Tag: Happiness

Categories
Biohacking Politics

Day 952 and Do It Live

I found myself with a bit of anxiety this morning. I was afraid that I hadn’t done enough to promote some of my commitments this month.

This morning I co-hosted a session on nervous system work for founders and venture capitalists with Jonny Miller. Aside from a few Zoom hiccups, I think it well. But with my anxiety all I could think of is how I should have done more. I could have invited more more people, emailed more reminders, promoted it more on Twitter. Just more.

I don’t think my anxiety is about a Zoom seminar. It seems to be directed towards a bigger event next week. I am co-hosting a BBQ at my home for the Frontier Institute in Montana.

I am finding myself fearful that I’ve not not done enough to promote it. I’m afraid I’ll look like a fool and fail at my goal of raising awareness (and ultimately money) for our policy goals. It’s probably irrational but it’s sitting heavily on my emotions at the moment.

I care a great deal about the event being a success. And I have done quite a bit to promote it and invite the right mix of folks who will be interested.

I think even admitting to the anxiety helps me recognize that it’s irrational. I do think the BBQ will be a good time. We will have food, drinks, good company and if you’d like to come it’s on August 16th. Worth a drive into Gallatin I promise.

I wish I didn’t get anxiety about if I’m working hard enough to prepare for an event. The balance between preparing and promoting an event and having it go smoothly when it comes to performing live isn’t an easy one for me. I used to obsessively prepare for everything.

Which would then backfire on me as I’d use all my energy on the lead up and find myself exhausted and frazzled when it came time to be present in the moment for a big day.

So I’m trying to not get too much in my head about if I’ve done enough. What will be will be and I can trust myself to be present in the moment to succeed.

So if you are interested in joining the next Nervous System Mastery Bootcamp with Jonny Miller my code is JULIE and it will get you $250 off. I myself am an alumni of the course and plan to retake it again in the fall. So you’d be taking it with me.

And if you’d like to meet me in person August 16th and you happen to be in Montana I’d love to host you at my home. The topic of conversation will be the Montana Miracle and now we can continue to make the state a place for all to thrive.

Please join Alex Miller, Julie Fredrickson, and Padden Murphy as they host a meet and greet with Frontier Institute’s CEO, Kendall Cotton. We will discuss the recently passed YIMBY policies in Montana’s 2023 Legislative Session and the Frontier Institute’s future plans to ensure Montana is a place that all can thrive.

Come learn about the Frontier Institute’s impactful initiatives, enjoy some delicious food, and engage with a group of fellow Montanans dedicated to knocking down bureaucratic barriers and ensuring opportunity for all. 

Please RSVP to secure your place at this exclusive gathering. The address will be provided upon RSVP.

Categories
Biohacking

Day 951 and Well Regulated

The more chaotic your circumstances, the more necessary you will find it to regulate your nervous system.

If you are nodding your head in agreement, you might appreciate more tools to cultivate calm. If so join myself and Jonny Miller tomorrow at 10am PST/1PM EST for a free session on how to integrate nervous system work into your startup.

If it’s not immediately obvious why you should care about your nervous system, let me give a brief primer. Stress is hard on your body. Hormones like cortisol can make you sick.

But did you know that we have a choice in how we react to stress? Between stimulus and response, there is freedom.

Have you ever felt overwhelmed by your circumstances? Maybe you’ve had the urge to simply shut down when life seemed like too much? Perhaps you’ve felt the desire to blow your top and scream instead?

These are classic stress responses. These are all states of a nervous system under pressure. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Your goal can be to move freely, flexibly and easily between different states of arousal and response as the stressors in your life come and go.

Founders of startups don’t always have a choice in how much stress is in our life. But we do have a choice in how we respond with our emotions and our physical body. We can maintain a well regulated nervous system even in a chaotic environment. If you want some simple tools that you can apply join myself at chaotic.capital and Jonny Miller tomorrow.

Categories
Emotional Work Uncategorized

Day 942 and Goodbyes

My childhood was full of goodbyes. I moved every two years for most of my young life. I was not a military brat or a diplomat’s child, just a millennial surviving the instability of her Boomer parents. It is a common experience I’ve learned.

My parents did their very best to walk different paths than their own parents. Like any child, I watched them closely and adjusted my own feelings accordingly.

Now as an adult I see how I work to walk on different paths than my own parents. Families are always adjusting to the wisdom of our past as we chart our future.

And so I think about how comfortable I am with saying goodbyes and I weigh it against the generations that came before. And I think that all we can do is try to balance the equation of our own life.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 936 and Take The Beating

I got my ass kicked yesterday. I made a decision that I knew would be disliked. I knew how unpopular the decision would make and that I would have to suffer the consequences. I did not bend on my decision despite knowing how much I would suffer for it. It was right for me. But damn it always sucks to take a beating.

I have taken my college cafeteria’s name as a law of the universe. TANSTAAFL. There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. I know it’s a bit unfashionable to be a Hayek libertarian these days but I do think we have to accommodate some basic physics in life. Actions have reactions.

I had to take my beating. I made people hurt. And it’s entirely possible that we have different expectations and realities. As soon as I give my firm position on my reality and energy I can expect a response.

