Tag: Forced Metaphor

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Aesthetics Startups Travel

Day 526 and Out of Practice Yuppie

A well dressed, tall, friendly looking white gentleman tried to join me on an otherwise empty blue velvet couch that I had deliberately planted myself in the middle of to avoid socializing. All that was missing was a “closed for business” sign around my neck.

I had attempted to tell him “no actually this seat is taken.” I was confused he didn’t immediately pick up on my body language. I had spread my entire body across the couch and had intensely “don’t come here” body language. I had my purse down to take up more space. I laid my hand with my wedding ring on my knee so it’s instantly visible. He didn’t pick up a single visual cue. I tried verbal. I literally shouted at him that no he wasn’t welcome to join me. “This seat is taken!” Didn’t make a difference.

I don’t think he could hear me as he sat down and tried to strike up a conversation despite his obvious discomfort clinging to the edge of the couch with half a butt cheek in mid air. He tried a few lines of conversation as I doggedly ignored him. I started a tweet and angled my phone screen towards him so he could see me typing complaints. Didn’t help at all.

I really had done everything I could to claim this space as my own. The couch was directly beneath an air vent trying to push cooler air into the crowded house bar. It was as hot inside the bar as it was outside but this one area had modestly more airflow making the summer heat at least breathable.

Which is to say it was over 100 degrees inside the old house. The Rainey Street bars in Austin are all converted old historical houses with wide open full floor windows and open doors to allow people to enjoy backyards with twinkling lights and hipster backyard games. These bars are a cultural treasure in March for SXSW when everyone enjoys the mild 70 degree early spring. In June during a heatwave they are a hellscape for yuppies who have simply forgotten how to socialize like normal human beings.

I was engaging in some incredibly rude behavior yes, but the bar has no other visible seating near an air vent and even the 5 degrees of lowered temperature and the moving air helped a little. I was wearing loose comfortable clothing but it was still intolerable. I regretted not sourcing a wheelchair for the week but then again none of these houses are accessible anyway. It was the only spot in the entire bar where I could even attempt to mitigate the effects of my invisible disability.

I could feel my spine starting to swell within minutes. Ankylosis is a winter disease. Heat and humidity swell the spine and that pain will radiate out to a kind of ambient full body throbbing intensity that cannot easily be ignored.

Actually, pain is just like the heat in that way. It overtakes your willpower slowly but inexorably. Quietly it makes itself known like the stillness of Joseph Conrad’s Jungle.

“And this stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention. It looked at you with a vengeful aspect.”

Joseph Conrad “Heart of Darkness”

The amount of determination you have to play mind-over-matter games is simply a fight against time. Eventually you get tired from the effort. You pray you don’t let it take you to the dark places it took Kurtz. But you know one day it could take you too.

Eventually my husband came back. He’d been searching for a bathroom and our hosts for the evening. The yuppie next to me pretended to ignore him. He sat for another two minutes or so just to give the impression he’s weirdly close proximity to me was on purpose as a resting place and not at all an attempt to strike up a conversation with a woman who did not want to talk. A tactic we’ve all used once or twice to conceal a social faux we didn’t mean to commit.

Alex and I used to attend parties like this all the time. We were aggressively on the circuit for both tech and media events for well over a decade. He used to produce TechCrunch Disrupt in a long distant past before he transitioned into being an operator at early stage startups. Then those startups matured to established companies. And now it’s become clear we are established professionals.

We no longer need the social circuit. Networking has lost its payouts. More people want to meet us and ask for things than the other way around. We’ve made it. And it’s a good thing too as the social contract is breaking down all around us. Yuppies have forgotten their manners as we are all out of practice with the basic niceties of the social season. Everything from how we approach someone to begin a conversation to whom we may invite to a private event is now fraught. Hell I can’t even remember how to apply professional makeup anymore so I can’t look down on a man looking to chat. We’ve all lost some of our humanity over the pandemic.

And I find myself mumbling “the horror, the horror” as I walk myself back to the hotel because the streets won’t allow taxis in the downtown core. The transition from soft times to whatever comes next is full of unexpected surprises.

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Internet Culture

Day 510 and Lifeline

Many people used social media as a lifeline to connect with others during the pandemic. The Zoom family dinners or the video hangout Happy Hours were a staple personally and professionally. We livestreamed religious gatherings and conversational societies. We set up Discord servers for our favorite topics and Telegram groups for group chats. As it turns out the metaverse is already here and we migrated there during the pandemic years.

