There are many networked subcultures on the internet. I myself participate in many on Twitter dedicated to working on what I’d loosely term as “the human experience.” It’s a diverse flourishing ecosystem of seekers.
I myself have many posts tagged under “emotional work” which is the overarching theme of most of how I do this work. Under it you will find family therapy therapy, nervous system regulation work, somatic practices, and even a few hints the spiritual and metaphysical.
There are many footpaths to follow if you are part of the “Pathless Path” contingent looking to find your own way through the forest. There are many more walking through this forest in 2024. The many dislocations of the Great Weirding and The Pandemic break many narratives.
The many nodes of seekers has led to a network strengthening that has given me the strength to continue on this path.
I began this reflection with Jonny Miller for a reason. Last night he retweeted a public question and answer session and “rapid fire coaching” with Joe Hudson for the next morning.
Jonny had spoken so highly of the Joe’s coaching. I wanted to go. But I was also afraid. Joe said in his tweet “it gets intense” and I wasn’t sure if I was brave enough for it. And yet I showed up.
I thought I’d watch, listen and learn. And then suddenly I found myself in the presence of excellence participating myself with vulnerability. Such is the magic of a true master. My fear was no more. In just ten minutes. Such is the depth of his gift. It’s a gift to experience excellence in others.
The value of an involved family versus the value of an independent life are not being well reconciled for middle aged millennials and their aging Boomers parents. And it seems to be the source of much hurt.
The sadness of misaligned values
Fantasies of a good family life that the elder generations did not prioritize when parenting their own children are now cropping up everywhere in culture.
“Do what we want you to do not what we wanted to do”
I understand how much it hurts to have family tell you they value something when they have acted completely contrary to that.
The biggest mismatch I’ve seen with my friends and their parents has been the hope that their parents would take grandparenting more seriously and being devastated when they simply don’t have any interest.
Now guilt & shame over past failures can be overwhelming as someone approaches the end of their time on this earth. Maybe the freedom at the end of life is more important than time with the next generation. Maybe those grandparents don’t want to be close to their grandchildren. Maybe they didn’t want closeness with their children in the first place. Or maybe some people only want relationships on their terms. I don’t know everyone’s personal values.
If a family didn’t live their values with their children when growing up then it’s hard to expect alignment on preferences that were never shown but only told.
I know it hurts to look at these issues in the face. Maybe it shouldn’t surprise millennials that not everyone in our parent’s generation wanted families and children. Maybe it shouldn’t surprise the elderly generation their values have to come with actions.
But coming to terms with failures in our own past is inevitable. And it’s wise to see them, own them and move on. I’ve now seen the values misalignments in every type of family. Married for 40 years, thrice divorced, mixed modern families, upper class, lower class, working class. All families have self deception on what they actually value versus what they say they value.
Families can claim something is important but don’t act like it. Acting like something is important makes all the difference. If you feel misalignment in your own relationships remember both parties have to change and find the relationship that they actually want.
For such a libertarian state, the alcohol laws seems a bit baffling. But one of the best burgers in town can be found at the bar inside the liquor store. It feel like any sports bar that leans towards country and western tunes. America is an amazing place.
Waiting on our burgers at the bar
And because we are also yuppies we went to get groceries at the local food cooperative of which we are members. My inner hippie loves getting her Dr Bronner from the bulk bins. We went a little overboard picking out some essential oils (Alex loves bergamot and I needed more lavender) and then ground of our not butters.
All the lentils and beans you could want
Having thoroughly covered the country and hippie portions of our day I came home to do some spring cleaning.
Moving from winter to warmer clothing isn’t my favorite seasonal shift. I prefer cozy cashmere and long sleeve black tee-shirts. But I have conferences and professional obligations coming up with travel so I tried out a new paid mobile application for closest organization and packing called Style Book.
I haven’t quire got the hang of it but the basic idea is to take photos of your wardrobe, tag it, organize it into outfits and packing lists and get more visibility into your wardrobe. I’ll have a to play with or more to get it polished but it seems like it has potential.
Style books Home Screen A spring lookA conference outfit
Much of my work is very abstracted from the real world as I am a network state Silicon Disapora type. But I grew up with much more concrete labor in the real world. And I see how people can fear picking up skills if they haven’t had so much as a shop class.
We keep some of those skills fresh living on our own land in Montana. It’s never as much as I hope but everything from hydroponics lettuce to pickling your own vegetables open source home automation and Bitcoin mining off our solar grid is on the table when you want a project.
It’s good to tinker. Even skilled labor like electrician work and plumbing can become a hobby with help from friends and the wealth of instruction on YouTube and Reddit. And you will have opportunities to pass it along to others which builds up your community and skills.
