Tag: Life

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Culture

Day 975 and Escapism

I’ve never really understood why Labor Day weekend was meant to mark the end of summer.

The fall solstice is still three weeks away but kids have back in school for an awkward amount of time that’s too short to appreciate time off. And to not too put too fine a point on it, America doesn’t give a fuck about celebrating labor.

It’s a stupid time for a long weekend. Maybe I’m just always rushing to be out of summer as I find it to be a miserable season. And yet Labor Day is still this iconic last hurrah of a summer with BBQs, time at the beach and long weekend travel as the dominant imagery in America.

Jimmy Buffet passed away today. The Margaritaville singing Boomer beach bum soft rocker making his final exit during Labor Day weekend is an aesthetic I hope brought him and his loved ones some joy. If my legacy was summer, I’d like to go out at the most “end of summer” possible moment.

It’s always sad to lose a cultural touchstone but maybe putting a final note on escapism should tell us all something. Perhaps it’s time to let go of the season of escapism. And I don’t just mean for this year. Maybe it’s time to shoulder the burdens of harvesting what we’ve sown.

Categories
Culture Emotional Work Politics

Day 972 and Falling Faster

I’m starting to feel like summer is losing its grip on me. I cannot even begin to express my relief that September is almost here. I loathe summer and this one has been particularly hot and horrifying.

Being in Montana for the summer has given me the nicest possible version of summer still possible on a warming planet. You wouldn’t imagine being a mile higher than sea level and in the Rocky Mountains would make for hot summers. But you’d be surprised. Thankfully it’s not a persistent condition like Houston.

I love being home. But I love winters in Montana about hundreds times more than summers. Ironic then that I usually find myself traveling for work during the times I most prefer to be at home. I struggle to remember the allure that travel once held before the Great Weirdening collided with the Pandemic Years. I remember yearning for Hong Kong and Dubai. Now I’m avidly negotiating Airbnb so I can stay put in a relatively centralized European city.

Can you imagine thinking that going abroad to do business was a sane use of time before say 2016? 2019 and onwards has given us closed borders to the lawful and state capacity collapse and immigration and visa panics. Hard to imagine that doesn’t feel like some kind of change to American idealism.

I truly pray if my writings are ever preserved for any kind of historical usage in some artificial intelligence that you will remember there was a time when New York and San Francisco were the gravity wells of an era. It’s been a long fifteen years since the Great Recession.

Whatever that time was it’s not the current moment. Maybe it comes back. I was a post 9/11 New Yorker who came from the country to do patriotic things like build businesses. Let’s not get into the war that happened in the process.

I’m glad I’ve gone home to the west. But I know you’ve got to journey from home to appreciate it too. I’ll keep my corner in the edge of the empire as renewal comes from the edges. Fall may turn into winter but you know in all seasons things turn.

Categories
Homesteading

Day 969 and Hot Chicks

I know it’s a little bit odd to be getting chickens in August, but as of today our homestead is now home to eight egg laying hens.

Our new hens (in their well fortified chicken run) settling in at our hone.

Some of our friends are moving and needed a local home for their laying hens. Another one of our friends was giving up their old chicken coop so we figured it was a sign from the universe that it was time for us to become chicken people.

Unboxing chickens

My husband has spent the last two weekends repainting the coop, installing predator fencing, and otherwise preparing for the arrival of the chickens. Having not done the work of raising them up ourselves the pressure is on to make sure they are well protected.

A little red henhouse

You can’t just take on a friend’s chickens without feeling just a bit more responsibility than you otherwise would had you raised them up from chicks ourselves. We can’t let a literal fox into the henhouse.

This is alas real possibility as a red fox roams our pastures. We’ve got a very tasty infestation of prairie dogs that are suitably stupid enough for an even moderately clever fox. Hopefully the 18 inch predator apron is suitably troublesome to keep our all but the most enterprising. We’d rather the prairie dogs remain the easy snack and our hens too much effort.

The funniest bit of all of this is that I am slightly intolerant to eggs. I can manage eggs in a baked good I find omelettes, quiches and even mayonnaise to a quick path to nausea. Even the smell of eggs being scrambled makes me a bit sick to my stomach.

But I’ve got a fantasy that industrial eggs are the problem and I could come to tolerate eggs from chickens living the good life roaming around our lovely Montana land. And if not we will give them to our neighbors. If we can find one that doesn’t have their own chickens.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 966 and Permission

I’ve been running a risk analysis on something personal. I think it’s worth considering the consequences of any decision. Especially when you take on some amount of risk.

We live in a time of safety. Some of us run the numbers and assume we will be the worst case scenario. Some of us presume the best case scenario.

Reality is never so black and a white. A risk for one person is good sense for another. We all have different values.

You shouldn’t be looking for permission from life. You will never get it. But you have to decide what risk parameters make sense for you. Maybe you like to play things a little faster. Maybe you like to play it safe.

I do think it’s worth evaluating how much you value what everyone tells you and what you think might work without accounting all the risks. Maybe some things are just worth it.

Categories
Biohacking Emotional Work

Day 965 and Bounce Back

I had a really shitty day yesterday. I was attuned to the haunted corners in myself and others. I was in an astonishing amount of pain. I got into a fight with a family member over a misunderstanding.

