Tag: Emotions

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Emotional Work

Day 1306 and What To Do

I am not a summer person so it’s not surprising that as the heat and haze drag on I find myself struggling to remain focused and upbeat.

I do have much to say except I’m sad and probably SAD as in seasonal affective disorder. I’d like to show some agency and fix it but I don’t know what to do from here.

I’m debating if I flee somewhere colder for the month. You’d think Montana would be safe. But fire season in the west means there are precious few places where the air is clean and the temperatures are cool and dry.

I’d like to force myself into a focused work sprint until this passes but I seem unable to do that either. It makes me feel a bit desperate as I am usually quite skilled as forcing myself through life on willpower alone. Except I don’t want to do it. That’s a first for me.

If there is a mass demoralization is a thing then summertime is all it took to achieve Yuri Bezmenov’s four stage campaign.

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Internet Culture Politics

Day 1304 and Don’t Scare The Hoes

Twitter had a significant exodus of left wing and moderates as Elon Musk took over the platform. The ugly parts of the internet were allowed free rein on the platform and plenty of users didn’t have time for that.

If you had been raised on a tidy internet of moderation this was upsetting and you went back to moderate places. If you’d been raised on the feral internet you don’t really mind. I was raised on the feral internet. I’m twenty years into sharing space with lunatics.

Some people think the feral internet is is entirely male. And don’t get me wrong, user statistics show 4chan, Reddit, Discord and Twitter are mostly men. But there have always been feminine corners of the internet. And they are influential. Tumblr girls, MySpace, and Livejournal had plenty of the dark feminine before we cleaned things up the consumable Instagram age. Before Ballerina Farm we had much rawer Mormon mommy blogging from Utah. Remember Dooce?

Working in fashion beginning in aughts and teens, I had a front row seat to the dark era of Tumblr. I’d seen horrors arise from femcel message boards. Pro-Ana content was left to fester because no one cared when women kept the harms to themselves. Guess what, those girls aren’t all grown up and now they harm the boys too.

OnlyFans findoms predate lonely nerds and Reddit mistresses trawl /marriedredpill/ looking to get laid by insecure rich men coated in fear optimizing around pick up artist tactics.

Women are not the good guys on the internet any more than men are the bad guys. The dark places online are dark for everyone. Welcome to the equality we’ve fostered. Scammers and grifters for all.

Dopamine rushes and control fantasies run rampant among the fearful and no flavor of childhood trauma goes unanswered thanks to the persistent financialization of every human relationship. We call this a low trust society.

So you might think it unfair of me to request, as a woman, that the men do not scare the hoes as we travel the next 100 days to the American election.

A right thinking person might recognize that there is no advantage to be gained in the gender wars. We are all combatants in a conflict that serves none of us and does much to degrade us all.

But young extremely online women are crashing into young extremely online men and the result is bratty cop memes and couch fucking. Cat ladies fighting dweebs is not a good look. Some might call it deliberately demoralizing

The normies, who let’s be honest are mostly women, are scared shitless of the aggressive edge of online discourse. They don’t like any of this shit.

And I don’t think you will like what happens and who ends up in charge of we’ve got a terrified population. So knock it off. Be a man. That’s a gender neutral statement. Our civilization is for adults.

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Culture Politics

Day 1299 and If You Aren’t Outraged

Land grant university towns in the American west should be studied for all kinds of reasons. But right now I’d love an old fashioned long form magazine essay on Bumper Sticker culture.

The Subaru plastered in stickers was a fun punchline when I was a kid. You’d chuckle at slogans like “if you aren’t outraged you aren’t paying attention” because you agreed.

If you’re not outraged you’re not paying attentions

If only people were paying attention you’d smugly nod. I use the word smug because in 2006 South Park pointed out the problem with being too smug about having the right opinions is that it alienates people.

