Tag: Emotions

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Emotional Work

Day 963 and Chronic Stress

I don’t think of myself as living a particularly stressful life. I’m one of the luckiest people I know. I love and am loved by my family. I own a homestead in Montana. I work with brilliant people.

My one burden in life is my health. I don’t want to undersell how much it affects my life (my ankylosis needs careful management) but I simply treat it as a fact of life. There is no reason to be upset about reality.

As social fabric tears and lives get worse under stress, it’s easy to become a victim to the things in our lives that trouble us. We can compare our gifts to others but one man’s troubles is another man’s perfect life.

I see the stress that is affect everyone I encounter. The fears range from existential to quotidian. Everything from the challenge of finding a doctor to the collapse in fertility rates can be a sign of the times.

I work to regulate my nervous system to accommodate whatever reality is in front of me. Sometimes that will include stress lot of my control. But I can work to control my response to it.

The better I get at this process of regulating myself I open up to the world. Taking on the agency you have available to you is a powerful social signal. I connect with others more readily as I show others that I can take care of myself.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 959 and Averages

I did not react to a drug in an average way. I’m really pissed about it. I went in so confident based on what the studies has shown. We’ve got this fantasy of science and specifically medicine that has very little appreciation for what it does to outliers.

We discuss what’s most likely. What’s average. What’s typical. We explain the difference between mean, median and average. We have rigor. We have regressions. We can come to an understanding of what the models agree is conforming to our understanding. You should probably see these results.

And then we gloss over the bad data. The outliers. The grits of sand. The flecks of reality that make your model jitter. The shit that just makes things more complicated. So maybe you toss it out.

And it mostly doesn’t matter. Because your body probably is pretty average. And that’s a great thing. We tell stories about what it means to be unique even as you are no different than anyone else. Pixar movies are about our ineffable spark of humanity soul even as it reflects on how we are all really just the same. Shared human experiences are universal. Probably because our bodies are pretty similar.

I sincerely believed I was average for most of my life. I was raised with that as a value. And now as an adult I see how I’m average in so many ways. But my body will never fully reflect a shared reality. You get to know what works for you even if you know what boundaries are a little different for you.

You’ve got to know the contours in which you are exactly as your reality would indicate. That’s your ego speaking generally. But the ways in which you are not matter too. That’s where you tailor treatment.

Categories
Community Internet Culture

Day 957 and Will It Blend?

We are deep in the dog days of summer. I ran a fever and found myself dead asleep till nearly 1pm as my body valiantly struggled to process deluge of stress hormones I’d let pile up. I missed recording a podcast but the fever broke. I’ll catch up.

Meanwhile, on the website formerly known as Twitter, an epic battle of meaning was waged. The group mind egregore known as “this particular corner of Twitter” asked you to take a pill and/or hit a button.

A classic “my child said” poast with a twist on Newcomb’s Problem and Nash Equilibrium

And thousands of jacked in minds, from neu-fascism-IQers-must-speciate-eugenicists & red-rose transhumanist-luxury-space-communists to normie-Dad-banger-poasters, all raced to decide the meaning of the ultimate symbol.

Who lives and who dies when we can no longer coordinate exclusively within our ingroup?

Absolute fucking chaos. The collective of our shared internet went into a frenzy of consensus making.

Would you walk away from Omelas? Or would you save yourself? Would the gods of rationalism betray your soul with the knowledge that the good of the one can and does outweigh the good of the many?

In which selective phrasing has me deciding I shouldn’t jump into a blender but because I am me I also must immediately counter signal

Are you willing to step into a blender to save the normies? No? Yes? Fuck! Roko (of Basilik fame) redefined the problem space.

And then because we all must troll, we all stepped into a blender for the good of our species. Well, I wanted to annoy Roko. So I said I would when I voted that I wouldn’t. Because all serious social question can and should be trolled.

The choice is yours and yours alone

In the space of a day, we all leapt into the proverbial blender to save the naive, the kind, and the fucking stupid. It’s what Spock have done for us. Pro-social is the logical choice. Or is it? Is it better to be red than dead? None of us know.

I personally hope we all continue to create an eternal refinement culture of love and hope across all cycles of time to come.

I found it to be a privilege to be a member of the hive mind. We are all the alignment. Our consensus efforts inside the plutocrats toy is more likely to bring about the singularity than almost any other activity I can imagine.

It is a privilege to be in the egregore. My smol sensemaker syncretic smooth brain being hooked up into the wider hive for “Red vs Blue Walk Away From Omelas Boogaloo” is quite literally divine. To retweet each others bangers is to see the face of God. Just try and remember the truth. There is no blender.

Categories
Chronicle

Day 955 and Logging

I keep a private journal of my daily life and it’s undulating metrics addition to this daily public log that has now stretched into its nine hundredth and fifty fifth day.

I use an application called Day One that is actually now integrated with my blogging software Jetpack so I probably could easily put the archives online. In an era of closed social media walled gardens, it’s nice to trust your open source software provider. Thanks WordPress for having my back for nearly twenty years.

