Tag: Energy

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease Travel

Day 789 and Types of Poverty

As you’ve probably seen articulated in thought leader tweet streams and thot-leader Medium posts, there are different kinds of millionaires. If you are young you are a time millionaire. If you are able bodied and healthy you are an energy millionaire.

I am in energy poverty. I carefully ration my attention & time and use lots of time-economic craft like asynchronous communication like emails and direct messages. Like a thrifty person with a budget I am always cutting the various coupons of time in my life to cobble together enough time to work full time so that no one can tell I’m energy poor.

It’s pretty common for folks to be in energy poverty. Maybe you are a parent. Maybe you are a care giver for an elderly parent. Maybe both. The most common is of course being disabled and requiring care. I am in that category.

I’ve turned my energy poverty into my super power. I am like Mr World monitoring feeds across the globe laying back and ingesting information & taking small minute actions to adjust my plans. I’ve adjust my career to fit this reality and find it to be an excellent fit for investing as it’s all about finding the alpha and acting on it.

I do telegraph that I’m in this situation. That my mind is sharp but my body is weak. I accept 2-3 events a week at maximum that require me to be up, about, in makeup and battle regalia (business dress) and the rest is dedicated to recovering.

I’ve never had hobbies that couldn’t be done from bed. The last time I participated in a sport was in my twenties before my latest flare. I’ve not had a social life independent from work for decades. It’s isolating and I remain perpetually afraid of losing people who aren’t in the same situation of energy poverty as I am.

Capacity can be drained further by negative conditions like heat, humidity or bright light. I am the type of disabled person that finds showering to be a huge drain so typically include those in my energy budgets as drains. Travel requires 24-48 hours of minimum recovery time which is why I tend only do month long stays places. You may have noticed I go cold places like Prague or Frankfurt and I live in Montana. That’s based on doctor recommendations.

Certain types of travel can’t be done without significant outlays of energy budget that will leave me in deficit for weeks. Beach vacations have long ago been lost but I can manage a tropical location so long as I stay entirely inside in an air conditioned room. Don’t worry laying on the beach isn’t fun for me so I’m not missing anything. Heat & salt water humidity is the fastest way for my body to begin an inflammation cycle.

I’m in Puerto Vallarta for my father’s birthday and the best I can manage is stay in my room all day and a dinner every other night. It’s a little confusing for folks who aren’t in energy poverty to fully grasp the concept but I feel no more frustrated with my situation than I would if I had financial poverty. Sometimes it’s just the situation and your budgets have hard limits. I’ll make an effort and spend 2 weeks of an energy on a long weekend for someone I love but it does cost me. Everything costs something.

Categories
Emotional Work Startups

Day 785 and Not Overwhelmed

Life feels pretty nonstop for me at the moment. I’ve got three deals I’m working on that are about to go out for fundraising, I’ve got my own fundraising to do, and I’ve got eyes on me from press. Normally this would be a full plate for me but I am taking a trip to celebrate my father’s 80th Birthday this week.

Normally I’d be panicking about packing. And I did have a few little moments of anxiety about getting everything done today. But I’m actually looking forward to the trip even as I have all this professional excitement.

My father loves startups. He just lives for everything about technology. He never missed a Comdex when I was a kid. He still goes to CES even now just to see what might be out there. His enthusiasm for this world is clearly where I got it.

So I think I might be looking forward to bringing all of the energy around chaotic.capital to his birthday. My father wasn’t a particularly demonstrative father but I know he’s really proud of the career I’ve pursued. So it seems fitting that for a celebration of his life and this major milestone that I get to bring some of the world he loves so much with me.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 781 and Accelerating

I am accelerating into the turn that is my extremely busy life. The global weirding is upon us, as I’ve been predicting for more than two years publicly on this blog and even further back in the press and on Twitter.

I was initially afraid that I wouldn’t be able to keep up with a faster life. One reason we moved to Montana was to keep the pace of our personal lives calm and level so professional obligations wouldn’t overwhelm us. And yet as more and more obligations and responsibilities became part of my daily reality, I wanted to shrink under the weight.

But I am not shrinking. I am standing tall. Sure I feel like I’m failing every day and I hate the feeling that I could disappoint folks who have placed capital and trust with me.

I am however sure that over the time horizon I have set I am doing things the right way. Everything else is luck and repeating the positive daily habits that have produced results in the past.

I feel happy with the acceleration if I stop giving the fear any oxygen. I’m starting to remember how I used to wield my talents. But this time I’ve got the benefits of five years of emotional maturing from intensive family systems therapy. I see my old coping mechanisms and bad habits withering as I bring the full maturity of my emotional journey to bear.