I found myself in a state of reactivity. It’s a huge challenge to manage nervous system regulation for me when I tip from the pain scale from my typical 4-5 to the impossible ignore 7-8 range.

I have become quite used to living with pain that would be distracting for others. I monitor biometrics like my heart rate variability to keep track of how stressed my body is from the pain.

I’ve found it important to learn how to bounce back from unexpected pain. It’s important to stop stress and reactivity in its tracks. If you let stress hijack your nervous system you can do yourself a lot of damage.

I took care of myself last night. I did what I needed to get my nervous system under control and the pain manageable. And it worked.

I turned myself around today. I lifted weights, I meditated, I took my supplements, and I tackled my work load with pleasure. I can feel the fatigue sweeping back in as the day winds up. But I can rest easy knowing I set myself up to bounce back again tomorrow. Budget for the body you have and not the fantasy one which you don’t have.

Categories
Culture Emotional Work

Day 964 and Haunted America

I’ve been getting the sense that more and more of my social circle is uneasy about our cultural moment.

The personal battles being waged are numerous and deadly. The losses feel as if they are mounting even for those of that look objectively successful to the outside.

Health challenges and illnesses are debilitating and expensive. The past traumas of dysfunctional families weigh on the more functional among us. Families struggle to cope with addiction, depression, and suicide. Violence eats around the edges in too many cases.

I see more people pulling back into perceived safety as they look to escape the wounded and the traumatized. We’ve got enough troubles in our own family so why take on problems that aren’t our own?

The ghosts of bad decisions and long troubled histories linger. The weight is heavy and I see people stumbling.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 963 and Chronic Stress

I don’t think of myself as living a particularly stressful life. I’m one of the luckiest people I know. I love and am loved by my family. I own a homestead in Montana. I work with brilliant people.

My one burden in life is my health. I don’t want to undersell how much it affects my life (my ankylosis needs careful management) but I simply treat it as a fact of life. There is no reason to be upset about reality.

As social fabric tears and lives get worse under stress, it’s easy to become a victim to the things in our lives that trouble us. We can compare our gifts to others but one man’s troubles is another man’s perfect life.

I see the stress that is affect everyone I encounter. The fears range from existential to quotidian. Everything from the challenge of finding a doctor to the collapse in fertility rates can be a sign of the times.

I work to regulate my nervous system to accommodate whatever reality is in front of me. Sometimes that will include stress lot of my control. But I can work to control my response to it.

The better I get at this process of regulating myself I open up to the world. Taking on the agency you have available to you is a powerful social signal. I connect with others more readily as I show others that I can take care of myself.

Categories
Community Emotional Work Media

Day 960 and Summer Frailty

Rounding the bend into a thousand posts is teaching me some lessons in humility and frailty. I am reaching to get words word as my mind is slow.

I am not reacting to something in an average way and it’s been a struggle to keep going over the laser week or two. I’ve put one foot in front of the other but I can see that I only slept for a couple hours last night. Ironic to be considering averages when one’s own responses are so slowed.

I am just trying to get through August. If my standards are simply to plod through then any achievement like throwing a successful policy night or recording a podcast for Wealth Actually on early stage venture capital count for something.

Much of my struggle is probably just some better living through chemistry problems. A new addition to the biohacking routine went awry. I’m struggling with the heat wave and the air quality of summer in the mountain west. The long days of bright lights slowly unspooling my sanity as I wait for cooler less cruel months to come. Just breathe in and out and try to eat and sleep.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 959 and Averages

I did not react to a drug in an average way. I’m really pissed about it. I went in so confident based on what the studies has shown. We’ve got this fantasy of science and specifically medicine that has very little appreciation for what it does to outliers.

We discuss what’s most likely. What’s average. What’s typical. We explain the difference between mean, median and average. We have rigor. We have regressions. We can come to an understanding of what the models agree is conforming to our understanding. You should probably see these results.

And then we gloss over the bad data. The outliers. The grits of sand. The flecks of reality that make your model jitter. The shit that just makes things more complicated. So maybe you toss it out.

And it mostly doesn’t matter. Because your body probably is pretty average. And that’s a great thing. We tell stories about what it means to be unique even as you are no different than anyone else. Pixar movies are about our ineffable spark of humanity soul even as it reflects on how we are all really just the same. Shared human experiences are universal. Probably because our bodies are pretty similar.

I sincerely believed I was average for most of my life. I was raised with that as a value. And now as an adult I see how I’m average in so many ways. But my body will never fully reflect a shared reality. You get to know what works for you even if you know what boundaries are a little different for you.

You’ve got to know the contours in which you are exactly as your reality would indicate. That’s your ego speaking generally. But the ways in which you are not matter too. That’s where you tailor treatment.

Categories
Chronicle

Day 955 and Logging

I keep a private journal of my daily life and it’s undulating metrics addition to this daily public log that has now stretched into its nine hundredth and fifty fifth day.

I use an application called Day One that is actually now integrated with my blogging software Jetpack so I probably could easily put the archives online. In an era of closed social media walled gardens, it’s nice to trust your open source software provider. Thanks WordPress for having my back for nearly twenty years.

Having a log of your life over a long enough period of time is a blessing and a curse. I noticed an upsetting anniversary when I opened up Day One today. I lost someone last summer and had forgotten that today was the day. Sometimes memory can be kind to you. I wasn’t thrilled with the reminder of the pain. But I’m glad that it was marked.