Having a log of your life over a long enough period of time is a blessing and a curse. I noticed an upsetting anniversary when I opened up Day One today. I lost someone last summer and had forgotten that today was the day. Sometimes memory can be kind to you. I wasn’t thrilled with the reminder of the pain. But I’m glad that it was marked.

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Biohacking Politics

Day 952 and Do It Live

I found myself with a bit of anxiety this morning. I was afraid that I hadn’t done enough to promote some of my commitments this month.

This morning I co-hosted a session on nervous system work for founders and venture capitalists with Jonny Miller. Aside from a few Zoom hiccups, I think it well. But with my anxiety all I could think of is how I should have done more. I could have invited more more people, emailed more reminders, promoted it more on Twitter. Just more.

I don’t think my anxiety is about a Zoom seminar. It seems to be directed towards a bigger event next week. I am co-hosting a BBQ at my home for the Frontier Institute in Montana.

I am finding myself fearful that I’ve not not done enough to promote it. I’m afraid I’ll look like a fool and fail at my goal of raising awareness (and ultimately money) for our policy goals. It’s probably irrational but it’s sitting heavily on my emotions at the moment.

I care a great deal about the event being a success. And I have done quite a bit to promote it and invite the right mix of folks who will be interested.

I think even admitting to the anxiety helps me recognize that it’s irrational. I do think the BBQ will be a good time. We will have food, drinks, good company and if you’d like to come it’s on August 16th. Worth a drive into Gallatin I promise.

I wish I didn’t get anxiety about if I’m working hard enough to prepare for an event. The balance between preparing and promoting an event and having it go smoothly when it comes to performing live isn’t an easy one for me. I used to obsessively prepare for everything.

Which would then backfire on me as I’d use all my energy on the lead up and find myself exhausted and frazzled when it came time to be present in the moment for a big day.

So I’m trying to not get too much in my head about if I’ve done enough. What will be will be and I can trust myself to be present in the moment to succeed.

So if you are interested in joining the next Nervous System Mastery Bootcamp with Jonny Miller my code is JULIE and it will get you $250 off. I myself am an alumni of the course and plan to retake it again in the fall. So you’d be taking it with me.

And if you’d like to meet me in person August 16th and you happen to be in Montana I’d love to host you at my home. The topic of conversation will be the Montana Miracle and now we can continue to make the state a place for all to thrive.

Please join Alex Miller, Julie Fredrickson, and Padden Murphy as they host a meet and greet with Frontier Institute’s CEO, Kendall Cotton. We will discuss the recently passed YIMBY policies in Montana’s 2023 Legislative Session and the Frontier Institute’s future plans to ensure Montana is a place that all can thrive.

Come learn about the Frontier Institute’s impactful initiatives, enjoy some delicious food, and engage with a group of fellow Montanans dedicated to knocking down bureaucratic barriers and ensuring opportunity for all. 

Please RSVP to secure your place at this exclusive gathering. The address will be provided upon RSVP.

Categories
Biohacking

Day 951 and Well Regulated

The more chaotic your circumstances, the more necessary you will find it to regulate your nervous system.

If you are nodding your head in agreement, you might appreciate more tools to cultivate calm. If so join myself and Jonny Miller tomorrow at 10am PST/1PM EST for a free session on how to integrate nervous system work into your startup.

If it’s not immediately obvious why you should care about your nervous system, let me give a brief primer. Stress is hard on your body. Hormones like cortisol can make you sick.

But did you know that we have a choice in how we react to stress? Between stimulus and response, there is freedom.

Have you ever felt overwhelmed by your circumstances? Maybe you’ve had the urge to simply shut down when life seemed like too much? Perhaps you’ve felt the desire to blow your top and scream instead?

These are classic stress responses. These are all states of a nervous system under pressure. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Your goal can be to move freely, flexibly and easily between different states of arousal and response as the stressors in your life come and go.

Founders of startups don’t always have a choice in how much stress is in our life. But we do have a choice in how we respond with our emotions and our physical body. We can maintain a well regulated nervous system even in a chaotic environment. If you want some simple tools that you can apply join myself at chaotic.capital and Jonny Miller tomorrow.

Categories
Aesthetics Internet Culture Politics

Day 947 and Dreams

I slept quite a bit last night. I slept more this afternoon. I can’t say why I needed so much rest. But what I can say is that I dreamed a lot. Odd, florid, turbulent dreams too demanding to be ignored.

It’s unclear to me what my unconscious was tidying up. Was it the detritus of ego death or the toxins being flushed by my glymphatic system? As my favorite meme suggests, “porque no los dos?”

I’ve not been much inclined to engage in the day’s online dramas as I’ve been too distracted by my own dream roads. My own life has too much of a hold on me today.

I gather there has been arguments about pagan vitalism and post-Christian morality. The persistent agony of feeling like life is no longer about living has scrambled the brains of our young. Extremist communities have infiltrated our meme spaces. White nationalists and Nietzschean fanbois insist on their own righteousness.

