Tag: Fear

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease

Day 1475 and Equalizing Pressure

I scared someone really badly today. As I was being locked into the hard shell for my eighth hyperbaric chamber oxygen therapy session, I realized I had forgotten my chewing gum.

At 2 atmospheres of pressure it can be a real challenge to keep your ears from getting painfully congested. Even with yawning and blowing oxygen out your nose, it’s like going into an airplane with a sinus trouble. It’s uncomfortable but it can also be dangerous.

Careful. Equalize the pressure in your ears. If you feel your ears stuffy, equalize the pressure in the following ways. 1. Yawn 2. Swallow saliva. 3. Close mouth, pinch the nose, out of breath, blow the nose (all spelling mistakes theirs)

I got a little panicked as I was trying to stop the clinic technician from finishing the sealing process as I wasn’t sure if they could stop it once it was sealed or if I would need a full decompression cycle.

I was texting frantically “I forgot my gum can this be stopped ASAP so I can get it?”

I was tapping the window on the hardshell with a worried look and showing the text. I kept trying to make the font bigger and be clearer. FORGOT GUM OPEN?!

But it was confusing enough that everyone in the room thought something was seriously wrong. Which it would have been without the gum as I can’t do a full hour at 2 atmosphere without the help of the chewing. All the yawning, blowing out through the nose and other techniques aren’t quite enough.

It wasn’t yet an emergency. If it was I would have hit the big red button. But everyone seemed to think it was. After 2-3 minutes of frantic miscommunication it turned out that it was fine to open it up but we’d need to restart the seal and pressurize it again. I got the gum. And look who was on the TV screen.

Just don’t die while inside the chamber

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 1474 and Process over Outcome

It’s hard to trust, well, anything. The uncertainty of the near future looks like the uncertainty of the far future right now.

It feels as if one is in a fog so thick that you can’t see your own hand reaching out to touch something at arm’s length let alone glimpse gjr far horizon

How do we set goals and work towards outcomes in that kind of world? I find it unsettling despite having years to prepare for a more chaotic world.

I am learning to let go of grasping for specific outcomes and lean on process to bring me to outcomes. I work the problems in front of me. I maintain the protocols that work for me. When they cease to yield results I change as rapidly as I am able.

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease Medical

Day 1470 and Disappointing Biomarkers

After my anaphylactic adventures over New Year’s, I decided it was time for a fresh round of bloodwork to see just how my inflammatory responses were doing.

I got them back and it shows exactly what you’d imagine from a patient with an active autoimmune condition. My sed rate, or erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR) made a significant jump from last measurement.

I’d been on the high end of normal for almost two years and this set returned with doubling of the previous number. This biomarker is used in conjunction with C-reactive protein (CRP) test to determine overall inflammatory responses. That test came back modestly elevated but not atrocious. I also have elevated IgA levels, also known hypergammaglobulimia so that’s a bummer.

It would seem that my relatively well controlled autoimmune disorders (psoriatic arthritis and ankylosis) are moving to an active phase.

Given my use of IL-17 inhibitor injections along with a pain management protocol, lifestyle and nutrition management and a focus on holistic interventions, these results are obviously quite disappointing to me.

It would seem 2024 was harder on me than I’d have preferred and 2025 will be a year of doubling down on holistic therapeutics. Red light, infrared sauna, cryotherapy, hyperbaric chambers oxygenation, and any other anti-inflammatory treatment I can throw at it. Not that I’m looking forward to trying get another round of elimination diets but needs must.

I’ve not changed my the cornerstone therapy secukinumab since the pandemic, so it may be time to see other options like Janus Kinase (JAK) Inhibitors.

I’ve tried Tumor Necrosis Factor (TNF) Inhibitors as well as methotrexate (otherwise known as chemotherapy) and none of those treatments (Humira, Embrel) helped much and dosing on and off of biological injections is a long process. It can take up to six months to see results and changing a treatment that has been working comes with significant risks.

I’m lucky that even with these biomarkers I am still functional. I am able to work semi-normal hours and am able to groom and exercise. I have no personal life to speak of nor do I have hobbies beyond my work (unless reading counts) so I’m lucky to love my family and work enough to have it provide enough meaning to keep going.

Much of my success in treating this chronic complex case has been made easier with the breakthroughs in artificial intelligence.

Even as my physicians have retired and my care team rotates, I am able to progress and learn more thanks to large language models and search tools like Perplexity. I’m confident I will find a way to get back to remission quickly with little disruption.

Nothing provides me as much motivation to work as disease. I see how I and other patients like me suffer and I double down.

