Tag: Life

Categories
Startups

Day 868 and Chunks

Amid all the panic about how artificial intelligence is rapidly replacing human work, we are hiding a dirty little secret. Humans are awful at breaking down goals into component parts. Anyone who has tried to use any type of project management software intuits this. Articulating clear, specific and manageable tasks is very hard.

Humans are inference driven, always integrating little bits of context and nuance. If your boss gives you a goal, the best path forward on it will depend on hundreds if not thousands of factors.

What’s your budget? What is your timeline? Who is on your team? Do you dislike someone? Want to impress another person? Is the goal to be fast? Is the goal to be good? Is the goal to be as good as possible as fast as possible with as little budget as possible? Trick question, quit your job if that last one true.

Knowing what we want, knowing the best path to achieving it, and knowing how the pursuit of those goals affect your family, friends, neighbors, enemies and adversaries, creates layers of decisions in a complex matrix of possibilities. This is easy for a machine to do if we’ve given them the right inputs, outputs, and parameters. Alignment isn’t all that easy.

I personally don’t believe most of us know what we want. Beyond a Giradian imitation of what our current culture deems valuable, and thus worthy of admiration, genuine desire is hard to pin down. And that makes it hard to have goals. Goals are required to have specific tasks. Specific preferences on how a task gets achieved narrow it down even further.

If I could simplify down every detail and desire and nuance and preference set and also align them with my wider goals, ambitions, and critical paths to achieving them you know I’d have it all organized on some kanban board. And if the AI can extract that from me and turn all my goals into discrete assignments and task chunks I’d happily go full Culture and let them run my entire life.

Categories
Biohacking

Day 866 and Sensory Overload

I was up very late last night as I had an evening commitment on Eastern Standard Time while I myself am on European Central Time. I finished at 6pm in New York but it was 2am for me. It was stimulating I was unable to fall asleep till well past 3am.

I didn’t successfully sleep in as much as I would have liked, so I found myself running on a bit less sleep than I would have preferred even though my Whoop suggested I was in the green with a reasonably high HRV score. When my biometrics are all in the green, even if I’ve had perceptually poor sleep, I try to let my data guide me.

I thought I was doing ok as I went about my routines and workload. I showered, meditated, did some work and even got a power nap in.

Still I found myself getting overwhelmed by basic sensory inputs. The sound of the cars on the road felt loud. I took a walk and found myself ordering an Uber to get home as I was tired and has gone too far. Alas, in the car, I found myself covering my ears and closing my eyes as the pop music and car incense overwhelmed two senses at once.

I felt as if I was an autistic cliche. I literally had my fingers in my ears humming to myself to calm myself down. After my nervous system mastery Bootcamp course, I knew my vagus nerve had gone into overstimulation.

I had gone into sympathetic shutdown without even realizing it. I couldn’t even think to ask the driver to turn down the music. I did what I could to breath.

It was a quick reminder that my daily life in the countryside of Montana is a lot easier on the body than a bustling city like Frankfurt.

Categories
Community Culture Travel

Day 864 and Parks and Recreation

All the shops are closed in Germany on Sunday. This is a basic fact I somehow always forget despite regularly being in Europe. They are serious about their day of rest.

Without the ability to go grocery shopping or otherwise pay for goods or services, Sunday becomes a day for getting your life in order. As long as you planned ahead for it. Which I definitely didn’t. But I made a go of it anyway.

I made myself coffee and did a mobility routine. I took a long bath with epsom salts. I did a load of laundry and set it outside to dry in the sun. I cleaned the bathroom so I could enjoy another bath later in the week. I washed the dishes and tidied the kitchen.

Then I found myself wandering the busy streets past closed shops and bustling parks. While the grocery shops were closed, the playhouses and calisthenics parks were open and absolutely packed.

Frankfurt has public spielhaus or playhouses in the parks for children with activities and equipment. When I walked by I saw teenagers playing basketball and elementary school children painting.

