Tag: Family

Categories
Medical

Day 845 and Fucked Fertility

A bit of discourse stirred up a lot of grief and sadness for me. Noah Smith did an analysis of the much discussed Atlantic piece “The Myth of the Broke Millennial.” His breakdown is excellent and I recommend the Twitter thread where several of my geriatric millennial friends weigh in on how late in life security has come for many of us and how precarious it still feels.

What jumped out at me most in Noah’s breakdown is whether millennials will feel financially secure enough to have kids if it’s indeed true that we are getting less precarious.

That matters as a question as having children appears to be a driving force towards conservative politics but also a general preference for less government involvement. Noah wondered if millennials will be less woke and less inclined to socialism if we don’t turn out to be downwardly mobile. The theory is we might be if, and it’s a big if, we feel secure enough to have children.

There is one age-related factor that appears to draw people to the right, however: having children. Fertility rates are down, and Twenge discusses some reasons for this in her article. But what really matters for politics is probably not the number of kids that get born, but the number of people who end up having any kids at all.

I’ve got bad news on this front as the first wave of elder millennials who haven’t already had kids probably can’t. Why? Our women are aging out of fertility before they find the security they feel they need to consider having kids.

By the time millennial women get to a place where it seems feasible we’ve long entered “geriatric pregnancy” territory. I froze my eggs right before it was considered a geriatric situation. Which is give or take 31-32 now as we redefine fertility. I am now 39.

Now that’s a longer story for me personally as freezing my eggs felt like a consumer decision, was marketed as insurance policy, and ended up being a life changing catastrophe. And I still don’t have kids.

The process of egg extraction triggered an inflammatory disease and I may never be able to carry to term. And I have complicated grief stricken emotions about the entire affair. And we spent a small fortune getting me healthy enough to go back work.

But my suspicion is that many millennials will learn that fertility isn’t as easy as they imagine if they try to deal with it past 35 let alone past 40.

And we simply cannot seem to discuss the issue in a way that is productive. The discourse is toxic as cultural warriors, often men weigh in with their complex emotions about what it means to have a family, support children and generally deal with women’s health.

Shaming and controlling women’s bodies doesn’t really do much for the cold hard reality that we failed many millennial women by assuring technology could solve for the hard questions on fertility. So we marketed these new medical options and sold it at premium. Silicon Valley mounted a whole campaign to freeze eggs for its female workforce.

I’m afraid we are too deeply entrenched in a culture war to discus this productively as most of the people I see with the message that fertility is complex tend to view things in a more traditional context.

I personally love playing a tradwife on Twitter because I’ve learned a lot about how reactionary feminists and baroque online misogyny views motherhood. They talk to me and I’ve listened.

But we need to get women of all politics and preferences and family structures involved in this conversation as a full decade of millennial women are going to need to consider their relationship to their own fertility and bodies in short order. And for many of us it’s too late.

Treatments like IVF and egg freezing & extraction are expensive and have considerably more risk than we are comfortable discussing. Surrogates are a quarter of a million dollar expense which disgustingly is for bureaucratic costs not the surrogate herself. If you want multiple children it’s not crazy to plan for a million dollars. And don’t get me started on how adoption plays into all of this.

A generation of fucked fertility with myriad corporate profit motives driving decision making sounds like the stuff of conspiracy and cranks but don’t be fooled by extremism. We’ve done a shitty job investing in women’s healthcare in America and it will have consequences.

I know it’s scary to look at head on. I regularly break down with my own grief on the matter. I’ve been looking at it for years. Having a serious health crisis brought on by family planning has been a blessing to my marriage but that blessing has enormous costs. I’d expect this process of addressing the fertility of a generation of women to be challenging for us all no matter your personal choices or politics.

Categories
Travel

Day 843 and Panic Procrastination

I have to pack for a trip to Texas and I’ve spent my entire day panicking about it and not doing it. Mind you I’ve done nothing else of particular value while panicking. Except I suppose my daily health routines. The rest of the day has been me feeling ashamed and massively over texting in group chats to avoid packing. I just don’t want to do it.

