Tag: Energy

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Biohacking Chronic Disease

Day 1323 and Dip to Progress

It’s always baffling to me when something that is supposed that is supposed to make you feel good makes me awful. And yet it’s a very consistent experience for me.

Every time I get bodywork done (massages, acupuncture, osteopathic spinal work, physical therapy) I feel like absolute shit for 24-48 hours afterwards.

I have an autoimmune condition called ankylosing spondylitis which is a fancy form of arthritis. It’s well controlled with medication and a healthy lifestyle but I am always looking for ways to increase my functionality as well as my capacity to tolerate stress.

This naturally leads me to want incorporate positive stress techniques like cold showers, saunas, and the thousands of other hacks to improve your capacity to tolerate stress.

I’ve tried supplements magnesium supplements to adaptogenic mushrooms and most major modalities of body work to even the whackiest of woo.

Yesterday I had an amazing osteopath work on my spine and yet today I feel about 10x worse than I did before I went in. The dip is just a misery of exhaustion, pain which leads to some anxiety from being tired and in uncomfortable.

I trust I’ll feel better after this dip and some progress as I recover from the good stress but at the moment I’m just miserable.

My assumption is that many things in life that make you feel better in the long term are uncomfortable. Delayed onset muscle soreness is a common issue for new weight lifters and pushes many out of their routines before they even get started.

It’s such an art finding the correct amount of stress to put your body under and I wish I had a more perfect intuition about how to do it. Until I do I’ll probably have to work through many types of dips.

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Emotional Work Startups

Day 1320 and Being “You-er”

You may recall the old aphorism about marriage. Men and women have very different goals for the institution and how it will or won’t change them.

“Men marry women with the hope they will never change. Women marry men with the hope they will change. Invariably they are both disappointed”

I don’t recall having any ambitions for changing my husband when we got married ten years ago. I thought quite highly of him when we got married. I still do.

The irony is that we have both changed significantly not because of any goal the other has for each other but because of the work we do together. Fast growing startups simply demand so much emotional change from their people.

A recent piece in the New York Times discussed how coaching has become the hack that drove emotional chances

Venture-backed startups simply must scale faster than all but the rarest of human beings can acquire emotional intelligence. As a result, startup founders and chief executives, many of whom are trained not in management but in software engineering, face extraordinary risk of coming unglued in ways that vaporize immense amounts of capital.

How Coaching Became Silicon Valley’s Hack for Therapy

Acquiring emotional intelligence quickly becomes a “do or die” skill in startups. And most of us do die. Ego death in mediation like jhanna are within reach because failure and rebirth are such common experiences for the technologists that build quickly moving companies.

Both my husband Alex and I have done family systems therapy as well as multiple forms of professional and personal coaching. If Alex didn’t want change from me as his wife then he is surely disappointed. As his wife if I wanted change from him I very much did get it.

Neither one of us is disappointed, aphorisms aside. If anything, as we’ve done more work to acquire the emotional intelligence required of us to growth and thrive in our work, we’ve become more ourselves.

There is a real joy in becoming “you-er” as essential personality, skills and ambitions become clearer. It’s well worth investing in therapy and coaching to become yourself. Being “you-er” is quite freeing. It’s hard to be disappointed by that outcome.

Categories
Biohacking Emotional Work

Day 1319 and Gimme Fuel, Gimme Fire

I’m a little bit underfed at the moment. If I don’t have someone feeding me I basically don’t eat. And I didn’t eat much this weekend because I was alone. The joyful peace of solitude means I’ll skip every meal I can.

I don’t mind a little feast and famine because I’ve always found food to be at best inconvenient and at worst an actively hostile force that would make me an undesirable fat woman. Elder millennials had terrific culture for women what else can say.

I didn’t come from a family that had a strong culture of food. Scandinavian foods are kind of gross when filtered through American agribusiness. Happy family mealtimes and nurturing through food seems like the stuff of movies not real life. It certainly wasn’t my experience as a kid.

I mostly absorbed the wider culture around me which said food was dangerous for women and should be actively restricted. The experiences I did have in my family’s relationship to food were not uniformly positive.

I’ve had years where I was able to look at food as fuel but those were mostly when I was very dedicated to athletic pursuits.

Alas that’s in the past for me thanks to age and disease. I’m happy I’m healthy enough to squat a few times a week and be out of bed for multiple hours at a time. And that’s still a struggle with my ankylosis.

I don’t crave food or have intrusive thoughts about it. I mostly just don’t like to eat and it has surely contributed to a genetic propensity to weight gain especially when it’s been combined with steroids to manage my autoimmune condition. If I were my body I wouldn’t speed up my metabolism either.

I better force myself into a meal right now because as tempting as it is to just not eat it’s a bad habit. But if someone just solves the problem of food I’d be the first person in line. Especially now that the American food system is beyond tainted. Like truly how can we have the fire to burn if our fuel is this bad?

Categories
Aesthetics

Day 1316 and August Has Its Moments

I wasn’t expecting August to be much fun but I’m on an enjoyable roll through the first week. Maybe the politicians will listen to us and maybe they won’t. But stuff still gets built no matter what the news says so I’m just working what’s in front of me with my people.

We’ve had relatively good luck with weather this week and the fires have blessedly not been blowing into the valley. Which does a lot to improve moods. It’s cool, bright and you can breathe.

Add in a few prime season tomatoes, some fresh basil, a Japanese watermelon at its peak, and you’ve got the making of a great evening. With sunset coming earlier every day I can almost feel like fall might come after all.

The simple pleasures and a lot of work keep the summer from driving you too crazy. But if you need a little crazy might I interest you in some thoughts on ratfucking and campaign semiotics.

