I had a bad migraine over the weekend that simply took up all the space in my mind and body. I woke up with a break in the pain and a deep urge to throw myself into something that felt like momentum.
I found myself awash in sadness. I couldn’t stop myself from crying. It was as if my entire body felt despair. I’ve come to accept the value in embracing emotions as they come. “The only way out is through.”
I trust that my nervous system knows as much as my cognitive mind. I go so far as to say it knows more but that sounds a little woo to folks. And so I listened to my sadness. I cried. I rambled at the many problems large and small facing my corner of the universe.
It’s hard to understand how we came to this point across a generation. But easy to see why millennials are unsure if any of our institutions can be trusted. And I wonder what it’s like to have no memory of a time before 9/11.
A toxic morass of content has been circling on Twitter and corners of the chattering classes on TikTok, Substack, and podcasts that I’ve taken to calling gender bait.
The insecurity is palpable. The lust for control is high. How many people you’ve had sex with and how it affects marriage and family formation has been a contentious topic in culture wars in America for sometime. For a private matter between partners, it’s shocking how much it’s become fodder for social media grist.
Presenting scorn to women for being without significant others and children strike me as callus. Fertility is one of the most sensitive possible areas for anyone. I know it has been for me. You never know why someone is childless.
I wouldn’t recommend diving into gender bait topics if you aren’t already aware of the discourse and it’s champions. This variant appears to have gained momentum with a YouTube celebrity boxer feud.
It’s now percolated out to every engagement farmer looking to grow their outrage crops. And it looks like business is booming. Sadly, lonely people are desperately searching for control and reassurance and gender bait gives it to them.
If you are looking for ways to judge, shame and coerce others into behaving in a way that provides you comfort without their consent please consider that the problem might be you. It’s your insecurities speaking when you apply sweeping generalization to an individual you may not even know.
Once you are secure in your value and worth it’s a lot easier to get what you want from others simply by having boundaries and standards. There is no need to rain judgement on others. You wouldn’t want them doing it to you. Apply the golden rule and nurture empathy. The security you will find will last longer than any temporary control you may find through shame or judgement.
Everyone in my social circle was in a terrific mood yesterday. A small company that was widely supported by angels in my ecosystem was acquired by a larger startup that we all like. Happy investors that we were, Alex and I read the cap table over dinner and celebrated each co-investor that we liked.
It was a jubilant moment across my group chats in a darker wider climate for startups. The federal reserve’s inflation fight has meant tighter dollars. And that means less funding for early stage companies at lower valuations.
The focus has been good for the industry. A reminder that we can’t spend our way to innovation. We’ve relied on bigger companies, weaker talent, and unsustainable growth policies while the cash spigot was on.
I enjoyed the win. I’m happy for the founder and the team who will be going to such a great company. I’m happy a lot of investors got a win. But I know that the good mood will have to sustain us through some rough patches. So it’s good we are all banding together and the wins are shared.
I’ve been running a risk analysis on something personal. I think it’s worth considering the consequences of any decision. Especially when you take on some amount of risk.
We live in a time of safety. Some of us run the numbers and assume we will be the worst case scenario. Some of us presume the best case scenario.
Reality is never so black and a white. A risk for one person is good sense for another. We all have different values.
You shouldn’t be looking for permission from life. You will never get it. But you have to decide what risk parameters make sense for you. Maybe you like to play things a little faster. Maybe you like to play it safe.
I do think it’s worth evaluating how much you value what everyone tells you and what you think might work without accounting all the risks. Maybe some things are just worth it.
I found myself in a state of reactivity. It’s a huge challenge to manage nervous system regulation for me when I tip from the pain scale from my typical 4-5 to the impossible ignore 7-8 range.
I have become quite used to living with pain that would be distracting for others. I monitor biometrics like my heart rate variability to keep track of how stressed my body is from the pain.
I’ve found it important to learn how to bounce back from unexpected pain. It’s important to stop stress and reactivity in its tracks. If you let stress hijack your nervous system you can do yourself a lot of damage.
I took care of myself last night. I did what I needed to get my nervous system under control and the pain manageable. And it worked.
I turned myself around today. I lifted weights, I meditated, I took my supplements, and I tackled my work load with pleasure. I can feel the fatigue sweeping back in as the day winds up. But I can rest easy knowing I set myself up to bounce back again tomorrow. Budget for the body you have and not the fantasy one which you don’t have.
I’ve been getting the sense that more and more of my social circle is uneasy about our cultural moment.
The personal battles being waged are numerous and deadly. The losses feel as if they are mounting even for those of that look objectively successful to the outside.
Health challenges and illnesses are debilitating and expensive. The past traumas of dysfunctional families weigh on the more functional among us. Families struggle to cope with addiction, depression, and suicide. Violence eats around the edges in too many cases.
I see more people pulling back into perceived safety as they look to escape the wounded and the traumatized. We’ve got enough troubles in our own family so why take on problems that aren’t our own?
The ghosts of bad decisions and long troubled histories linger. The weight is heavy and I see people stumbling.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