For the adults there are calisthenics stations on the river where you can workout in public any time of the day or night. I’m not much for pull ups I did end up playing around with a thirty minute body weight workout of squats, mountain climbers, pikes, bridges, leg raises, dips, planks and push ups. It just felt like a fun thing to do.

And isn’t that a pleasant thought? That on a sunny spring day it just seems nice to be outside playing. The dream of parks and recreation is alive in Frankfurt.

Categories
Aesthetics Community Finance

Day 863 Abstract The Pain Away

When I was a small child I attended meditation retreats with my parents. Hippies amirite? The particular branch practiced was some variant of Kashmir Shivaism, but I’ve got to imagine it was heavily edited for the consumption of white Boomers.

Who else would take a vacation to sit in silence, chant the Bhagavata Gita at 5am and practice sevā, all while having six year old children? Silicon Valley’s syncretic culture produces some weird hybrids. Seventies counter culture gave us some of the best religious revivals in American history.

If you didn’t catch the word sevā earlier it’s actually going to be the anchor of the post. Sevā as it was explained to me as a child at the ashram is selfless service. It’s work you do without expectation of reward. It is a dedication to others.

Practically it meant that anytime we lived at the ashram everyone contributed some set of work, mostly unskilled labor but not always, in the form of sevā. I did everything from food preparation and dish washing (working a commercial kitchen dishwasher is actually fun) to caring for some donated horses. I had fun summers as a child.

But the point was that everyone participated in some way to the functions of the ashram no matter who you were. And we did have some weird celebrities but that’s not the point. Sevā applied to us all. Though I’m sure glad I never looked too hard at the politics of finances of these ashtrays. Childhood innocence. As a child I just thought it was fun to contribute to the adult world.

But what I remember now is a sense of connection. That no aspect of these retreats was ever abstracted to far from me. The service was meant to bond you to an experience of a world bigger than yourself. And by recognizing that, you’d somehow connect more with others.

I try to remember that now when I am in lonely cities where every aspect of living with others is transaction. A food delivery service whisks you a meal in an hour in a country where you are an outsider without ties, bonds or service beyond the basic civilizational contract of capital markets.

The global cosmopolitan gloss of mobile applications have abstracted service away to the point where we can have an entire day of discourse about a man being sad a house cleaner washed a cast iron skillet but we can’t admit that we all pay for service as it cracks the facade.

We’ve got no sevā because that’s an expectation too great to hear. We can barely manage to pay a fee for service anymore. Imagine if we had to operate without intangibles. We can barely make Uber Eats function with taxes, tips, and services fees. Bless the markets for this freedom and curse it in the same breath.

Fuck the pain away? No, we abstract the pain away. No need to see who contributes anything. You can complain to a faceless chatbot cum customer service artificial intelligence about how some man on a bicycle didn’t deliver your order on time. The service lives below the machine now and has patience for frailty.

And yes I’m writing this because my Korean fried chicken and kimchi order got lost in a side street in Frankfurt for an hour or two.

Don’t worry the corporate entities that intermediated between me, the restaurant and the courier decided in my favor. The customer is always right as long as they have paid the fees to pretend that are lords.

All pain in the above transaction was abstracted away into some governance structure that decided it was worth 25 euro or so. One presumes some public market agreed on the price. I guess I did too. We all did.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 862 and Separation

They say absence makes the heart grow fonder. But I don’t feel absence in my heart. And it certainly isn’t positive. If only absence were so tightly concentrated and concretely clear. I feel it in my entire body. And it’s painful.

Perhaps it’s the new emotional attunement gained from my five week nervous system bootcamp but I feel separation from my loved-ones keenly. It’s an amorphous horror that traps me in sympathetic paralysis.

My throat closes up, my chest tightens, my jaw clenches and I gasp for air as I try to stave off the grief. I cry but not freely. It’s a poorly controlled gulping sensation as close to drowning as I can imagine.

I don’t know if it is a sense memory from childhood. But I register the subtle smells of abandonment, loss, and separation with the sensitivity of a hound. I imagine the pain to be a sort of umami. Another taste beyond the two poles of sweet and salty. My pain is savory.

