Tag: Life

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Chronicle Culture

Day 1087 and Christmas Weekend

I plan to work most of next week so I am particularly intent on resting throughout this weekend and Monday.

I was thrilled to wake up to a snowfall this morning as it’s been an unseasonably dry winter in Montana. My husband was up before me and started a fire in our wood stove.

I wandered into out into the living room sleepy and tired to find the coziest scene. Mountain living is wonderful if you’ve got the temperament for long cold nights.

I am tired which makes me more reactive. A soothing winter calm is a tonic for my nerves. I do not feel as if I am particularly reflective at the moment as that would require more control than I have the energy to muster.

I will watch some movies, enjoy a few meals, and otherwise let the season sooth me. I hope it’s enough as I am expecting 2024 to start with a bang.

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Emotional Work

Day 1083 and Uncertainty

I feel as if I spend a lot of time reassuring people that nobody has a clue about what happens next and that’s fine.

Even the brightest humans are still basically dim witted simians barely managing our fragile wetware as our environment provides constant destabilization. That we even survive that set of circumstances seems a pleasant surprise. Humans are adaptable.

I have typical fears about muddling through life but my existential angst remains in check. If I’m in a simulated environment running a set of programs given to me by God or a random super intelligence what does it matter to me?

I’m here and I like it enough to continue being alive. Sure I’d love to find out the mystery of consciousness and the nature of reality but if don’t I am happy with my lot in life. Whoever programmed me did a fine job. Thanks Mom and the wider memetic cultural movements that made me.

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Community Internet Culture

Day 1082 and Local Maxima

It’s not an original sentiment but one aspect of Internet culture that has been most challenging is seeing how much less special you are when compared to the entirety of the species. Rather than choosing to find this humbling or inspiring some find it threatening and destabilizing.

There has been a video going around of a teenage boy, who seems to be a fine young man with a variety of interests with above average marks and test results, who didn’t get into Cornell. The internet has theories which I hope the young man doesn’t read.

Now looking at it with somewhat objective perspective I’d say his scores wouldn’t have got him into a top decile university twenty years ago let alone a top ten one. It’s even more competitive now as we send so many more students to university now. Arguably more than we can afford as a nation but we still do it.

So being rejected from a very selective school isn’t that unlikely with those metrics. Being above average is good. It doesn’t make you the best though. Being above average means you go to an above average university. Traditionally this has meant your local state land grant university. Perhaps you’d study something socially useful like civil engineering. These are good things that we should celebrate.

If you are a bit better than your local geographic average congratulations your life will be better access to a wider world. It will also teach you quickly that you are not all that special. That’s fine too.

This teenager will do fine. He shouldn’t be wrapped in social anxiety. He is at a successful local maxima but is not yet prepared for even softest of global minima. He’s going to have to get better for that. No one should be ashamed of this outcome. It’s actually quite hard to be in the global ten percent of anything. This young man might have a shot at it if he continues to improve. I’m rooting for him.

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Emotional Work

Day 1081 and Sleep It Off

Trying to balance everything coming at you at the end of the year isn’t easy. Joy at accomplishments and time together are the goal for family time.

But the experience is overlaid with wrapping the year and planning for what is sure to be an intense year to come. It can feel somewhat paralyzing when I consider it.

I felt like I had to sleep off a lot this weekend . I crashed most of Saturday. I seriously slept 11 and a half hours. And I did feel better.

I’m looking at an intense year and I am afraid. We can’t lose some of the battles. They are winnable ones but it’s going to take a coordinated effort from many of us. In the spirit of the Christmas season, I pray for miracles.

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Emotional Work

Day 1080 and Hard Feedback

Ego protection is innate. Humans have quite the capacity for engaging in defense mechanisms. As I do my end of year reviews to see what I have accomplished and where I have failed I see my ego everywhere.

The types of ego protection that plague me tend to be with those all too human relationships that are closest to me.

I had to admit to myself that I’d been engaging in entirely unproductive approaches in a close partnership. I wanted more from my partner and I’d express it again and again, but I didn’t seem capable of demanding the outcomes I needed. This was unproductive obviously.

Hard feedback was given to my partner. I had to look into my own motivations for enabling a cycle of letting outcomes that didn’t match our goals occur. My own part in it mattered. We had enforced errors, self doubt, fear and all the other typical buggaboos you might expect in a hard situation.

It can be hard to simply address the hard things head on.

Emotional reactivity is part of our autonomic nervous system. It’s not always right. It’s only sometimes right. And learning to tune it is part of the fun. You want to improve your heuristics over time. You will get more clarity on the world and your place in it. If you wish to persist in feeling anxious and uncertain being passive will have that effect. It literally hurts you. You have agency in deciding to address how you feel head on.

Day 1072 Head-on

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Chronicle Media

Day 1075 and Behind The Scenes

I am a firm believer in doing as much journaling in public as I can as it’s a forcing function for myself as a thinker but also because it allows others to locate me in the vast expanse of an increasingly fractured virtual landscape.

But sometimes I have to do work that I can’t make immediately public. A lot of what I do never gets put public and I have to find ways to remind myself what I was doing without being glaringly obvious about it when I must keep someone’s trust.

Also because most people are mostly concerned with themselves vague poasting can do a lot of the work. Everyone will assume it’s about them. Cue Carly Simon “you’re so vain!” But most people won’t bother to ask.