If life is going to keep getting faster and faster then I suppose my only choice is to enjoy the thrill of acceleration and trust that I’ve done the work to stay on the ride.

Categories
Politics Preparedness

Day 779 and Future Shock

It feels like a lot of people are finally catching up to what a shit show institutional distrust has wrought on American society. Nobody trusts anyone and everyone is going tribal. The level of panic is feeling palpable across media narratives and we are being offered a choice to either get worked up or get on with our lives.

I will admit I feel a little bit smug on this point as I’ve been prattling on about doomer shit forever. But I also got off my ass and moved to Montana and starting picking up some skills so I could continue to feel like my life had some measure of resilience to it. I ain’t getting all worked up about the end of the world because I can’t live in perpetual anxiety.

Maybe it’s because my parents are hippies that it’s not a big stretch for me to imagine what happens when cultural conventions break down. The post war generation had a whole other set of traumas around social change. And a lot of splinter subcultures emerged from how they were specifically betrayed by all major institutions as well.

So I am reluctant to say this is new. Decline is a long slow managed process and new revolutions turn up all the time to solve our problems. I believe in human ingenuity.

But I do think we’ve sped up the pace of culture as we ramped up new technology as each new instance of connectivity has somehow also wrought alienation and anxiety. It’s hardly surprising that half of the internet is in a complete panic over what rules of the game changed.

What can I say except that it’s so satisfying to lie to yourself about how you benefit each time a cheat code is revealed. Perhaps just enjoy the power and get on with it. I don’t know what to tell you to do but find a way to make peace with it. Because otherwise you will be preyed upon. There are thousands of kinds of power and I suggest you find yours.

But I am genuinely concerned that we are headed to a further and faster and new types crisis of meaning as new rules get introduced, and every actor that desires to hold power will be running to capture it.

And I do mean everyone. It’s not that your tribe is good and the other tribe is bad, rather it’s hard for humans to trust each other with too much power. Independence is a very heavy burden and it’s insulting when you won’t carry your share. We’ve been negotiating the boundaries of it since Socrates got poisoned for corrupting the youth of Athens. And we still don’t have a good answer to what constitutes human excellence.

Categories
Internet Culture

Day 778 and Touch Snow

I am so all typed out right now. I’ve been firing on all cylinders on text and direct message and group chats and Signal and Telegram and fuck now on WordPress.

So much shit is happening and I need to maybe get offline for a bit. Even if I’m just bringing it back down by a couple hours I think I’d be in good shape. I just literally cannot believe how much shit I wrote today.

I have had a few too many things click into place. So I am going through a bit of a level up while at the same time trying to remember to take care of myself. I am a creature that lives off the acuity of my endocrine system. So I can’t let myself get too stressed or I will literally fuck up my work.

So I will keep today brief except as a reminder that it is possible and desirable to maintain a certain stand of rhythm within your day. Because if you cannot regulate your autonomic state you’ve got no business even being in the game.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 775 and In and Out

I am a bit overclocked. I’ve written about it before and the language is useful so I am quoting myself to remind myself what needs to be done.

It will just take some time to let all the cortisol spikes drain out and the other sundry overstimulation issues to get back to baseline.

I am thankfully not experiencing any of the typical anxiety I have felt in the past when overclocked. I just feel tired and shitty and like I need to had off some of inputs to my team.

I’m noting this all here and keeping it short as I need to get in and out so I can get back to the business of recovery as I have so much to take advantage of in my life right now. And the only way I can do that is continuing to maintain the routines and rhythms that got me to this good spot in the first place.

Categories
Startups

Day 761 and Calls

Yesterday ended up being a big day for me. A couple projects that have been in the works for months for final confirmations. That meant I spent a lot of time on phone calls yesterday.

I hadn’t planned for Monday to be so busy. I have therapy in the late afternoons so I tend to back my mornings but I still leave enough breaks to come down from the energy and excitement of a big call. I find synchronized communications to be a little overstimulating so I like to meditate and do Wim Hoff breathing to break down my cortisol levels.

But I couldn’t make it happen yesterday. It was too much back to back. I went from an hour long fact checking media call right into my two hour group therapy session. I’d had a few other smaller calls before it as well.

My earbuds were the first to note the issue. With about fifteen minutes left in my two hour Zoom I got the 10% battery left warning from my AirPods. My technology realized it was time to recharge before I did.

And boy was the decay quick. The AirPods went bwoooop and went dead. I could feel myself getting a little dazed myself. As soon as I was off the call I checked my HRV using Welltory and found all my systems were drained. Too many calls has called on too few resources.