I think it’s genuinely healthy to feel like you have the capacity to endure criticism. Sometimes you can’t make people happy. Sometimes you’ve done something wrong. Sometimes it’s just that you couldn’t find an accommodation between what you gave the situation and what it gave you.

Life has a budget. There is a balance to the energy of the world. I suppose sometimes you just have to take your licks.

Categories
Homesteading

Day 913 and Offline

The social internet is having a bit of a chaotic moment. I haven’t been able to send Tweets consistently for about a day. And I didn’t miss it that much. It felt a little weird at first as I could load tweets, like them and chat in DMs but it was clear none of my replies were sending.

It’s a holiday weekend so for Twitter’s sake I’m sad to report I had other things to keep me occupied. That’s probably bad news for the platform.

We did a big kitchen clean out. Organized the meals for the upcoming week. Like any weekend lots of chores from laundry to deep conditioning was on the to do list.

The real prize of being offline is being outdoors. The weather was absolutely gorgeous this weekend, practically begging us to spend time on the porch or in the Adirondack chairs we put out by our small pond. The air was so clear today you could see from one end of Gallatin to another.

Two Adirondack chairs on fresh cut grass with a blue sky behind it. Is this what they mean when they say touch grass?

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 908 and Joyful Grief

I’ve had enough emotional and mental work to know that grief is a complex and personal process. I knew as the death of a close family loved one came on the summer solstice that I needed to grieve.

I revisited the frameworks. There are the three Cs (chose, connect, communicate) for a simple framework to prioritize your needs. There are the 4 Rs Recognize Reality, Remember, Reaffirm, and Release for memorials and funerals.

And of course, the most famous remains the 5 stages of grief from Kübler-Ross’s “On Death and Dying,” the 1969 book in which she proposed the patient centered stages of denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

I was prepared to go through all of it. And I did. The shock was immediate as soon as I learned she had passed. I was angry she was gone. I asked why someone else couldn’t have been taken instead of her. I was sad to carry on with out her. Acceptance seemed distant.

But as I started to communicate my own feelings I recognized an emotion I wasn’t prepared to encounter so soon. I felt immense joy. Losing her overwhelming made me feel grateful for the joy she’d given me in my own life.

What incredible luck I had to be a part of her life and receive so many emotional gifts as a result. The freedom she encouraged in me gave me the capacity for boundaries and needs and wants I’d never accepted fully.

And then, even though I was prepared for the possibility, she was gone and I realized she had been right. I could accept things that I’d distrusted for so many painful decades.

And here I am. And here I remain. And what she has given me is permission to thrive. Even in the immediate wake of her loss I felt lightness and ease permeate my work. I wrote my investor updates. I gave an interview to Axios Pro Rata. That interview lead to a substantial feature on my preseed venture fund chaotic.capital. I worked on my immigration policy advocacy.

I felt the joy of living a life I had chosen because someone had loved me enough to share that I could chose to be free. And that fills me with joy.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 903 and Life Goes On

I just didn’t want to write today. I am all over the place with pain and grief even as the world keeps on spinning. I lost someone very important to my family yesterday. A matriarch if you will.

My biometrics are a mess. You can see the stress spiking as I got on calls to both do business and then also discuss the business of life afterwards. Because life does indeed go on. My Whoop said I had 108% more stress today than a typical Thursday if you want to know what grief does to your stress levels.

My Whoop detected grief

I have written so much today on so many other mediums. I’ve texted and direct messages and tweeted and probably wrote several novellas in various group chats. But I just couldn’t make myself write my essay here. So like I would on any other day, I’ll give my myself permission to carry on. I’ll tag this, Tweet it and go to bed and hope I can do more tomorrow.

Categories
Community Emotional Work

Day 899 & Simple

I have led a complicated life. I didn’t really know as a child that being raised by syncretic vaguely nomadic hippies looking for utopias wasn’t really all that relatable. Aside from the general revivalism ethos of America, most folks tend to ride middle of the herd.

There I was not realizing I had a nose for powerful evangelism. I missed that boarding schools and colleges were meant to put you in a certain place in society. Then I didn’t know that spending time inside cultural institutions like fashion was an aspiration. I didn’t really clock that startups, or venture capital, or fucking around online would be a nexus of power either. I just thought all those places looked cool so I showed up.

Maybe I was simple. Maybe I just flowed like water towards the chaos before it became the big show for everyone. I am someone who understands the Thursday Styles problem of timing and I like to get there a little bit ahead of time. Get good seats and sell picks and shovels. From there it’s just a matter of having the stomach for the ride.

But knowing where the boundaries on consensus are is what keeps you from being swept up in the madness, as a movement meant for small mysteries and initiates suddenly sees the harsh glare of vox populi.

And so I am called to remember it is a gift to be simple. It’s a Shaker tune if you recall. Speaking of religious revivalism. The internet’s second brain tells me they were a millenarian restorationistChristian sect with a dualist view of God and equality between the sexes. Quakers and Shakers clearly impressed American’s hippies with this catchy tune. I know I learned it by heart as a child’s.