I hate packing. I hate travel. None of it appeals to me. If you’d like to know why I’ve written about my most common recurring nightmare.

I never leave on the trip. The dream never lets me finish packing. I guess my unconscious hasn’t figured out how to proceed that it wasn’t the packing that scared me, it was leaving behind the life that I thought was safe. Maybe I’ll get there eventually. I don’t want to be stuck in a nightmare, packing up my life, being afraid of being dragged someplace I don’t want to go.

I’ve moved thirty eight times in my life and traveled constantly as a child (and still do as an adult) and I’ve never quite shaken how traumatic it still feels to my inner child who just wanted to stay in one place for more than a year or two. If I never had to travel again in my entire life I would honestly be happy.

With that thought I am going to go take some drugs, remind myself I am able to pause between my reaction and my action, and stop procrastinating on this packing. Maybe I’ll cry a little first.

Categories
Emotional Work Startups

Day 825 and Papered

A bunch of stuff that has been in the works for me for a while all got papered in the last couple of days. If you read any of my zen poasting (misspelled for internet reasons) you’ve probably gleaned that I’ve had a lot going on. Stuff got resolved on time horizons as long as lifetimes and as short as a narrative cycle.

I’d like to celebrate some of the papering (two deals I worked particularly hard for over a long time horizon) and I’m sure I will do so at some point but everything is going by fast and I’m just so drained from the dance. I suppose it’s how you really know if you are living. It’s a lot to live through everyone’s ego death drives and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t take a huge toll on me. I don’t yet know how to pay these costs in anyway but energy yet but I’m learning. If I put hard costs on it motherfuckers wouldn’t like the bill.

I’m modestly less sympathetic to everyone else’s bullshit as someone in my extended family passed away (not getting into it as it’s not my loss) and that invariably makes every other problem look inconsequential. Who care about your feelings and your ego and your petty obsessions in the face of death. But also maybe you should care about them even more? Not my call to be honest.

I’m not really able to mourn with them directly but I feel the energy of the loss reverberating for my loved one. And I wish I didn’t want to discuss it at all but I do. Somehow death is the lowest drama aspect of my week. Actual death.

So if everyone else can tone the energy down a little I’d appreciate it. I will absolutely make sure shit is inked, wired, soothed, smoothed and otherwise handled. It will all get papered. Whether it gets celebrated or mourned is a matter of personal discretion and I’m all out of fucks as to what you chose. Just gimme a beat or two to breath. This isn’t what you’d call a nine to five job.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 823 and Non Attachment

Have you ever read a piece of literature and seen a character described as “a man of great passions?” I feel like it used to be much more acceptable to discuss appetites and the grasping griping hand of man. Perhaps this mentality passed just as Bejamin Disraeli did, unto another era of fallen archetypes. Now we are civilized men with passions well in hand.

Man is only truly great when he acts from his passions.

Bejamin Disraeli

I was raised in a family that meditated. We went to ashrams. We had family vacations in silent retreat. We settled in Boulder where Naropa is as much a part of the institutional fabric of the town as your typical church.

Non-attachment was a concept that was familiar to me long before I felt I had any secure attachment style of my own. I’ve written about my recurring nightmare of packing for a trip or a move. Non-attachment may even be my style of attachment. I am fearful avoidant for anyone keeping score.

Being in chronic pain has been a gift for deepening my understanding of non-attachment. In order to survive pain, you remind yourself it will pass. But accepting that knowledge is a double edge sword. You accept that your joy and happiness is also passing. And you are offered a choice to grasp at them with mean jealously or to hold them as lightly as you would hold your agonies.

Non attachment isn’t just practiced on the negatives in your life. It’s an equal opportunity philosophy. The money you have. The things you own. The beauty you possess. All are fleeting. They are rare intangible things we must value as both priceless and worthless in equal measure.

I believe we can act in greatness in our passion, even if, or maybe especially if, we practice non attachment. I am both saved and damned. I am powerful and meek. I am a woman of great passions and I am capable of separating myself from them as reality dictates.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 806 and Inputs

I’ve had a very intense month. In the past thirty days I feel like I’ve lived an entire lifetime of emotions.

