Tag: Emotions

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Community

Day 1103 and Choosing Optimism

We finally got some significant snowfall in Montana last night. We’ve had a dry and relatively warm winter, so having half a foot of light powder was good news. It seemed to put everyone I met today in spirits.

I had cause to go into town and it was all smiles everywhere we went. A quick doctor visit was all enthusiastic exchanges about how beautiful it was outside.

The universe must have picked up on my general optimism as while we were in town some friends texted let us know they were coming through on their way to the airport. The timing worked perfectly as we went over to the other side of the valley to meet up before their next bit of travel and intersected for some socializing. Football games, bingo nights and bar food certainly sounds like a nice night in America.

As much pessimism infects our daily narratives, sometimes all it takes is a snow day and being together to remind you that we’ve got of reasons for optimism.

After reading about Joel Mokyr’s Culture of Growth thesis on the importance of a positive mindset for technological progress I’m reminded again that we have to bring that mindset to daily life.

The popularity of the e/acc mindset is a reminder that we can choose optimistic narratives to reset the negative algorithmic tilt. I am grateful for every social interaction I have with others who want to discuss progress. I see commitments in lives every day to building. There is optimism everywhere from biohacking to open source software to bingo nights.

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Internet Culture

Day 1098 and We’re Back

I wish I hadn’t had insomnia last night as clearly ever came back to work today. It was electric in the hive minds of Twitter today. I am revisiting all kinds of priors as the timelines of different subcultures return back online.

I don’t know if anything I saw will stick but it’s clear that influencing public opinion is on everyone’s agenda. Elon Musk may have absolutely no zero intuition for how his narratives will play and maybe he doesn’t care.

I don’t think he means ill for what is still the only really unsupervised place for elite opinion influence and people are running wild with it. I’m almost sympathetic to Russian troll farms. It’s got to require enormous compute to keep on top of billions of malleable propaganda ready minds.

WhatsApp having trouble with “gm” tweets overloading the application has to be an urban legend but you can almost see it being true. Can you imagine every timeline across every cosmopolitan center pinging online and interacting with all the pieces of content that came before it? It’s a glorious perpetual process and I need to step off the wheel to rest. But I’m glad we are so back.

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Emotional Work

Day 1096 and Year Four

The persistence of my daily writing habit has helped anchor a sense of self that I have enjoyed cultivating. I am the sort of person who sticks with things.

I’ve been in the process of excavating and rebuilding my sense of self over the last few years. Many others have gone through similar journeys during the pandemic years. I feel lucky to have captured some of mine in writing. I like who I have become as a result of it.

I like seeing that I have reinforced positive and optimistic aspirations for myself year over year. I hope it shows who I am to other people through my revealed preferences. My actions speak louder than my words even if some of my actions are shown through words.

I do not have any New Year’s resolutions for 2024 that I didn’t already have for myself in 2023. I’d like to keep the good things in my life, pray for willingness to improve upon the bad things, and remain steadfast in the commitments I have.

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Chronicle

Day 1090 and Winter Breaks

I would very much like to take an extended break to restore my mind and my body. I feel as if I could use a week or two offline.

The holy nights have held a place in my heart and mind as the season for introspection. I like doing fasts during this time, but it’s not been physically wise to take an extended fast recently.

I expect 2024 to be a big year. I had lots of little things to wrap in 2023 which is impacting my capacity to fully check out for the remainder of the year. Duty calls I suppose. I am keeping my obligations to others but I may need to find a way to keep obligations to myself.

On that note, I’ll keep this short. It’s better to get back to reading and resting when my capacity is diminished.

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Emotional Work

Day 1083 and Uncertainty

I feel as if I spend a lot of time reassuring people that nobody has a clue about what happens next and that’s fine.

Even the brightest humans are still basically dim witted simians barely managing our fragile wetware as our environment provides constant destabilization. That we even survive that set of circumstances seems a pleasant surprise. Humans are adaptable.

I have typical fears about muddling through life but my existential angst remains in check. If I’m in a simulated environment running a set of programs given to me by God or a random super intelligence what does it matter to me?

I’m here and I like it enough to continue being alive. Sure I’d love to find out the mystery of consciousness and the nature of reality but if don’t I am happy with my lot in life. Whoever programmed me did a fine job. Thanks Mom and the wider memetic cultural movements that made me.

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Emotional Work

Day 1081 and Sleep It Off

Trying to balance everything coming at you at the end of the year isn’t easy. Joy at accomplishments and time together are the goal for family time.

But the experience is overlaid with wrapping the year and planning for what is sure to be an intense year to come. It can feel somewhat paralyzing when I consider it.

I felt like I had to sleep off a lot this weekend . I crashed most of Saturday. I seriously slept 11 and a half hours. And I did feel better.