And now here we are in 2024 everyone is paying attention. And everyone is outraged. And it sucks. All of this paying attention making us outraged doesn’t seem improve the situation in the slightest.

And everyone is smug as hell being very assured that they have the right opinion even though we appear to have about thousand different ways to prove to yourself that your outrage is justified and it’s the other team isn’t paying attention.

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Emotional Work

Day 1298 and In My Bones

I got a great night’s sleep according to all trackers. I didn’t feel well when I woke at all despite this.

I had the kind of unsettled unwell feeling that you can’t pinpoint with any precision but you know in your bones something is off. Naturally this meant some shit was about to go down.

We’ve been enduring the summer of political news. The media, the chattering classes and “the opinion leaders” have perfected the art of breaking through even if you don’t pay much attention. And I do pay attention.

I wrote a long essay yesterday on the general state of living in the past’s vision of the future. It’s worth a read if you have an interest in Cyperpunk or anarcho-tyranny. I feel the weight of all the competing narratives fighting for my attention. And I am just tired.

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Emotional Work Politics

Day 1294 and Like Shit

I mentioned on Twitter yesterday that I’d been breaking down crying at regular intervals since the assassination attempt against Donald Trump.

I’m not a Trump supporter. I am and will remain a small government libertarian and I can’t see that changing short of fundamental shifts in material reality. Which is possible but human nature doesn’t change much.

I feel like absolute shit physically and emotionally about where we are at. The rapid changes that are proceeding in the wake of this violence cannot be undone. We are here.

I feel incredibly stupid saying this which is almost always a sign I should say it.
I’ve been breaking down into tears every couple of hours since the assassination attempt on Trump.
My emotional metabolism isn’t up to the acceleration unless I let myself feel it a

We are in a chaotic time and even I do not feel up to the rate of change. I’m afraid of what will happen no matter the outcome of the election.

I don’t think we should underestimate the trauma of political violence. A fellow citizen died for exercising his fundamental rights. He’s not the first and unlikely to be the last.

I want to feel less impacted emotionally but I can’t just stuff these feelings. I wish I could write more and at length about all of this but I’m simply not there. It’s all too painful.

Categories
Chronic Disease

Day 1282 and Summertime Sadness

Montana has blessedly been free of excess heat and fire season doesn’t seem to have arrived. But it was a wet spring and I fear we have a long summer ahead of me. I live in one of the best possible places to spend a summer and I still find it challenging m.

I was looking back at pictures from this time last year and I was not in the best health. I’ve never been a summer person and I have to accept some aspect of its misery is likely to forever plague me.

Other people have season affect disorder in the winter. I guess my people are a winter people. I can’t wait for snow to return.

Maybe I’m not alone in finding summertime unbearable. Lana Del Ray croons through summer’s emotional ghosts. Crime gets worse when it’s hotter.

I’m sure my mood is affected by the lingering Covid (does it count as long when you feel shitty 7 weeks later?) as well as the general unease in American politics. I’ll do what I can to shake it. But I’ll never understand anyone’s affection the season.

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Media Politics

Day 1280 and Campaign Season

I am very much beginning to wish I had not watched the presidential debates. I want to say it’s been amusing to watch the different flavors of panic, but it makes me feel a bit gross.

Schadenfreude feels like a cousin to envy. It’s a dirty vice you shouldn’t be swift to cultivate in yourself even if it’s a very human response. I’d prefer to cultivate what virtues I can embody even if imperfectly.

I don’t want to lose my head just because everyone else seems to be doing so but it’s hard not pay attention to the politics when it’s the 4th of July week. I know I can’t do anything about national politics so I continue locally and on issues where we can have clear impact like housing and regulatory reform.

It’s possible that having more hands on experience with on community boards and with local permitting made the more tangible aspects of “Yes In My Neighborhood” campaigns clear to me.

I would prefer to be active in my contributions and focus on solutions. Am I angry and afraid when I see national politics and grand geopolitical news? Of course. If I thought about it too much I’d remember that everyone involved is human just like me. Then I’d worry even more. So I’ll try to focus on moving what I can.