The progress we’ve made on autoimmune conditions in the wake of Covid and the rapid progression of protein discoveries as more AI tooling comes online. A chaotic world with a chaotic body drives my investing. We can do better as I see so much progress.

Categories
Community Preparedness

Day 1469 and Prayers and Hope

My in-laws live on the west side of Los Angeles as well as one of my portfolio founders, significant extended family and many dear friends including one of my closest and best friends. I am afraid for all them as the fires in Pacific Palisades has rapidly spread.

Please pray for the city of Los Angeles and her people as these fires rage. A dry year with little rain and unpredictable Santa Ana winds have led to a precarious situation.

Officials warned of devastating losses as the main blaze raced through the affluent Pacific Palisades neighborhood. The fast-moving fire spread across nearly 3,000 acres and was still 0% contained early Wednesday, according to the Los Angeles Fire Department –WSJ

A professional colleague known well to the venture community Mark Suster is quoted in this WSJ piece as he and his family were evacuated. I fear many more may be in his position. I pray their homes are not lost.

I have an especially strong emotional reaction to these types of rapid urban firestorms after living through Boulder’s Marshall Fire two years ago. Over three thousand homes were lost. It was devastating to my hometown and it is still rebuilding three years later.

I advocate for preparedness as both an individual and a community. I have lots of posts and media on the top if you are interested. When these tragedies strike, show up for your neighbors and your family by preparing so that when the worst happens you can be at your best for people.

Categories
Community Politics

Day 1458 and Ingroup Preference

“one day you’re in, the next you’re out”

Heidi Klum – Project Runway

Twitter is in the middle of a multi-day long information war ostensibly over foreign worker visas in America. It’s about visas in the same way that Gamergate was about “ethics in journalism” if you catch my drift.

The similarities are interesting. It’s a fight over who’s interests are included and prioritized in a lucrative space. If gaming makes money and had that much vitriol involved imagine how much worse it is at the scale of a nation. All power struggles become culture war online.

American, being the aging but dominant geopolitical entity on the planet, is a popular place to be. So naturally the fight for who benefits from America is gnarly as fuck and has a lot of racism.

Who has rights and who benefits from them sounds much grander than video games or fashion but who decides what is “in-group” is existential.

As we experience the Great Reshuffle over the next decade or two, the question of who is protected in a nation state couldn’t be more potent. And human nature means we are viewing it with as much sense as a gaggle of fashion editors. Being part of the in group in America is as ugly a business as any.

Categories
Culture Politics

Day 1457 and Cultural Values

I really tried to stay out of discourse on Twitter over Christmas break, alas being only human I stupidly decided to wade into discussions about American talent and our disgracefully broken immigration and visa system. It was a mistake.

A debate over type of work visa called the H-1B kicked off days of horrific anti-Indian racism which then created a bizarre backlash insinuating white Americans of having a culture of under-achievement. All over a broken program that brings in 65,000 workers in a country of 300m.

Naturally people are pissed. The whole thing feels like it was designed to manufacture a schism between factions of the Republican Party as it touched some very raw nerves.

The “precariat” of lower middle class professional Americans took sucker punches from anonymous account and also Vivek Ganapathy Ramaswamy for having bad cultural values which has affected our willingness to compete for excellence.

Maybe someone else will remember this but I recall an incident during my childhood when Bill Cosby got canceled (no not for that) over statements suggesting that some portions of poor black American cultural values were not promoting success and achievement.

If we had a similar cultural figure in white American that said something equivalent we’d probably get the same backlash as no one likes to hear told that they need to work on themselves. And in general people definitely don’t want to hear their flaws from someone who acts like their betters.

I think the bigger question is how is it that we found our values of hard work and achievement degraded. What has happened in our schools and in our workplaces that we are not aspiring to better ourselves. That’s where the heart of the issue is most tender and for good reason.

Categories
Internet Culture Politics

Day 1447 and LARPing To Death

Do you know what LARP means? If so, do you remember when you first heard the term? Think back and recall the context of your first exposure to the term. I’ll give you a couple hints for history.

Maybe LARP was used to describe playing a tabletop game like Dungeons and Dragons. Perhaps you went to a Renaissance Fair and encountered the melees put on by Society for Creative Anachronism. If you remember Dagohir you are a real OG & also old.

LARP stands for live action role-playing. It originally involved fancy dress, maintaining character and strict but fantastical rule sets. Its not much different from what children call “make believe” except it’s done by adults who presumably understand the difference between fantasy and reality.

