I was very kindly tagged in a Twitter thread today with a lovely compliment about my daily writing habits. Does quantity have its own quality? As I close in on a thousand posts I think my answer is a strong “maybe!”
What are your favorite examples of “Quantity has a quality all its own?” Examples: @tylercowen writing a post a day, a column a month and a book a year for two decades Kanye’s “5 beats a day for 3 summers” Seinfeld’s “Don’t break the chain” one joke a day. Reply from Alan Simon @ almostmedia She’s not for everyone, but she’s been very dedicated and is approaching her 1,000th daily post.
One aspect of creation that is perhaps a bit understudied is just how much it is dominated by the truly prolific. The outliers practice a lot. Every single day I practice because I both enjoy it and I trust that doing a thing over time improves the thing. You can imagine how this predisposition makes me sympathetic to Calvinism.
I credit hippie parenting and the Waldorf curriculum. I was taught early on that it was good to make things even if you sucked at it. So I just spent a lot of my time sucking at creative endeavors and not finding it all that discouraging as I don’t mind being embarrassed.
So I suppose my quantity has demonstrated its own quality in its sheer persistence. Reminding yourself to do a daily practice has its benefits over time if you can stand it. Personally for me writing has always has a kind of blind optimism that has never been beaten out of me. I am a writer. I write. If it every becomes more than that I wouldn’t mind but I don’t need it to. The thing has been it’s own reward.
The social internet is having a bit of a chaotic moment. I haven’t been able to send Tweets consistently for about a day. And I didn’t miss it that much. It felt a little weird at first as I could load tweets, like them and chat in DMs but it was clear none of my replies were sending.
It’s a holiday weekend so for Twitter’s sake I’m sad to report I had other things to keep me occupied. That’s probably bad news for the platform.
We did a big kitchen clean out. Organized the meals for the upcoming week. Like any weekend lots of chores from laundry to deep conditioning was on the to do list.
The real prize of being offline is being outdoors. The weather was absolutely gorgeous this weekend, practically begging us to spend time on the porch or in the Adirondack chairs we put out by our small pond. The air was so clear today you could see from one end of Gallatin to another.
Two Adirondack chairs on fresh cut grass with a blue sky behind it. Is this what they mean when they say touch grass?
I’ve got two uninterrupted months in Montana ahead of me. Maybe I mention this as significant because I spent so much time on the road this spring. I’ve also had multiple catastrophic level dislocations professionally and personally in the front half of the year.
Catastrophic dislocation seems to be the new normal for everyone. I hate to consider that I may have some bargaining & denial about my own thesis at chaotic.capital. But I find myself wishing to be wrong about where I see the future heading. Wouldn’t it be better if our modern lives were getting simpler instead of more complex?
I know that’s a childish fantasy. The complexity in our world has brought about so much good. The costs have been high but the benefits were tangible.
And yet here I am hoping to have some uninterrupted time in a quiet corner of the American empire so that I can cultivate my own strengths. I want to reconnect to myself and recovery from the effort, pain, and grief of living. I want to live and work and build without the chaos of history turning back on again. I dislike how much I now believe ignorance to be bliss.
I should be shilling myself in today’s installment of writing everyday. But I’m a little tired to pull off the full bragging I’d like. One of my favorite financial news and analysis sources, Axios Pro-Rata, featured my little pre-seed fund chaotic.capital with an in-depth look at resiliency technology.
It’s a big deal to me because in-depth trade reporting is where the nuts and bolts of an industry are discussed. Anytime I’ve built something of value it was always the beat reporters who recognized it first.
I even had the good luck of preparing my quarterly investor update the day before this article hit everyone’s newsletter inboxes. So I’ve got all the materials ready to go.
Alas I’m wiped from a week of life happening (a death in the family) and the general excitement of the global summer solstice mania that’s gripping all the timelines.
I don’t typically look back on my posts except in my end of yearround ups in December when I try to come to grips with another trip around the sun. But a friend mentioned they had really enjoyed this week so I went and looked back. And I’d say this week is all bangers.
That’s not really typical as I have ups and downs as you’d expect from any daily habit. One of my promises to myself when I began this experiment was to not judge where I was on any given day and simply practice. But I sure brought the fucking goods this week.
I don’t think I’ve ever had a streak as good. I think my email bankruptcy post is probably the best of the bunch as a narrative as it’s a story I think anyone who has lived a longtime online will enjoy. But it’s a toss up between between the others as to which has the most emotional resonance.
If you are in love perhaps it’s my husbands birthday that will speak to you. If you have someone sick in your life or are in the throes of pain that’s probably the winner. But the one that can change your life with a metaphor? Probably the NPC post. I hope if you stumble across this roundup today I hope you will go read the bangers as I’m very proud of the quality of my work this week. Practice does indeed work. Thanks Allen Iverson!
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.