The trouble with expanding your subjective reality to include virtual spaces, is that you have massively expanded the surface area of your life. Your world becomes much larger when it’s virtual. Living in the metaverse opens up your neighborhood to the global village.

When you are confined to physical reality as your living space, your subjective reality remains the people you encounter in your daily routine. At most this might be a cosmopolitan city, but for most of us it’s a parochial circle of work, children and basic goods and services. Dunbar’s number suggests we top out at about 150 people.

Most people are awkwardly straddling some middle ground these days. News media expands our subjective reality a bit, and we Americans almost all participate in some online virtual community. If you are creative class it is a professional obligation. But largely we live a real life in our physical communities. We know what is going on in the outside world but we mostly live insular lives.

That is until a tragedy occurs. And at the rate we are going these days that means once every week or so. Suddenly the entire world is focused on one singular horror. Even if it isn’t your own horror in your own physical community your subjective virtual reality feels as if it did.

And this can really suck if the metaverse is a big part of your life. Especially if the metaverse is where most of your social contact happens. The lifeline to virtual communities is no longer expanding your world but merely expanding the surface area of grief during a shared public tragedy.

I am skeptical there is a solution for this problem of shared surface area during a tragedy. Bearing witness is a human instinct deeply coded into our cultures. The desire to be bound together is for better or worse, our reality as social animals. Taking our communities online just takes our culture with us.

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Emotional Work Startups

Day 505 and Deadlines

I’m trying to stave off a cortisol spike that my body simply does not need. I’ve got a talk coming up for Consensus in June and I owe an editorial with my main thesis along with any visuals I may need for the talk due next week.

I know the area I plan to speak about quite well. It is titled the InDAOstrial Revolution and I plan to cover some far future possibilities for what the new organizational structure can bring. And I do mean far as I’ll talk about some radical ideas like data collectives for rare diseases and networked nation states. I’m really excited as I think decentralized autonomous organizations offer us a new path for how we can pool different kinds of resources. I think DAOs give humans a chance to build better bigger weirder things on totally radical timelines just like the advent of the corporation did before in the industrial revolution.

I’ve been watching Gilded Age as I’m a sucker for set pieces but also because I love stories of wealth and power and cultural mores being pushed. I think DAOs have the chance to do that for society and the family in a way that is just as unsettling and ultimately wealth creating as anything we saw in the Gilded Age. And the changes we see to cultural norms will be every bit as revolutionary as the ones we see with inventions or investments. When times change, we push all of the ideas we have about how to properly organize individuals and citizens with it.

What I’m saying is I’m obviously passionate about the topic and even when I’m home with the flu I’m thinking about ways to knit together different worlds and metaphors. I might not be the best expert on DAOs nor am I remotely close to being one of the earlier people to get into them, but I’m absolutely an informed and enthusiastic professional with the training to think about this holistically. So I’d listen to me if I had the chance.

Nevertheless I’m worried I’ll botch the talk. My mind wants to worry I’ve run out of time to do a good job (I obviously haven’t) and that even if I put in a lot of hours it could have been more. I could have started sooner.

But honestly I’ve got to let that self defeating talk go. What I bring will be enough. And a deadline looming even with a sickness is no reason to worry when you know and love a topic well. So I’ll trust myself to bring you something good.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 480 and Responsibility

I usually have therapy on Mondays. I stack all my emotional work into the first day of the week so I can be my most present for everyone in my life. But today I just couldn’t show up for my emotional work. I’m in a lot of pain and a bunch of things are up in the air professionally and personally. I’m just not able to be here.

Thankfully I’m lucky enough to be surrounded by people who are working on deepening their emotional practice. Someone was able to help me see that I wasn’t able to show up even though I physically showed up. They did it with one insight too.

Responsibility is having ability to respond

One insight and my mind was blown 🤯. In that moment I didn’t realize I didn’t have the ability to respond. I was abdicating responsibility. I was reactive. It wasn’t under my control. I couldn’t preserve my ability to today today. I was not preserving my response ability.

I quietly bowed out of therapy for the evening. Well not so quietly I cried a little and shared my disappointment. I needed to take responsibility for myself in that moment. So in order to preserve my capacity to respond I had to make the decision to bow out. I needed to be the adult that would take care of whatever portion of me was incapable of working through the physical pain of that moment. My inner child needed me to parent and I did. Now hopefully I can continue that streak through mealtime, bath time and bedtime so that my adult and my inner child can respond to the best of our ability to tomorrow.