It’s likely if you are younger and extremely online, your first encounter with LARPing was less “gamers dressed up with swords” and more “anon pretending to be some type of identity” on a social media platform. Like based and woke, LARP is a term that has had a lot of semantic drift.

Increasingly it feels as if some of us aren’t sure what is shared consensus reality and what is fantasy anymore. We used to call that “crazy” but it’s so prevalent one has to wonder if whole categories of otherwise sane people have gone nuts. People become convinced of fantasy they have made in their identities and are acting out on them.

Even the FBI is concerned about the blurred lines between fantasy and reality in LARPing. In 2023 they discussed the potential threat of violent extremism emerging from LARPing

Violent extremists will extensively engage in confirmation bias prior to the implementation of their plan. However, in this context, it becomes confirmation violence, or the use of targeted violence to impose social and political beliefs onto others and, therefore, change their behavior — in a grandiose sense, perhaps even the course of history

I personally can’t think of a more chilling term than confirmation violence in the wake of the public reaction to the assassination of United Health Care insurance CEO Brian Thompson. We are now LARPing ourselves to death. A bit too “if you die in the Matrix you die in real life” vibes if you ask me.

Think about how we went from digital mobs to physical riots to the dangerous new trend of assassination as cancellation. Vaguely defined members of today’s outgroup are no longer merely targets of online criticism but actually targets of stochastic terrorism. This is leaderless, decentralized violence. No one person held up a hand to start it, and no one person can easily stop it.

Balaji on Decentralized Violence

As centralized authorities are going through significant challenges to their authority we are probably in for a lot more LARPing to death. I’d be prepared to see a lot more violence emerging from LARPers convinced of their own story’s moral superiority.

And I’d be careful about buying into anyone’s story as we adjust. If all the world is a stage but the characters have real weapon’s we are in for a world of hurt.

Categories
Culture Internet Culture

Day 1444 and Intrasexual Competition

Dating discourse seems to have taken over all forms of social media. Maybe it seems louder than usual because it’s cuffing season and with Netflix becoming a Christmas romance movie juggernaut the urge to find a partner is higher in December.

But you have to be wary of the stories and advice that litter Reddit and Twitter. Not everyone doling out advice actually wants you to succeed. Some of them look like they are actively undermining their peers.

The manosphere seems determined to turn young men into fearful controlling oafs while the radfem/femcel/tradwife axis of influencers is a mess of undermining advice stoking the neuroses of young women.

In the battle of the sexes, a favored tactic is sabotage. Evolutionary psychologists would probably say what we are seeing on social media is intrasexual competition run amok

Giving bad advice undermines your sexual competition. And if you sell advice or attention, keeping people coming back for more bad takes while keeping them miserable (and single) is the whole game. The hot takers build attention and clout.

Attention grifters are here to make you engage while turning you into a neurotic mess. So before taking someone’s advice on the other sex, ask “cui bono” because it’s probably not you.

Categories
Emotional Work Internet Culture

1443 and Irreducible

Being “spreadsheet brained” has become a shorthand critique for the technocratic mindset that prefers to see with abstractions rather than through immediate physical reality.

I don’t have a full history of the term but it was brought into my lexicon by Ashley Fitzgerald of Doomer Optimism.

A Wojack suffering from an inoperable tumor called spreadsheet brain.

Having spreadsheet brain can be a quality of life problem. If you are particularly numerate you can easily fixate on the negative statistics. We then use those facts to isolate themselves from the each other. It’s a classic case of seeing the price of things and not the value. It can easily become a very smart form of stupid.

I’m more of a whole to parts thinker myself so I’m amused by this meme even though as someone who works with tech startups I’m obviously susceptible to spreadsheet brain issues.

It’s reasonable to have concerns with thinking only in abstract terms. The topology of human experience is complex and yet we have many tools that take the irreducible and cook it down into something concentrated, clear, and altogether too legible. We desire to be seen but perhaps not too closely.

Categories
Emotional Work Media Medical

Day 1441 and Fever

I woke up at 4am with my racing heart. I looked at my Whoop biometrics and my resting heart rate was abnormally high. I’m talking 110bpm at the peak of my REM cycle. I obviously has a nightmare.

I figured that nothing could be that scary so I took my temperature. Sure enough I was running a light fever.

The last few days have been a particularly gruesome one the internet. Rapid change, institutional distrust, and chaos have led us to blood. And instead of sorrow it’s all cheers and memes.

I hope it passes quickly. Both my own fever and the one gripping the timelines. I feel in need of some time off from the world. It’s been an intense year. I pray for more introspection through advent.