I had some exciting but modestly controversial press in Vanity Fair about how chaotic the future looks in America. That brought a lot of attention and new LPs in chaotic.capital who want to invest in solutions for living in a rapidly changing future shocked world.

Then we were off to Mexico to celebrate my father’s 80th birthday and I had to grapple with complicated emotions on being present for family and the aspirations I have for a life that doesn’t align with disability.

Within a few days of getting back I had my sense making capacity crash override my brain into a snowblind. I thought I was going a little crazy but no it was because a bank collapsed. Then I heard some dog whistles about euthanizing people like me.

And finally I realized there is no point in doing my own writing in the wake of ChatGPT4 and decided that I’d do it anyways because organic human brewed content from Montana is fun to make.

It’s been an astonishing amount of inputs into my system and I am leaving out a lot of personal life details that I’ll leave folks to guess at. As exhausting as all of the above sounds it only represents a fraction of the work and emotional energy I brought to bear on expanding myself to meet this moment.

Categories
Finance Politics

Day 802 and Vengeance

You can’t stare into the abyss without letting it stare back at you. And I did a little too much abyssal observation over the course of the weekend. I feel overwhelmed with grief. I saw in the abyss a roiling cauldron of rage and hate and fear and despair. And I saw my own grief reflected back. The boiling blood that demands punishment flooded the news.

I feel grief for the inner child who lived through the turmoil of past market dislocations. I feel grief for my father who suffered through the bankruptcy of 2001. I feel grief for my mother whose teacher’s pension was decimated in 2008. I feel all the pain and sadness and anger and unfairness. I feel it all in my own family.

He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.

Moby Dick

I see the desire for vengeance. I feel it myself. I never saw any kind of justice for my father or my mother. My inner child will never know that peace. And I will have to be an adult and accept the disappointment of a world where far too many little children suffer for sins of their fathers. Many of us pick them up and carry them on. The churn is largely amoral and uncaring.

I see how satisfying it must be to give in to Ahab’s roiling anger. I saw many hot heart shells bursting on the time line over the weekend. A few were directed at me. I can’t be sure that my own didn’t explode on innocents. We are all culpable in ways big and small.

I am doing what I can to dust myself off and carry on because work must be done. We’ve not yet finished building a better future. We’ve barely even built the outlines for a tolerably decent present. I pray it’s too soon for us to find out how hot our hate burns.

Categories
Culture

Day 797 and Women’s Day

I remember a gentler more optimistic time when I received a “holiday” like International Women’s Day with some amount of positivity. I’ll grant it was mostly as an excuse for marketing and public relations but it didn’t offend me. Now in the harsh reactionary landscape of 2023 I fucking loathe it.

There was a time when I discussed issues like equity and inclusion and felt proud to ask for more space for women in the many male dominated spaces where I spent my time. I like startups, economics, math, science fiction and libertarianism so you could say I’m used to be one of the few women. And I never felt like I didn’t belong.

That is until I started taking up space. Once you’ve asked to be treated as not just one of the boys but as the leader of the pack you start to notice the snarls. Still I didn’t mind. Being top dog is always going to involve some fights. Let’s just say I’m glad women were allowed into the back door of the startup economy by handling Ecommerce. I didn’t mind having to earn my way in by playing in girly spaces like shopping. The money spends.

But I didn’t have to fight any men to do it. I found a way in on my own terms even though I might have preferred something a little less clearly marked as “for girls!” Because I’ve come to believe that no one wants a more diverse world. Diversifying industries that felt safe to men like startups was fought tooth and nail because who wants to give up ground that they fought hard to gain. I’m sure the men all bleed for their positions and nobody wants more competition. I get it.

It’s all a bit of polite fiction because the reality is power is always earned (or taken) and if you think life is a zero sum game you might believe me gaining power is your loss. I don’t believe in zero sum so I’m a little more “win win” but I get it. I see your pain.