Categories
Aesthetics

Day 444 and Equinox

There is a brand of luxury gyms called Equinox that was started in Manhattan. I didn’t have enough money for a decent apartment when I first arrived in the city, so I showered at the gym. There was a time when I lived in a shithole on the Bowery that barely had working hot water but I could always rely on the sanctuary of the spa-like bathrooms at the Equinox. Apartments then were two grand a pop but an Equinox membership could be had for $150.

I loved that place so much my friend Rob swears I manifested a job at the corporate headquarters. I only lasted a year in the marketing department before I got headhunted out but I loved working there (until I hated it but that’s another story.)

One of the big events the gym would throw for marketing purposes was their biannual seasonal Equinox parties. They’d make a big to-do about both the fall and spring Equinox and encourage members to bring friends for free classes and workouts, and somewhat inexplicably an open bar. I never got how mixing drinks and spin class worked but whatever.

I always thought there was something beautiful about a fitness brand centering its marketing around the change of seasons. The Equinox logo plays on the balance of day and night aesthetically. But I’ve always preferred to think of the brand as a promise that all things change. It’s a powerful one for marketing aspirational luxury fitness because the origins of its earthly seasonal reality is so visceral.

The solstice may get all the glory what with midsummer madness and orgies and the Swedish horror movies and the whole winter solstice getting adopted by Christianity thing. But it’s the Equinox that has always spoken to me. Maybe it’s because I gravitate towards extremes that I crave the balance of the equinox over the solstice. I aspire to the rhythms promised by a day perfectly split by light and dark. The equinox says to me that it’s possible, even if it’s only twice a year, to get it all perfectly balanced. And then we get back to change. We move back towards extremes as we tilt towards the solstice.

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Emotional Work Preparedness

Day 422 and Very Good Care

I’ve been bouncing around a little in the zeitgeist and media frenzy of last few days. I’ve not done a great job of processing the Russian war in Ukraine. I’ve got ambient stresses related to the generally chaotic moment so the acceleration of conflict felt both inevitable and unnerving. And yet we might outrun the apocalypse yet. Doomer optimism has never seemed so apt a term.

I am going to take care of myself during this tumult. This year of self love and affirmation means thriving in the worse situations. Because I take responsibility for myself. I am a victim to no person or circumstance. I control my response to any situation. That is the freedom to live.

But that thriving only occurs when I prioritize myself first. If I can’t parent my inner child through her fears and reactions, than how can anyone else trust that I will come through for them? Mutual trust comes from understanding the motivations in our relationships and what we get from each other. And that starts with being an adult to ourselves.

This idea of emotional responsibility is a simple concept that is surprisingly hard for people. I work on it every week in therapy. Feeling our emotions (often driven by our childhood experiences) gives the capacity to interact with others as an adult. It’s a step beyond professionalism. I’ve found it’s what separates those who are good at the work they do versus being truly great at their profession. The great are present in who they are.

So don’t be afraid to become truly ok. Thrive. Love yourself and your life even when it feels pointless. Even when the world feels crazy. Especially then. You have no need to attack yourself. Remove the self as an attack vector. We do not harm ourselves. The world is hard enough as it is that it needs no help from us. Now is the time to take care good care of yourself.

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Emotional Work Preparedness

Day 420 and Oxytocin

Stress is sneaking up on us everywhere. Just opening up a newspaper or scrolling Twitter is enough to spike your cortisol levels. I’m not quite ready to make jokes about World War III but I can see why people are.

I knew when I started chaotic.capital that folks might think I was a doomer and even a bit crazy. But I was confident that we’d be moving in a more chaotic world. I didn’t mean it in a bad way. Merely that in a world with increasing complexity we must all become more adaptable.

But today I didn’t feel like I was at my most adaptable. I felt as if my parasympathetic response was all out of whack. The inputs were overwhelming my nervous system. So I did what seemed most rational and also most emotionally appealing. I snuggled up to my husband and asked for a hug. I needed the oxytocin that is released from touch to counterbalance the cortisol that was flushing my system. If this is the new normal I need to up my oxytocin doses.