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Emotional Work Media

Day 1279 and Not The Whole Story

I have recently been prioritizing correcting mistaken impressions of the world. As the rationalist set say, I like to update my heuristics.

It’s just not all that uncommon to believe wrong things and for the wrong reasons. We find out with alarming about retracted studies, updates to long held beliefs about culture or politics, or simply something galling about reality. And so sometimes we have to adjust our priors. We never have the whole story.

I recently found myself comparing myself to another person only to get quickly reminded of a set of circumstances that made our situations basically incomparable. I simply didn’t have the whole picture.

My mother loved a hippie bumper sticker about the folly of sincere youthful knowledge.

Quick ask your teenage for advice while they still know everything

The best part of middle age is discovering just how little you know. It can feel paralyzing at times. I’m sure you can imagine how “I don’t know the whole story” can be interpreted in many ways. I hope to be on the sunny side of learning.

Two men sit on a bus. On the dark side facing a dark mountain we see scared sad man with a “I don’t know the whole story” thought bubble. On the bright side of the bus with a wide vista a man thinks “I don’t know the whole story!”
Categories
Emotional Work

Day 1274 and Anger is Secondary

I am in a pocket of emotions today that I’m working through by writing. I’ve been told that anger is what’s called a secondary emotion.

Some metaphors that are helpful to understanding what is meant by a “secondary emotion” are thinking of anger as a boiling cauldron or a volcano. What you see isn’t the whole picture. It is the steam coming off something deeper. If you prefer cooler (literally) metaphor, the Gottman Institute calls it the Anger Iceberg.

The Anger Iceberg via Choosing Therapy from the Gottman Institute.

I am unsure what mix of feelings are making up my roiling cauldron. I’m struggling to feel them as chilly like an iceberg. The heat of it feels closer to my current experience than something frozen. But you get the picture. Looking underneath is important.

And underneath the anger disappointment, hurt, and frustration are all emotions I can “touch” as I explore ny feelings. But it’s underneath a roiling boiling mess that is only clear in glimpses.

I imagine I’m not the only one who struggles to see where the primary emotions. The optimism I have temperamentally abuts against a shared reality that feels angry.

I intend to watch a debate between two unpopular geriatric candidates for President of the United States of America. Of course being angry about that is secondary to a host of other more salient emotions. We must reach. It is crucial to reach those emotions if we desire to change as a nation.

Categories
Community

Day 1273 and Context Window

The fracturing of the social web has made it harder to connect person to person.

The enjoyment of sharing a platform or a protocol with other humans is undermined as grifters and opportunists bang against artificial intelligence slop and algorithmic manipulation. It’s just not as fun to be online in that atmosphere.

I happen to like putting a little more of humanity out here on the edges of the great social media seas. I am not everyone’s cup of tea but at least you know what flavor I am.

Perhaps humans need longer context windows just as much as our artificial intelligence. I’ll allow Google’s Keyword blog on DeepMind’s longer context window to explain.

Context windows are important because they help AI models recall information during a session. Have you ever forgotten someone’s name in the middle of a conversation a few minutes after they’ve said it, or sprinted across a room to grab a notebook to jot down a phone number you were just given? Remembering things in the flow of a conversation can be tricky for AI models, too — you might have had an experience where a chatbot “forgot” information after a few turns. That’s where long context windows can help.

What is a long context window?

Part of my affection for “blogging” whether it’s on my own WordPress powered website or Twitter (remember when we called it a microblogging service?) is that it gives the chance to establish a large context window for me.

You can definitely make predictions about me based on what I’ve shared. If I am as complex as million token window (which is what Google’s Gemini can now handle) I would honestly be surprised. So go ahead and augment any conversations you have with me with the wider context of Julie. It’s my goal that it allows us to connect better.