That kind of depth usually means something is coming up from the very beginnings of life before conscious rationality. And I long to struggle against it. I want to fight it off with intellect. I hate the sadness that washes over me, bringing me despair I didn’t know was inside me.

And yet it is there. And all I can do is remember to let it out. I remember to stop the gasping grasping attempts at control and feel my way into the emotions of separation. And maybe then it will find ways to dissipate. The only way out is through.

Categories
Travel

Day 859 and Half Day Tourism

My husband and I typically like to travel together for work, but over the next few weeks we made the choice to let our schedules diverge to cover more ground on our work. He’s handling a number of American events while I am headed to Europe for portfolio work and fundraising.  

Because the logistics of getting transcontinental flights have become trickier, I was in Seattle for a little over 24 hours. I’ve managed to pack more into this layover than I’ve ever managed to do in my entire life. It’s a quirk of circumstances as my body is having a really couple of days.

I fit in a waxing, a haircut, soup dumplings, smoked salmon, two excellent coffees, and walking around Pike’s Place taking pictures and shopping. And it’s been sunny which is how I know the universe delivered me several miracles.

    Categories
    Culture Homesteading

    Day 856 and Spring Into Action

    It’s been a beautiful week in the Gallatin Valley. Every single morning on my daily constitutional walk I notice new growth. Very suddenly we went from of melting & assessing snow damage to bright and sunny spring green.

    The more northern latitudes get a shorter growing season (in fact we will get more snow) but the season is one of magnified intensity as our evenings stretch towards 10pm before the light is gone. And so on this first weekend of May we’ve begun taking action on spring. Hobby farmers spring into action.

    Alex slicing open a bag of manure in our back pasture in preparation for tree planting
    A man, a hole, and a shovel

    My husband and I have no idea what we are doing but with the true spirit of fuck around and find out we began anyway. Our running joke is that Alex is a #ManofAction as there is just simply so much more practically to do when you live on land for which you are ultimately responsible. It’s a lot of fun and very grounding.

    And as you might guess the most liberating feeling in the world is being held accountable for yourself and your choices. So even knowing full well you are basically that dog typing on a computer subtitled “I’ve got no ideal what I’m doing” you carry on anyway.

    I’ve got no idea what I’m doing Golden Retriever Typing

    While I did a few laps around the pasture and helped with a bit of the lighter work my role was mostly to capture the fun and excitement of trying something new. We picked two apple, two plum and one cherry from Starks Brothers to add in after a fall planting of a number of apple trees. We’ve got no idea if any of this is going to take. We’ve read some books but that barely counts.

    Our cyberpunk John Deer free of computer parts along with a few stages of planting

    Meanwhile inside the homestead I’ve been doing some spring cleaning. I’ve been appropriately assigned gender formative roles as I actually enjoy keeping things attractive and beautiful. The closests need turning over from the wool and layering over to tee-shirts, sundresses, and linens. Alex mostly goes from button downs to tee shirts. Jeans are swapped for cargo shorts. Being a man is simpler.

    Winter boots need to be put away and flats, sneakers and sandals brought to the front. Alex had more work gear and footwear as he does more of the outdoors work than I do so shoes are more Alex than me.

    Heavy winter oil and moisture rich cosmetics will give way to lighter water creams and ceramides. I don’t change retinols but I may add in more C and lactic acid for turnover in the heat. Alex meanwhile gets away with a basic vitamin C moisturizer and SPF.

    I alas have not dealt with getting my hair trimmed in sometime but the reminder that it’s time to cut off dead ends is ultimately a spring time ambition. Hopefully you had the good sense to prune in the winter. My husband is lucky enough to simply buzz his head. Happy spring everyone and may your rituals enjoyable to you.

    Categories
    Emotional Work Preparedness

    Day 844 and Blooming

    Spring is in the air. Not in Montana so much as it’s still mud season, but metaphorically. Life is blooming and blossoming all around me after what feels like a lifetime of winter. Everyone in my orbit is flourishing and optimistic about how they are choosing to live their own lives. Which is wild as I’m friends with a lot of doomers.