Categories
Emotional Work Politics

Day 1315 and Ratfucking Season

I’ve been engaging in more of American political discourse online as we head into the main campaign season. That’s probably a mistake.

American is no country for old libertarians. Or in my case middle aged small “l” libertarians who aren’t keen on more government involvement in anything. Cyperpunk is became daily life and the crypto-libertarian instincts some of us were raised into make us distrust this particular flavor.

But I’m in a pretty decent mood all things considered. Perhaps the typical depressive lassitude of the sunny season is being mitigated by the climate controlled extremely online nature of the networked era. Madness without breaking a sweat.

My people are not much for sunnier climes and our popular culture representations have more than a touch of summer madness. Better to keep us indoors when the mercury climbs.

And yet the madness seeps in to the virtual worlds of media. August is full of ugly surprises.Which brings me to the rat fucking.

As I said, I’m watching American politics. It’s definitely Knives Out season and as my friend Jon Stokes points out the semiotics are ugly. Now that we have the Vice Presidency match up set as Ohio Senator JD Vance versus Minnesota Governor Tim Walz we can run cultural scripts. It’s already ugly, sexualized and bullying.

meme warfare b/c it codes Vance as the self-loathing, repressed kinkster who hasn’t yet come out to a loving ally dad who’ll embrace him & pass the torch to him

This is ratfucking season and the Democrats are on top of their game. Politico has a short history of ratfucking which anyone interested in political campaigns would do well to read.

Roger Stone has been with us doing dirty tricks for so long sometimes we forget that both sides are up to it and have been since before Nixon.

Like my goodness how things don’t repeat but rhyme in twisted new ways. We’ve got a Kennedy with a car crash crash and carcasses in the news.

It’s wild that the same people are still around and involved and somehow not dead. You shouldn’t get to do the “Summer of 68” twice in my opinion. And absolutely nobody wants a repeat of the 70s. Can you imagine cultural stagflation? Actually maybe I can

Maybe we are doing reinforcement learning in a simulation of some sort and we actually are in a gradient descent of madness being smeared across an event horizon of frenzied power dreams of an artificial American swampland simulation that ran too long. It’s all awfully crisp.

Categories
Emotional Work Startups

Day 1314 and Picking Up Good Vibrations

I am so tired. A wave of good news, good startups, good luck and good vibes has been coming my way. Pet Sounds may be Brian Wilson’s best work but good vibrations are a universal broadcasting frequency.

I am choosing to tap into those good vibes even if I’m concerned about well just about everything. There is nothing to be done but work the problems in front of me.

No blackpilling

So I’ll keep nurturing my good vibes. I won’t be blackpilled. I can make a difference and so can you.

If you want to send some good vibes and solutions my way, I’ve got some sort of neck pain from tension in my traps that is messing with me fiercely and I’d like to work through that. That’s the level of problem in front of me that’s solvable. That’s a vibration that can be raised. Maybe you’ve got some stuff you need help with. Hit me up with solutions or problems.

Categories
Startups

Day 1312 and Phew Slow Down

I haven’t been paying too much to the news of the week as there has been too much to do. After weeks of drama in the world of domestic politics I’d like to be doing something more productive than watching. Silicon Valley infighting

I’m always happiest when I’m working with founders and there is slightly more demand than supply at the moment on the Julie . This is a good thing for me but less so for the founders and I’d like more capacity for them.

I’ve been working from my gut (honed from now 18 years in startup land) and the results of our investing honestly so much better than I could have envisioned.

It’s unusual to be able to do real performance driven work in the first 2-3 years of a fund cycle when you are small and pressed but somehow we are here without single zero in even the riskiest of spaces.

It’s all markups and progress and it feels almost too good to be true and I’m so excited to make the case for where chaotic.capital goes from here. But wouldn’t mind being able to catch my breath. Such is the nature of startups. It can be mostly eating glass but we are actually doing the thing.

Categories
Emotional Work Startups

Day 1310 and Zonked

I didn’t get enough sleep last night. Between one thing and another I got about five hours of sleep. Adult circadian rhythms being what they are I still woke at the usual time.

I had a busy morning and afternoon so I pushed through it. Unexpectedly a number of pieces of my investing work were happening all at once. So much for a slow August right?

I was able to get through everything on my calendar but I’m I was starring down a bunch of work even at midafternoon. And I found myself unable to keep my eyes open.

I was zonked. Slept from 2 till I was woken up for a bird dinner. I’ll admit I’m planing to sleep as soon as I can wrap up my evening routine.

I’ve got so much to get through over the weekend. I have two rounds I’m working on (if you like hardtech slide into my DMs), juggling a bunch of inbound, and I’m gearing up for the fall. So maybe I need a little extra sleep.

And to think just a few days ago I was completely despondent over fire season, the sadness of American politics and my own seasonal affective disorder with high summer. If things keep up at this pace it won’t be summer much longer.

Categories
Internet Culture

Day 1305 and Well Now I’m Scared

Things have taken a turn for the worse on the timelines. I’m not all that bothered by the feral internet, but I do occasionally find myself staring down the dark corridors of anonymous “holders of risqué opinions” and I wonder about my life choices.

I’ve written before about how I think our communication channels are where most of war gets waged now.

I can feel all the shifting crazies that come from an unstable media environment. Our endocrine systems are simply not built to metabolize this much information and noise. Signal is lost in the static.

I suspect a lot of rational voices will make the choice to bounce out of the moment simply to avoid the informational shrapnel. Alas these days it’s less of a metaphor. How quickly we forget that just weeks ago someone tried to kill a presidential candidate.

If rational people don’t want to engage. And given where we are with ridiculous hysterics over couch coitus I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t. Well you will be left to the hyenas. Millions have already retreated to the cozy web. As they reemerge it’s only a reminder of how bad things are online.

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.