Categories
Biohacking Emotional Work

Day 754 and Smooth is Fast

I like to move quickly. With my enthusiasm for generating momentum, I can easily get myself myself into trouble. I’d bet you can remember a time when you accidentally slowed yourself down by trying to go too quickly.

The phrase “slow is smooth, smooth is fast” originates from the SEAL teams but the purpose behind it can be applied to all situations. There are many situations when we want to react quickly and start moving, but in your efforts to move so quickly, you end up slowing down the operation

Chris Fussel, McChrystal Group

I was rewatching William Gibson’s Peripheral and happened to hear the SEAL slogan from one of the main characters Burton. As his sister Flynne scrambles he reminds her that slow is smooth and smooth is fast.

I am taking that to heart today as I’m itching to get a bunch done. But I am still a little jet lagged from being on Europe time and I woke up a little bit sniffly and a low recovery score on my Whoop.

As tempting as it is to beat myself up about feeling behind on work or scold myself for deliberately slowing myself, I am reminded that there is a reason high performance teams like the SEALS believe slow is smooth and smooth is fast.

Categories
Travel

Day 752 and 24 Hours

I cannot remember the last time I pulled an all nighter. Probably something related to Black Friday sales. But in order to travel back from Prague to Montana I was awake for 24 hours straight across three flights and four separate airports.

I hadn’t really intended to be awake for the entire trip but because one has to pad timing around flights these days, every leg of the trip involved three or four hours between flights or an extended delay that has me running.

I was awake at 5:30am in Prague for a 7am flight that boarded at 7am. I arrived in London at 10am GMT after delays. My Heathrow to Denver flight was meant to department at 1pm. That 9 hour flight was the most pleasant part of the journey but I didn’t want to nap during it as I was concerned it would make my jet lag significantly worse.

I landed in Denver at 3:30pm Mountain time which is 7 hours minus GMT and 8 hours behind Prague so it was 10:30pm for me. I was dragging as that was a long day in and of itself. And frankly I’m used to living off a hub like Denver so a final leg of the journey was a new experience for me.

It was snowing in Denver which had created a significant backlog for takeoffs as everyone needed de-icing. I made a made dash for the 1:30pm Bozeman flight that was delayed to 4pm. I sprinted through Global Entry and back through security but the doors had already closed. I had to wait for my originally schedule 7:30pm flight.

Miraculously that flight was only delayed to 8pm because of the weather but I still found myself sitting in Terminal B for hours as my energy flagged and my spine started to hurt. My body clearly knew it was time for me to be in bed but here I was under florescent lights, eating a Caesar salad at a chain restaurant, waiting for one last flight.

When we boarded at 8pm it was 4am for my internal body clock. Thankfully the 700 mile flight from Denver to Bozeman is only a little over an hour. We touched down at 930pm. By the time I got to Alex waiting for me outside I had been up for exactly 24 hours.

I crossed a contingent, the English Channel, flew over the arctic circle and through another continent, which is an impressive territory to cover in a single day. But what a long day it was.

I slept from 11pm to 10am MTN to make up my sleep debt for the all nighter and I am still pretty tired. That was the equivalent of sleeping till 5pm. It all felt very collegiate to sleep through “the entire day” even though I am now settled back into my original time zone.

My Whoop recovery score was a 24% so I was pretty into the red from the whole experience. But I should be ready to spend the week on the proper time zone so I suppose it was all worth it.

Categories
Biohacking Travel

Day 737 and Jet Lag

Like most people I’ve got my delusions. I am convinced I handled jet lag well. But when I look at my writing history and I’ve written about having jet lag six times

I had an absolutely chaotic travel day yesterday with delayed flights, United canceling my downstream flights when I was forced to buy a new ticket for the first leg of my trip, and an astonishing array of clearly sick individuals. Despite all of that I arrived six hours ahead of schedule. I was alas a complete mess from all the running around and stress.

I woke up far too early for my time zone this morning. I waited for coffee shops to open at 7am. But despite the caffeine I found myself falling back asleep from 10am to noon. I worry I’ve destroyed any chance I have at resetting my circadian rhythm to local time.

I’ve got plans to work East Coast hours while I’m in Europe. I like having the entire morning to myself before everyone wakes up. The hours can be a little lonely on Twitter but that’s probably for the best.

Hopefully by Monday I’ll have settled in and adjusted but right now I’m groggy, itchy (unclear if that’s the jet lag or the pervasive use of scented detergents and the fact that Europeans still smoke) and generally fucked up. My eyes are so red I look like I’ve been smoking weed nonstop. Which ironically might improve the situation.