It has become harder and harder find people who are hands on with tradecraft. A friend is building a new outbuilding on his property and an electrician quoted him $7,000 to run 30’ to a new 60a subpanel and a few circuits.
Fortunately, Montana is a state that allows homeowners to pull their own permits and do their own electrical work. So for an $80 permit fee and with some help from Alex, he can do the entire job himself for the cost of materials, about $1,500.
And isn’t that a wonderful pro-social way to learn, build and make things with others? Be the labor you want to see in the world.
I’d describe her experience as literal shape rotation with what is a “memory palace” visualization of the world.
I can’t imagine not having inner monologue. I have a bicameral mind and can picture imagery and movement in my head and discuss it with myself.
Her description of her thought process is akin to having filing system and seeing her thoughts in that system rendered in a flexible database. It’s like she’s a computer.
Other reactions to this video have churned through my mind. Is self awareness maladaptive? Would a future intelligence find this bicameral mind inefficient and go back to unicameral. What other forms exist? Can we toggle it up and down? Is it a gradient in humans of types of cognition and the inner voice is just a processing error?
Can’t find it in the thread atm but thanks to the person who made this. “The end point of this thinking is self awareness is maladaptive”
Oh my god, I get it now. The bicameral mind is still in the process of breaking down. Inner monologues are holdovers, doomed to be outcompeted by more efficient mind
Is this “breakdown” a the shift away from perceiving the voice as external to the self? Is it the erasure of the voice wholesale? What will artificial intelligences make of these differences in human minds? Is this special? A tiger isn’t bicameral.
I think this is relevant to our moment in artificial intelligence development. A Finnish mathematician wrote one of the best science fiction novels I read in the last decade on quantum minds and memory palaces. There is a side plots with embodied intelligences on Mar.
The Quantum Thief is a science fiction novel by Finnish writer Hannu Rajaniemi and the first novel in a trilogy featuring the character of Jean le Flambeur; the sequels are The Fractal Prince and The Causal Ange
Wikipedia
I’ve got a hazy theory about Nordic decentralized engineering culture and mental organization. It’s not a coincidence that fifteen years ago a Silicon Valley Finnish computer scientist wrote some of the best science fiction about a theory of mind that was interior and perfectly organized right?
I may need to go read Julian Jaynes.
An un-cameral mind, as proposed by Julian Jaynes in his theory of bicameral mentality, refers to a state where cognitive functions are divided between two parts without consciousness or meta-reflection. In this non-conscious mental state, individuals lack the ability to reason, articulate mental contents, or have executive ego functions like deliberate mind-wandering. The breakdown of this division led to the emergence of consciousness in humans, characterized by the capacity for introspection and autobiographical memory[1][3].
Jaynes suggests that ancient people in the bicameral state experienced auditory hallucinations as commands from gods, guiding their actions without conscious evaluation. This theory has influenced discussions on consciousness, language, and culture, although it has faced criticisms and debates. Despite differing opinions, Jaynes’s work remains a thought-provoking exploration of the origins of consciousness and continues to inspire research in psychology and consciousness studies[3][5].
Sources [1] Bicameral mentality – Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameral_mentality [2] The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind http://www.compilerpress.ca/Competitiveness/Anno/Anno%20Jaynes%20Bicameral%20Mind1.htm [3] The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in_the_Breakdown_of_the_Bicameral_Mind [4] Retrospective: Julian Jaynes and The Origin of Consciousness in … – jstor https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/amerjpsyc.125.2.0237 [5] The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind https://www.amazon.com/Origin-Consciousness-Breakdown-Bicameral-Mind/dp/0618057072
I saw someone else say meditation is literally teaching people how to run a monocameral emulator. I’ve done these types of exercises as a child. It sounds a bit Bene Geserit but mental exercises around focus was part of the German theosophical tradition that gave us Rudolf Steiner.
I wish I’d be a bit more organized on this but I’ve been fully back on work so this will have to do for today.
I am in a lot of pain today so I’m not thinking as clearly as I’d like. But I have learned to be sanguine about misery over the years.
When you have chronic illnesses you can either become a victim to them or accept them as part of the tapestry of human experiences.
I have had a framing that I’ll butcher today as I can’t recall any past artful coinages. It goes something like one can be existentially happy even if one’s circumstances are miserable. The opposite applies as well. People can have happy daily circumstances and be existentially miserable.
I feel like that no matter how much I may bitch and moan about my life that I am ultimately happy about my lot in life. I’ve got nothing to complain about and when I do complain it’s quite likely that kind of misery actually makes me happy.