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Startups

Day 406 and Like I’m 5

I welcome pitches through my social media channels. I’ve even gone so far as to put together an FAQ for how to pitch me. I hope I do a good job of welcoming founders at even the earliest stages into conversation. But just because I am happy to shoot the shit with you, doesn’t mean I’m capable of organizing your thoughts for you.

Want me to write a check? When you are getting started with me keep it simple. Ground me in the basics so you can take me into the details. Go from whole to parts.

Now I’m not asking you to dumb it down. I’m asking you to do the work to really clarify what you want to make. Maybe it doesn’t sound as impressive in a few sentences, but trust me you must anchor everything in the basics. If you cannot articulate the core product you need to build how in a few sentences, how do you think you will convince me to support your biggest craziest vision?

Now what I am asking you to do is actually quite hard. If you aren’t sure what I mean when I ask for a basic product description spend some time on the excellent Reddit sub “Explain Like I’m 5.” The premise is simple. If you have a complex technical topic that requires expertise you need a way to get it across to a layperson.

You will hire a lot of lay people in your career as a founder. I am just the first one. Educating me on what you are doing is hopefully the start of thousands of explanations you will give on what your company does. Because we both want you to build a big company right?

So while you are welcome to send me your standard 15 page deck, or in depth Notion documentation, or your favorite Substack blog posts, you know I have to explain it to the co-investors, new hires and LPs in a sentence right?

What I don’t want is to dig through dozens of documents and feel even less sure by the end of my diligence of what you are building than when I started. I want to hear a synopsis that excites me to dig in and then go on a journey with you where I learn just how much you’ve thought about it. But if you can’t keep it simple you probably aren’t ready to be fundraising.

Categories
Internet Culture

Day 400 and Consumption

I’m excited to be hitting my first year two posting milestone today. Four hundred straight days of writing is the kind of habit that has got clear staying power. It’s funny that today I celebrate the power of creation when my topic for the day is consumption.

Pandemic living cut down a lot of consumption for me. Travel, dining out, cosmetics and fashion used to be huge parts of my life. Style played a prominent part in my career. I loved being a part of a creative profession. People made things. We worked on items that existed in the physical world meant to be appreciated in the here and now. But we also made things to be consumed. We created in service of consumption.

I love the intersection of art and commerce. It’s really where humanity tells on itself. Just raw unadulterated power dynamics on display. But also sometimes consumption means wanting to be seen and liked by someone else for sharing in-group affinities. I get it. I pride myself on knowing a bunch of ephemera so I can wow just about anyone at a cocktail party. Being included is a powerful safety drive and I think it’s nice to cultivate it for each other.

So I guess I’ve missed I missed some of that. Being at home I’ve done so little to engage with the current moment’s aesthetics except as they manifest inside internet culture. I’m up on all the zeitgeist in the chattering classes but I’m not hip to what’s being bought.

Maybe this is what happens when you haven’t been on Instagram since Trump got elected. I’ve got no idea where to shop anymore. My instincts remain but the specifics of the moment were a blank. So you want to know what I bought? Hand to fucking God I bought some of Kim Kardashian’s loungewear. Because why not go right into the Kierkegaardian soul sickness. If I’m starting my fresh might as well go right to the common denominator.

Categories
Preparedness

Day 399 and Life Finds A Way

Postlapsarian literature is arguably the first type of story in the human mind. A fall takes place. What comes after? Paradise Lost is an entire genre of folklore. I’ve been watching the new Station Eleven television show having made that mistake of reading the book early in the pandemic. I say mistake because it’s an emotional book.

Maybe it’s America’s obsession with second acts that gives me optimism. We will have a fall. A shuffling towards Bethlehem style shambles perhaps. But we will rise. Our national bird has never been the bald eagle. It’s been the phoenix.

Maybe this is why we tolerate horrible work conditions and miserable days fighting our fellow man for a scrap of security. Because as the saying goes, each of us is only a temporarily embarrassed billionaire. Don’t worry we will be back. The show must go on.

And so we concoct elaborate fantasies about how this too will pass. One day our chronic poor health will get better. Just you wait. We believe in science here you see. Science means an Epcot better tomorrow just hang in there.

Our Hollywood fantasies are riddled with “life finds a way” punchlines because well the struggle for survival in an inhospitable world is a universal struggle for our species. There is no lost cause.

But also there is no enjoying the moment or savoring the little things in life if we are always watering for our heroic moment in “the after” and holding back in the now. But don’t worry. Life finds a way. And so will you. Just remember that the end of the world is mostly a change in circumstances.