Tis the gift to be simple, ’tis the gift to be free,
‘Tis the gift to come down where I ought to be;
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
‘Twill be in the valley of love and delight.
When true simplicity is gained,
To bow and to bend we shan’t be ashamed;
to turn, turn, will be my delight.
Till by turning, turning we come round right.

Joseph Bracket

Maybe you also live a complicated life. Or maybe you are working to simplify your life. Whatever you do remember you can have more agency than you think. I’m sending you that message from the valley of love and delight that is Gallatin Valley.

Categories
Culture

Day 895 and Stop Being An NPC

I’ve got a theory that main character energy only bothers you if you are not the main character of your own life.

Which you might not be. Most of us are running around on programming we didn’t write, blithely unaware that we have accepted being a non-playable character in our own lives. We are acting like NPCs even though we aren’t. Fuck.

You don’t have to be an NPC. Life is actually shared consensus reality even if it has rules just like a game. The first step in making sure you aren’t an NPC is treating other humans like they are real people. Yes, cue the record scratch.

This is actually hard. It requires empathy. But it is very simple. It is just the golden rule. When you treat other humans as real players of the game of life, you will find quickly that they treat you as one too.

You need to be emotionally present with another person. It requires a couple minutes of empathy at most. I’d wager it’s like masturbation for men, you could pull it off in a minute flat if you had to.

But so few of us are bothering to show up for other people in any meaningful way anymore.

One of my favorite Twitter vibecamp folks, Critter, made the observation that it’s so rare to meet someone with agency on dating apps that it can cause some whiplash when you engage with “a live one” if you will excuse the pun.

I find this sad because it’s true. It’s rare to encounter people who are present in their own lives. People go through the motions of their lives because it’s the normal way to live. It just doesn’t have to be your reality if you don’t want it to be.

And it’s not an easy change to make for most of us. It’s actually confusing for internet natives to be reminded that there are people on the other end of the algorithm because so many of us simply aren’t acting like full humans anymore.

We are just running social programming and hoping it gets us the rewards we were promised. Gamification and financialization and other forms of nudging spreadsheet brain send us hustling for dopamine hits.

So how do you tell if someone isn’t just playing to their cultural programming script? Or framed another way, how do you stop acting like an NPC in your own life? And how do you find out if someone else is also looking to engage with you as a human with agency?

The biggest clue someone has agency is that they discuss their feelings and emotional reactions to you the person in front of them

They don’t cloak it in ideas & theory or art without connecting it to how it makes them feel in relation to you & your relationship with them

Julie Fredrickson on Empathy & Agency

I can’t believe I’m quoting myself but I summed it up reasonably well on Twitter in response to a mutual asking myself and Critter how you know if someone isn’t an NPC.

You show up in that moment with them and do not run any social scripts on them. You treat them like you’d like them to treat you.

You don’t try to control them with mirroring or other social techniques. If you are serious about being intimately in a moment with another person won’t use any technique. You will just be. It actually is vibes.

You will show up and ask them how they feel and will react honestly to their feelings. And yes sometimes those emotions may be unpalatable (anger, sadness, jealousy) but it’s the first crucial step in building trust with another person. And that’s how you stop being an NPC. Good luck!

Categories
Culture Emotional Work

Day 893 and Somebody to Love

Today is my husband’s birthday. We aren’t doing anything specific to celebrate the occasion as that is his preference. But I want to mark the day personally by sharing my love for his dislike of making a “thing” out of traditional celebrations. I feel it is one of his finest qualities.

I respect that Alex doesn’t like to make a big deal about his birthday. He doesn’t really care for making a big thing out anyone else’s birthday for that matter either.

He will celebrate an occasion if someone else wants to do so but I’ve only ever seen him enjoy celebrating daily life. He’s loyal to the people but disinclined to mere symbolism.

Alex’s approach to marking an occasion has always shown me constancy and loyalty. He shows up for each day. Perhaps this approach isn’t a conscious effort. He shows up for the moment when asked. Over and over again. Which is quite a bit harder than buying a good gift even if it looks less glamorous.

My birthday celebration with Alex involved a 2 hour delayed cold pizza at 1 in the morning while staying in shitty hotel in London. That’s more of my speed than parties, gifts, or elaborate gatherings and more of his speed as well.

Maybe it’s that Alex doesn’t wish ask us to perform rituals that have no meaning to him. I perceive this inclination as gracious and masculine and steady.

This isn’t to say that there isn’t a shadow version of this preference. My suspicion is that birthdays require too much social pressure for it to be enjoyable. It’s burdensome for the return on emotional investment and a waste when one can celebrate at any moment one chooses.

In the spirit I’d like to wish Alex a happy birthday and a lyric from Queen. May you all find somebody to love.

Ooh, each morning I get up I die a little
Can barely stand on my feet
(Take a look at yourself)
Take a look in the mirror and cry (and cry)
Lord, what you’re doing to me? (Yeah, yeah)
I have spent all my years in believing you
But I just can’t get no relief, Lord
Somebody (somebody), ooh, somebody (somebody)
Can anybody find me somebody to love?

Queen’s Somebody to Love