And who can blame the lost boys from looking at these scandals? Ontological shocks are coming at a fast and furious pace, all while the depths of the abyss are staring back.

Nothing is sacred and all is permitted. Everything is sacred and nothing is permitted. Keep at the permutation until you’ve reached enlightenment. Or until you’ve died.

I’ve not felt the need to swim in the deep end of offense. I require no taboo or reactionary behaviors to feel as if I’m alive. My dreams even at their most intense remain mere reflections of the enormity of my own life. I have lived large and with more agency than I ever dreamed possible.

Categories
Culture Politics Preparedness

Day 943 and Glimmers

I find myself filled with optimism today, even as I’m quite sure we are ramping quickly into the era of chaos I’ve been prattling on about for nearly a thousand days. Everything feels a bit “hold on to your hats” as we collectively experience the fear and joy of an illegible moment without any dominant narratives.

And yet today inside this chaos without clarity, the internet is filled with enthusiasm as a small niche of enthusiasts try to replicate the results of a chemistry paper that claims to have made a superconducting at room temperature material LK-99 produced with common materials like lead and red phosphorus.

Add that on top of fervor over Congressional investigations “aliens” program whistleblowers while we all collectively wonder at the potential for artificial general intelligence to be accelerated and the zeitgeist is a fever pitch of vibe shifts from doom to foom.

All of these glimmers of joyful uncertainty and hopeful chaos are emerging from a youth culture that is quite sure it has been abandoned by its own past as it is bombarded by a dystopian future by its own geriatric elite. Is it any wonder it feels like the social contract is hanging on by a thread?

Historian Peter Turchin is taking a victory lap with the accuracy of his theory of cliodynamics

When the equilibrium between ruling elites and the majority tips too far in favor of elites, political instability is all but inevitable. As income inequality surges and prosperity flows disproportionately into the hands of the elites, the common people suffer, and society-wide efforts to become an elite grow ever more frenzied. He calls this process the wealth pump; it’s a world of the damned and the saved.

Peter Turchin “End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration

The broader popular rediscovery of historians Neil Howe and William Strauss is no coincidence. They wrote the The Forth Turning twenty five years ago.

Looking back at the last 500 years, they’d uncovered a distinct pattern: modern history moves in cycles, each one lasting roughly eighty to one hundred years, the length of a long human life, with each cycle composed of four eras—or “turnings”—that always arrive in the same order and each last about twenty years. The last of these eras—the fourth turning—was always the most perilous.

The Fourth Turning Is Here

Clever Simon and Schuster realized it was an opportune moment to point out that the fourth turning had arrived with a new book from Howe.

So perhaps these glimmers are here to show us that the churn is here, the fourth turning is now, and Turchin’s race to become an elite to outrun the effects of dislocation may already have its winners.

Amidst all of that there are those of us seeking to believe that we might find a way forward. I’d rather be looking for the glimmers of hope. I’ve already done what I can to warn about the need to prepare for hard times. If you haven’t yet come to terms with the doom then I certainly won’t convince you of the need for optimism either.

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Emotional Work Uncategorized

Day 942 and Goodbyes

My childhood was full of goodbyes. I moved every two years for most of my young life. I was not a military brat or a diplomat’s child, just a millennial surviving the instability of her Boomer parents. It is a common experience I’ve learned.

My parents did their very best to walk different paths than their own parents. Like any child, I watched them closely and adjusted my own feelings accordingly.

Now as an adult I see how I work to walk on different paths than my own parents. Families are always adjusting to the wisdom of our past as we chart our future.

And so I think about how comfortable I am with saying goodbyes and I weigh it against the generations that came before. And I think that all we can do is try to balance the equation of our own life.

Categories
Chronicle Emotional Work

Day 941 and Unreasonable

Today marks our one year anniversary of moving to Montana. I noted yesterday just how much we achieved in just 365 days.

I’ve tended to think in terms of time in terms of days over the past three years because no other metric seemed sensible. Too much changes every day even as too little seems to be different.

I do believe that what gets measured gets managed. So it makes sense that someone like me who writes every single day thinks that days are the manageable metric. Not that being manageable means anything is under control. Merely that I have some metric to measure back into to make life seem more reasonable.

I am however all too human. We are feeling animals with the capacity to reason. It’s important that it’s not the other way around. Much as I like to reason my way through life I’ve learned to remember feelings matter. This has made me both much more open and also much more careful about how I treat myself.

I suppose this makes me unreasonable simply by definition. Humans are unreasonable because we do not operate through reason entirely I’d encourage even my most autistic friends to remember that this means you are unreasonable too.

Narratives are the comfort we seek as our apophenia runs rampant. Spotting the one thing that is not like the others is how we survive. We seek sense in the chaos. It’s an unreasonable thing to do when we know we’ve not yet managed to measure even a fraction of our reality. One day I hope I come to terms with that.