic inflammatory spinal condition and my husband is my primary care giver. Typically disability is recognized in the wider pantheon of intersectionality as a disadvantage.
But intersectionality isn’t nearly as fun for dunking as inchoate rage. Much better to enjoy a little consequence free social opprobrium by laughing at those awful wealthy startup shitheads who pay for services. Fuck us!
I don’t desire any pity for my disability. But it would be silly to pretend that simply because we came into some money that I don’t have any problems.
Without treatment I was bedridden and unable to walk. So when we had some startup investments exit it was an relief to feel like we wouldn’t be in lifelong medical debt. We hire services as it allows us both to work. And I work because our medical bills are insane. Fun loop right?
Whatever you take away from this, I’d argue it’s good to care about power, community, skills, disability, labor and ending the culture wars. I’m glad this happened on May Day. We will continue pay a living wage to our skilled service providers. We are lucky it’s within our means. We pay $150 for three hours and we will continue to put our money into our community because that’s the whole point of rich assholes. Now go watch some Downtown Abbey.
A lot of folks are suffering right now. And I’ve got all the empathy in the world for just how rough it is to live in this modern moment. So I want you to really hear what I’m saying knowing that I do it out of love.
It’s sucks to suck
I’m currently sucking at a bunch of stuff in my life. Because I’m learning new skills and expanding my horizons. I am just sucking big hairy balls as I go about the process of embarrassing myself becoming competent through failure.
Thankfully I am surrounded by a family who loves me and wants me to improve. They don’t mind if I suck because sucking is the first step in success. If I don’t suck at something I’m probably not pushing myself to learn. And just because I’m afraid of sucking is no excuse. Everyone sucks sometimes.
And I get it. It sucks to suck. I hate how uncomfortable it makes me feel to fuck up. I am regularly failing at lots of shit on what feels like a daily basis.
And I do often want to crawl into a hole and stop doing new things so I can enjoy the feelings of power and competence at things I am already successful in.
And yet I don’t want to stay in my comfort zone. Even though I am intimately familiar with how much it sucks to suck. I hate the feeling of having not tried even more. I’d rather shoulder the risk of the fuck ups than live with the crushing anxiety of not shooting my shot.
Because more than it sucks to suck, it really fucking sucks to not even try. It eats away at your soul. You wonder if your life could be better. And I am here to tell you yes it can be. My life is fucking awesome right now. And it’s awesome because I tried. I spent a lot of time being embarrassed.
I didn’t get everything I wanted. But like those damned boomers said, you might find that you get what you need. So go ahead and suck. The path to happiness is on the other side of it. Don’t give up just because it sucks to suck.
I fancy myself as someone who enjoys playing games. I mostly play the great game but I enjoy a good stupid grinder. Pokémon Go, Duolingo, and Fitocracy all appeal to my sense of hard work mattering.
But, of course, games have exploits. Some of them are significant. Sometimes leveling up is just a matter of getting lucky. A side quest dropped you an s tier item and the game engine smiled on you. Yay!
Silicon Valley mistakes luck for skill pretty regularly. And we don’t take it that well when other people use the same exploits as us because damn it that’s just not fair!
So rules tend to get rewritten and the hacks get patched and the economy in grinder games reliably defaults back to rewarding repetitive work. It’s not that different from the real economy. Gamers want to know clever game play works but not as much as they want to keep the value of what they have earned. It’s a real tension those sunk costs! Even if starting over benefits you the tendency to cling is understandable.
You’ve got to know when to spot when an activity is worth more than the general perception. You used to have to do this sort of work on your own but thanks to the internet we’ve got cheat codes literally everywhere for everything.
Don’t confuse the fact that cheat codes work for the fact that grinding came be the right approach for the game you are playing. Sometimes putting in the work means being a team player is valuable. Sometimes you are the glass cannon. Sometimes your style of play will offend others. Don’t take it all so seriously that you cannot stomach making a move. What’s the worst thing that happens?
Here is a mindfuck for you. Pretending works. The mimicry of the thing occasionally, though not mostly, can lead to having the real thing. Fake it till you make it” works if you’ve got a long enough runway to allow for take off. If you’ve judged the resources correctly is more art than science but you should still be able to do the math.
There are, of course, laws of physics to account for in all of this but your reality is more fungible than you realize. I wouldn’t try manifesting a whole fantasy world, but if you are Brandon Sanderson you might have a shot. That guy rocks.
In discussing whether it is better to fire founders or product managers on Twitter today I got to see a lot of the cargo cult culture of Silicon Valley coming off a high. A lot of people can perform innovation and we’ve maybe even got it down to being well liked by financial markets. But sometimes you actually do have to go and do the thing. And you can’t fake it.
If you aren’t familiar with kayfabe, it’s a term used in wrestling. It means you don’t break character loosely. You keep the secret even if everyone is in on it. You can take things a bit too far and the blending of fiction and reality has now given us a reality tv president.
But what happens when you don’t make the jump? Does reality crash in? Will the market punish you for not delivering on a convincing enough value proposition? Do you have to keep your ambition within some scope that can exist in our agreed upon reality? Yes of course. Fuck you it’s called civilization. But every once in a while someone goes from vapor ware to the Revolution. Don’t be so sure you can spot the difference though. Kayfabe doesn’t just fool rubes.
The future is looking as uncertain as a Paul Atreides without the spice. I cannot see how it resolves. I see only hard choices and responsibilities both individual and collective. And I feel ready to hold my ground on what I contribute. But I will be holding others to theirs as well.
We’ve got a long ways to go. Many people do not wish to see things as they are. Issues both material and social are gripping America and by extension the world as the dollar hegemony comes into question over powerful institutional distrust. The power that comes in holding your gaze on what it could all mean and not turning to panic in fear is immense. I am not turning away.
I hold the knowledge that I can do everything right and still fail. I have faced the no win scenario. The Kobeyashi Maru of it all is that sometimes we lose. And we will feel it. And those feelings matter. But then we shoulder the burden and do what needs to be done. The only one who can save you is yourself. And I chose to see the power in the hard choices.
My mother has always had a gift for aphorisms. I am grateful she has this talent as I’ve been able to simply repackage her wisdom and look much more talented than I actually am at delivering pull quotes. Brevity is the soul of wit and my mother is very witty.
One of the pithy witticisms I believe I learned from her is a classic take on beauty and class being more fungible than we are led to believe.
Pretty is a skill set
Me and/or my mother
If you’ve ever hung out with a bunch of rich girls and wondered why they are all hot consider the dilemma solved. It’s a skill that is cultivated. Like any skill you cultivate or with time but also money. And if you are rich and white the path to beauty is a lot shorter than you might realize. It’s pretty fucked.
I’ve been lucky enough to cultivate this skill set over time. I’ve come to rely on it as part of my arsenal. But I’ve also got a bit of a cranky body so I’ve not always been able to consistently practice the various skills required.
And sometimes life just gets in the way. I look like a fucking mess today. After a week cooped up in an air conditioned room in Mexico with trips outside for slightly traumatic family emotional bonding, I look like shit.
My hair is unsettled and popping off static electricity. I’ve got small pimples all across my forehead. I’ve got patches of eczema on my right chin. I do not appear to have the skill set for pretty today.
Normally I do my best to hide in these circumstances. Especially if I don’t trust someone. I don’t like looking like I lack skill when it comes to presentation. And it is often a sign of respect to look well groomed and beautiful.
In fact, today we’ve got a houseguest that normally I’d feel required to be at full skill set capacity around. And I just didn’t feel like it was necessary. And that’s a skill set worth cultivating too.