I deliberately insulate from algorithmic visual content. It makes you miserable for one. But more importantly, it deadens your aesthetic palette from overexposure.
If you want to develop and sustain personal taste and style, do yourself a favor and do it deliberately without the subtle nudging enforcement of refinement culture.
I do however avidly follow the propagation of different fashions as a personal interest. I like to see where a runaway trend goes as virality and social contagion set in. The New York Post’s entire culture section is dedicated to moral panics but it occasionally hits on real sources of social anxiety.
I still have anxiety about weight from living through the TMZ era of body shaming. So I’m sympathetic to what it must feel like to younger women facing the relentless scrutiny of living online. They rightly perceive appearances to be a part of how value is calculated in wider society and are afraid of losing it.
I’m convinced some portion of the extremely online Gen Z are living entirely out of the slipstream of historical culture. They consume artifacts from other people’s youth culture but live in a what amounts to a “long now” in which the future seems unstable. We rebooted 2003 as a micro trend but the apocalypse is almost here.
The nostalgia machine gives Gen Z an ever present history but very little present to hold onto for grounding in physical reality. Their ahistorical vibes approach seems to overweight the need for youth.
Sean Monahan of K-Hole normcore fame posted a mapping of the aesthetics of the decade that I thought spoke well to the strange relationship digital aesthetics have to time. I’m posting a diagram here from his post here.
If Gen Z is aging like milk it’s probably not because they are actually aging quickly. Though I’m sure the stress isn’t doing them any favors. I think dit’s what Ryan Broderick of Garbage Day points out here. The glamified hyper-media full face contour is an ageless one. It’s inspired by the past and stuck in the past. It’s got nothing to do with their actual age.
We finally got some significant snowfall in Montana last night. We’ve had a dry and relatively warm winter, so having half a foot of light powder was good news. It seemed to put everyone I met today in spirits.
I had cause to go into town and it was all smiles everywhere we went. A quick doctor visit was all enthusiastic exchanges about how beautiful it was outside.
The universe must have picked up on my general optimism as while we were in town some friends texted let us know they were coming through on their way to the airport. The timing worked perfectly as we went over to the other side of the valley to meet up before their next bit of travel and intersected for some socializing. Football games, bingo nights and bar food certainly sounds like a nice night in America.
As much pessimism infects our daily narratives, sometimes all it takes is a snow day and being together to remind you that we’ve got of reasons for optimism.
After reading about Joel Mokyr’s Culture of Growth thesis on the importance of a positive mindset for technological progress I’m reminded again that we have to bring that mindset to daily life.
I am feeling relaxed. This feeling has eluded me for nearly a week as the race to Christmas holidays left me mostly feeling sick and in pain.
I was getting tension headaches from the long hours and stress of the last two months of work. In an attempt to improve my muscular skeletal compensatory issues, I triggered a “this gets worse before it gets better” healing crisis. While my C1 and C2 upper spine feels much better, every other connected system was also contorted to accommodate the problem. It’s a bit of an adjustment.
But I slept a solid ten hours last night and I managed to get several naps in the past few days. By the time I made it to my first working session today after Christmas, I was ready to enjoy my work again. There is no finer pleasure to be found in startup life than a team you enjoy working with.
I am lucky that I do what I love. It doesn’t feel much like work to help founders you admire take action. The limber approach of answering to your best judgement is a joy. A startup dynamic that’s productive can feel as if you are intaking information and updating your prior working models at a rapid clip. And if you are lucky see results from your actions. It’s invigorating
I hope I feel a bit better and more rested as the week rolls on as I’d like to do a 2023 roundup but my priorities remain the work and my health so what gets done will be ordered as such. I hope everyone has work that engages them thusly.
I enjoyed a very American style Christmas Eve today. My husband and I have been so busy with professional obligations that we had not done anything to prepare for this Christmas week.
After we a did a run to the proper grocery for other necessities like satsuma tangerines (the rare Christmas citrus has a short season in December) we headed home laden with marvelous delicacies and at least ten meals for the week ahead. I was then very grateful to get an afternoon nap. So rare to be relaxed enough for REM sleep in the middle of the day.
We have done a feast of the seven fishes as our Christmas Eve meal over the years but it’s a challenge to eat that much when it’s not a crowd. So this year we’ve narrowed it down to three fishes. Technically they are crustaceans.
My hope is tomorrow will be a peaceful one of rest, prayer, relaxation and probably some movies. It will be Die Hard tonight as is tradition and hopefully A Christmas Story tomorrow.