I’m looking at an intense year and I am afraid. We can’t lose some of the battles. They are winnable ones but it’s going to take a coordinated effort from many of us. In the spirit of the Christmas season, I pray for miracles.

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Emotional Work

Day 1080 and Hard Feedback

Ego protection is innate. Humans have quite the capacity for engaging in defense mechanisms. As I do my end of year reviews to see what I have accomplished and where I have failed I see my ego everywhere.

The types of ego protection that plague me tend to be with those all too human relationships that are closest to me.

I had to admit to myself that I’d been engaging in entirely unproductive approaches in a close partnership. I wanted more from my partner and I’d express it again and again, but I didn’t seem capable of demanding the outcomes I needed. This was unproductive obviously.

Hard feedback was given to my partner. I had to look into my own motivations for enabling a cycle of letting outcomes that didn’t match our goals occur. My own part in it mattered. We had enforced errors, self doubt, fear and all the other typical buggaboos you might expect in a hard situation.

It can be hard to simply address the hard things head on.

Emotional reactivity is part of our autonomic nervous system. It’s not always right. It’s only sometimes right. And learning to tune it is part of the fun. You want to improve your heuristics over time. You will get more clarity on the world and your place in it. If you wish to persist in feeling anxious and uncertain being passive will have that effect. It literally hurts you. You have agency in deciding to address how you feel head on.

Day 1072 Head-on

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Emotional Work

Day 1079 and Flowing

I try to direct my attention to where I have natural advantages. I’m sure you’ve seen variations on the theory that if you are gifted with a talent then honing those talents with hard work is the rational path.

If you are a 5/10 perhaps you can’t reach beyond 7 of 10 with effort, but if you are a 7 you can probably put in the effort to be an 8 or 9 and achieve great things.

I don’t mean this as an argument for not putting in the hard work to improve where you lack talent, but rather that hard work can compound for even greater rewards when applied to your talents.

No one ever enjoys being bad at anything, but it’s worth remembering that aptitude can and ought to be honed. I don’t always love seeing the areas of my life where I suck. I was in the past very inclined to beat myself up over it. That is the path to not improving anywhere in your life.

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Culture

Day 1078 and Centering Ourselves

You’re telling me the church that tortured Galileo for the dismantling of geocentrism is against the erosion of the anthropocentrism of intellig

Beff Jezos

Venkatesh Rao wrote earlier this year on Ribbonfarm that he thought artificial intelligence was a Copernican moment for what constitutes personhood. I found his argument particularly compelling. Now as we approach Christmas, Pope Francis has weighed in.

Pope Francis has called for a legally binding international treaty to regulate artificial intelligence, saying algorithms must not be allowed to replace human values and warning of a “technological dictatorship” threatening human existence.

Reuters

I have to say this is setting off all kinds of alarm bells in the pattern recognition hypophenia section of my mind. Who might be working to use artificial intelligence for institutional control? Why would the most powerful religious institution on earth have this position? Might this be a good time to reflect on how this institution responded to the advent of the printing press? Is the Catholic Church merely seeking the same power over science as it always has?

Who might benefit from this type of institutional pressure? Certainly at the national state level we have players like America, Europe and China. At the multinational corporate level we have Microsoft. Gatekeeping technological dominance through regulatory suppression is practically Microsoft’s metier.

Index Librorum Prohibitorum was a list of heretical books which were deemed immoral to Catholics. I bring this up because Johannes Kepler‘s Epitome astronomiae Copernicanae was one of them.

The heliocentric heresy era of the Inquisition is worth reviewing as we as a species must grapple with the possibility that science may continue to reveal our humble place in the cosmos.

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Emotional Work

Day 1074 and Go Go Go

I feel as if I had a lot more trepidation about the future before the pandemic. I wasn’t so sure if I had a clear view of how my own personal philosophies were meant to engage with the scramble of building, and then surviving, my own life. That seemed like a luxury for people higher up the hierarchy of needs than I was.

I feel like I got a lot wrong even as I see how I was equipped with so many tools that I used clumsily. I wish, in some ways, that I’d been surer of my own knowledge earlier. I didn’t trust myself. I felt like a Cassandra doomed to see dire outcomes.

And yet I retained some sense of optimism. You can see my doomer arcs clearly across the written records as systems failed me and then failed others. Natural disasters and chronic illness in very real ways forced me to overcome any inclination towards a culture of nihilism. I found that I couldn’t give up.

There was no comfort to be found in saving myself but I did. And now I find myself simply done with trying to muddle along. I am getting much louder about my own alliances and beliefs. I am updating my priors and throwing myself into fights. I am choosing sides even when I don’t care for all my compatriots. Neutrality is easier to maintain at the edge of an empire surely but I hard limits on what I find to be acceptable compromises in a free society.