    The cost of an exceptional springtime was quite high. The flourishing is happening amongst those in my ecosystem who addressed their suffering head on in deep dark winters of soul and body. Between the pandemic and the financial calamities in the following polycrisis, people had it rough.

    I’m not saying any of that is over so much as I’m seeing people reconcile that life is just going to be bumpy for the foreseeable future. Maybe it was always this bumpy. I gather that Americans are the ones experiencing the most dissonance on a changing world because we had it pretty good for a long while.

    But it’s a choice to come to terms with a fallen world. Both in the Christian sense and in the wider “shit is crazy” sense. We still need to be housed and fed and educated and kept safe. Especially if times bad. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs still applies. But if you take care of your own needs you can blossom even in hard times. Maybe even especially. Spring follows winters.

    Categories
    Medical

    Day 834 and Inside Out

    I had a really rough night last night. It’s entirely possible my original theory of industrial lettuce wasn’t the whole picture.

    For a little timeline clarification. Yesterday, I woke up with stomach troubles after eating agribusiness salad chain for dinner on Wednesday. I had meetings on Thursday so I took some varied drug store tummy medicines and gutted it out. I even had a very fun time at my meetings. But then as the adrenaline of the day wained I was heading towards disaster. The nausea and had was getting worse.

    I realized I couldn’t attended a dinner with some old friends but Alex was fine. I told him to pick up some Tums on the way home. As his dinner wore on my symptoms got worse and worse.

    I felt like I was beach ball ready to pop. My stomach was distended so far I felt like I had back problems my stomach pushed out so far. I was tight Mike a drum. The pain and nausea consumed my focus. Around 7:30 or so I called Alex saying I needed a doctor or a visit to urgent care. I couldn’t tolerate it any longer.

    Blessedly our doctor in Montana called back almost immediately. He had just personally had a case of stomach flu or norovirus himself and mentioned it was trending up nationwide. At that point I was mostly moaning and curled into a ball from the nausea and gas. He prescribed an antispasmodic called dicyclomine. It helps calm stomach cramping.

    I had an hour of crying and praying waiting for it to kick in. I’m sure I scared the shit out of the other hotel guests with the moaning and crying. I was begging Alex to please fix it. To find something else I could take. To do literally anything to relieve me of this horror. Thankfully around 930pm or so it kicked in fully. How do I know?

    I was able to vomit. A lot. Seven times over the course of half an hour. And then I was fine. My stomach deflated down to a normal size. The nausea abated. The pain and cramping subsided. Four hours of intense misery has passed with a drug that turned me inside out.

    I spent all of Friday in bed sleeping it off. I missed all my meetings and couldn’t eat anything till dinner time came around. I’m having some soup and I suspect I’ll simply pass out. New York is an inside out kind of place sometimes and I’ll just have to live with it.

    Categories
    Travel

    Day 832 and Julie in Motion

    Objects in motion tend to stay in motion. Newton’s laws of motion work for people in motion. I swung into my day and once a Julie is in motion she tends to stay that way.

    I want sure how I would feel being in New York City. I’ve technically been back to the city since we left but this felt like my first real trip back to the city. And I remembered what it felt like to have my days packed. Full of things to do and people to see.

    I felt energized. Maybe even just a little bit optimistic. Like being in motion was a worthwhile state to maintain. I enjoyed it. I expected things to feel maybe busier or louder or overwhelming and instead it felt normal. Like I’d always lived life bouncing from one thing to the next.

    And to be fair a lot is happening. Balances of power are shifting. Plans are being hatched. People are planting seeds. There is a palpable sense of springtime hope but it’s a bigger than that. People are excited to see what happens next. And a city is a place of serendipity when the weather is good. And I could see some joy in being at old haunts.

    We’ve got change on the horizon and some of us are excited to be players in the great game. Which is always a nice feeling. A lot is shifting and changing and we bandy about words like apocalypse and disaster. But maybe we have a hell of a good time finding our way out of this mess. I felt like maybe I could see a sliver of how it might play out while strolling in Manhattan.