So it’s with that dose of realism that I’ll ask you to pardon me if I am skeptical of the value of some corporate holiday to celebrate women’s contributions to the world. We are half the fucking planet. Of course we contributed to the fucking outcome! I don’t need a damn day for that.

Just because men kept women in the house (or cave or whatever) for a couple thousand years doesn’t mean we didn’t build this world too. We bore your children and made your food and kept the hearth.

We gave your dumb asses advice and kept you civilized because that’s what you asked from us. And yet somehow in modernity, men resented women for civilization even though you sure seem like you love the power and wealth that came with civilizing.

The new masculinity Internet influencers say it’s so emasculating to stop being brutes. It’s these women and their demands for respect and inclusion that is so burdensome. Fuck feminized society they howl. Return to tradition! Ok, so which one is it buddy? You want to be a warrior but you also like wearing those Gucci loafers too.

So yeah fuck all the way off. In fact, let’s get grosser. Suck my blood cunt. No one is buying me off with a holiday. It’s tacky. Like buying flowers for your wife after you did something bad. Just own up to it and fuck the flowers. Be a man.

So that’s my message on International Women’s Day. Be a man. It’s what everyone wanted right? Oh and suck my bloody cunt. Let’s stop with the special holidays and get on with building the world together. You know, like we used to do.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 796 and Bedtime Revenge

I’ve been putting off writing basically all day even though I’ve had a number of topics that are completely in my wheelhouse show up in the discourse. For instance, how does one masturbate safely with extremely thin skin? Yes, it was quite a day for Elon Musk jokes.

But I just don’t want to write. I feel resentful that I have pushed this discipline on myself and I do not feel like adhering to any rules even the ones I set myself.

There is a concept in sleep psychology called bedtime revenge procrastination.

Revenge bedtime procrastination refers to the decision to delay sleep in response to stress or a lack of free time earlier in the day

I had plenty of time in my day to write and also plenty of inspiration for it too. But because I feel indignation about being constrained by any sort of discipline I decided to procrastinate.

I rarely feel this about writing but I do often feel the need to rebel against schedules or demands on my time. I felt tremendously overstretched as a teenager but it goes back even further to feeling like I was put into schooling and social situations that were too much for me.

It’s valuable to recognize these behaviors that originate in childhood. Most of our unproductive habits tends to be based on very early reactions we had when we were young and had little control. It’s called a reaction formation for those of you not hopelessly therapy-pilled like me.

Reaktionsbildung is the fantastic German word for it. You are likely familiar with its basic format. “A reaction formation is a defense mechanism in which emotions and impulses which are perceived to be unacceptable are mastered by exaggeration of the directly opposing tendency.” Thank you Wikipedia for that simple explanation. Basically your unconscious mind helps you rebel.

I think it’s unacceptable to be undisciplined. So I impose discipline. Even though I don’t actually lack discipline myself, my anxiety around how unacceptable it is to be undisciplined will drive a host of opposite reactions. Thankfully I’m aware and now the blog post is written and I can enjoy dinner with my family having conquered today’s demons.

Categories
Emotional Work Startups

Day 792 and Level Ups

I know I am courting a bit of a crash tomorrow because I can feel just how much energy this week took. But I am feeling emotionally like I leveled up. I looked at a few of my emotional patterns this week pretty head on and redrew some boundaries. And this always improves my work performance.

The upside of journaling your thoughts and emotions is you have a back catalog of your own thoughts to compare against your eventual conclusions. You can look back and spot patters in your thinking and tie them together. Writing everyday can be excruciating but I never regret having done it.

I have to always remind myself that it takes a fair amount of effort and a high tolerance for being wrong in public. You have to get used to people disliking you and finding you distasteful. People want to put their emotional response onto you and the hard work of being an adult is not accepting what isn’t yours.

If you can tie that kind of self reflection into your professional life you get all kinds of unexpected level ups. You tell people about your own responsibilities and they trust you with theirs. You get to build great things together by building on shares humanity. The best business relationships I have are the ones where we understand what value each of our personal lives brings to counteracting of own limitations and blind spots. I’ll always work with someone who leads with their humanity first. Big visions get worked out together by trusting each others talents.

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.