A fair number of people rightfully don’t feel like they are public figures even as increasingly we all live some version of our lives in public. So a lot of social cues go into protecting trust.

Internet native people like myself have come to accept that there is no privacy. The divide between generations is probably less clear than you’d expect. But if you grew up online you know you can’t always control where your content and identity goes. Controlling it is like controlling the weather. Only conspiracy theories believe it can be done and they probably agree on who does it. Sorry there’s a joke about how the internet is filled with Nazis.

Security online has mostly come by through obscurity. But that’s not an absolute defense as anyone with a little bit of forum skills can absolutely fuck your life. This will only get worse as artificial intelligence helps us sort through things.

The Zoomers are particularly good at this and they grew up with things like swarming, catfishing and other hostile virtual low trust behaviors in anonymous environments. Honestly internet hygiene is for shit but basic common sense can do most of the work. So stay safe out there and remember some people live on attention. Be careful how much you give them.

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Emotional Work

Day 1074 and Go Go Go

I feel as if I had a lot more trepidation about the future before the pandemic. I wasn’t so sure if I had a clear view of how my own personal philosophies were meant to engage with the scramble of building, and then surviving, my own life. That seemed like a luxury for people higher up the hierarchy of needs than I was.

I feel like I got a lot wrong even as I see how I was equipped with so many tools that I used clumsily. I wish, in some ways, that I’d been surer of my own knowledge earlier. I didn’t trust myself. I felt like a Cassandra doomed to see dire outcomes.

And yet I retained some sense of optimism. You can see my doomer arcs clearly across the written records as systems failed me and then failed others. Natural disasters and chronic illness in very real ways forced me to overcome any inclination towards a culture of nihilism. I found that I couldn’t give up.

There was no comfort to be found in saving myself but I did. And now I find myself simply done with trying to muddle along. I am getting much louder about my own alliances and beliefs. I am updating my priors and throwing myself into fights. I am choosing sides even when I don’t care for all my compatriots. Neutrality is easier to maintain at the edge of an empire surely but I hard limits on what I find to be acceptable compromises in a free society.

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Internet Culture Medical

Day 1069 and Fever

I both literally have a fever in my own body while I am watching a fever burn through one of my favorite extremely online communities in the form of effective acceleration memers versus a heavily armed establishment unit of academic utilitarians. Who would like you to know they aren’t effective altruists I’m sure.

I myself enjoy a good internecine debate as I became a Calvinist as an adult because fuck it the Reformation is the home of the institutional skeptic. Flame wars are the modern 95 theses. And naturally everyone involved thinks their counterparts are reactionaries. Tyranny of small differences.

I’d say more about this but it’s later in the day and like I said I am running a fever. My immune system is remarkably active so I’m honestly shocked a fever got through at all. I actively beat my immune system into retreat so whenever it gains ground I am annoyed and confused. So it’s probably best if I sign off as it’s never a good idea to be letting your fever dreams get the best of you.

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Biohacking Emotional Work

Day 1068 and Routine Versus Speed

I always find myself disappointed by how much time I put into health. Perhaps it’s a sign of how high expectations are for performance in the tools we use daily that it seems preposterous that it should require a third of your time in maintenance.

Perhaps this is an unfair intuition on my part. For every hour of flight the F-16 needs around 17 man-hours of maintenance. I’d prefer to not be quite so resource intensive as a fight jet but maybe fighting entropy does require 8-10 of my day.

As I try to do more with my days and push myself to do more in less time I still have to put in the effort to stay at my old baseline. I put my faith in the miracles of compounding. What was once a huge effort is now a habit.

I try to fight my tendency to optimize even as tracking my own data has its benefits. Most of my inputs are just a refinement on existing heuristics. Occasionally I’ll find someone who has a fix so might better than what I’ve been doing it fundamentally resets my understanding of my works model. It happens more than you’d think.

In accelerating I must apply more energy to my existing systems. Or course the old systems seem to call out depending more. As I push for performance my body demands its sleep, its fuel and any other number of needs. Sometimes it’s a want. It’s not always clear so I test.

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Travel

Day 1064 and Faster San Francisco

I am energized by my day. Any residual pain from the challenges of travel have been mitigated by rest, exercise, meditation and lots of medication.

If I could to give only one argument in favor of acceleration, it would be our capacity to improve medicine. I’d like to find a cure to my ankylosis personally, but it’s bigger than all that. I believe we should do everything we can to improve the health and well being of humanity.

I do so much to balance my own health and wellbeing just so I can keep working and contributing to the startups I love so much. Often I miss so much of life that others take for granted like socializing together. Hobbies, socializing and much of the tapestry of living together is off limits to me as energy budget is too high.

I’d like more capacity in life so I can chose not only to work, but to go to meetups, dinners and whatever else folks get up to in their leisure and community hours.

I am not one for FOMO while I’m in bed recovering, but on the occasional day where I get to do leisure activities I am reminded that I could have more of life if we agreed to prioritize the acceleration of medicine. My energy budget is only limited by the state of our healthcare.

On that note I’ll be at an e/acc meetup tonight in San Francisco. If you think you see me do please come up and say hello. I’d love to meet you. I’ll be wearing the leopard dress I have come to think of as the “spot me in the wild” outfit as well as three distinct wearables.