Tag: Religion

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Biohacking Emotional Work

Day 215 and Leisure

I’ve got a bad relationship with work. Since I was a teenager I’ve been compulsive about the idea of hard work. I don’t know how I got to have a problem with the Protestant Work Ethic but it seems likely I developed it long before I read Max Weber and found it’s comforting rationalizations about work’s inherent morality.

I’m fascinated by things like commodity aesthetics, the history of consumption, and theories of leisure & status. Partially because I got a kick out of supposing I was a better person than those wretched lazy types. I wasn’t so sophisticated to sneer “rentier” class as kid but I was well on my way to veneration of hard work and productive capital. An economics degree finished the job.

This was compounded by growing up in a family that worshipped the culture of Silicon Valley. The innovation of computers and the people that worked all hours to bring their creativity to the world were the most important people on the planet. They hadn’t quite crossed the cultural rubicon of power that the tech industry has now, but the power of making the future was hard work and heady stuff even before it captured the mainstream. I wanted to change the world like the people my father admired

There was a time when computing and automation raised questions of a new era of leisure. If we could move all of the work we’d previously done manually to automated systems perhaps humans could ascend to The Culture of Ian M Bank’s novels. In a distant future of abundance, sentient AIs run industry and production, so humanity can do, well, whatever it likes.

But we haven’t achieved a post scarcity world. If anything accumulating resources and showing you’ve done it by the rules of the meritocracy makes hard work even more crucial. You’ve got to play and win two games. You’ve got to make the money and show you’ve demonstrated the proper status while doing it. It seems like leisure is losing the battle quite soundly.

I’ve been pushing all year to get back to hard work. I’ve worked hard at my health. I’ve committed myself to biohacking. But really what if the obsession with working myself to the bone is killing me? I’ve been completely relaxed as I prepared for a medical procedure this week. I’ve never felt better. Which forced me to ask myself if maybe I better come to live leisure like the way I have loved work. It might be a much better life for me. The future sentient AIs might approve as well.

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Aesthetics Preparedness

Day 206 and Summer Storms

When I was a kid it was considered common knowledge to “get off the mountain” before the afternoon thundershowers. Along the front range of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, the afternoon or evening storm is a mainstay of summer. A quick occasionally terrifying show of nature in all her glory.

Lightning in Rocky Mountain National Park

One minute the sky is clear and the summer heat is bearing down on you, and the next torrential rains with lightning and thunder cracking one after the other explode. Temperatures can drop 20 degrees in as many minutes. The wind is the first sign a storm is bearing down on you. A reminder why it’s wise to pack layers and be prepared with rain gear even on the sunniest day.

I personally love the storms. The relief from the heat is welcome. But it’s more than comfort. It’s the emotions that come with something so powerful bearing down on you. The smell of ozone permeates the air. The excitement and fear from needing to get to safety when the first signs of a storm moving in snow themselves.

Most Coloradan that hike have high country lightning safety training to rely on, but it doesn’t make those bursts of light any less terrifying. The hairs standing on end a visceral reminder why the god of thunder featured so heavily in mythology. The power on display is clear. Thunder clapping as lightning strikes a reminder that you are in the middle of a power that has no interest in you. It just exists.

But like a god, natural phenomena is capricious. As quickly as a mountain storm blows in it blows out. The clouds part. Sun shines through. The occasional rainbow will cross a valley. I just watched a downpour from the safety of my house in the foothills. I guess I still know to be off the mountain before the storm comes. It was a beautiful mesmerizing twenty minutes of rain, lightning, hail and thunder. And then it was gone

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Emotional Work Startups

Day 153 and Startup Families

I’ve worked my entire career in startups. I love it. But the work barely compares to being a member of a startup family. My entire life has been lived, literally from the day I was born, in the ecosystem of families that make startups come to life.

I was “in it” from conception and all my success and traumas are in some way tied back to that luck. And I became a startup founder and eventually a startup wife. This post is about what it’s like to live in perpetual uncertainty of creation with the occasional bout of life changing money.

For everyone that has a payday that changed their lives forever, chances are they have spent decades in the shadow of that system of building, scaling, and selling companies. The paydays are sporadic, completely dependent on luck and often extremely unfair. Most of the time the early team sees nothing. I’ve personally had an exit where I got nothing. I’ve had an exit where I couldn’t afford to exercise my options so when the company that bought mine exited I didn’t see a dime. So I know how fundamentally random startup life can be. How unfair it can feel. Because today it is our turn to be the beneficiary of the unwarranted success.

My husband Alex’s long time home Stack Overflow, sold for 1.8B dollars today. And yes we are one of the 61 families that will see more than a million dollars from it. But it’s not all joyful excitement in our house. Because it’s not about not just about money. It never has been. In my family it’s always been about belief. And it’s really hard to reconcile the many competing emotions that come with a liquidity event. It’s the culmination of much work and time from everyone.

My father proudly reminds me that when I was born, he didn’t have a job as he was pitching an education startup. What a blessing to have the energy of one’s life be aligned with risk from the start. And also what a curse. My family had incredible boom years where money wasn’t a concern coupled with devastating financial and emotional ruin as companies went to zero and markets crashed. My father sacrificed so much for his dreams. He saw the value of software and took his wife and children to the promised land of Silicon Valley. And oh it was glorious. And oh how it hurt.

I have fond memories of Comdex, elaborate company cruises and board meetings during “take your daughter to work day.” I also remember my father not being there for birthdays, for dinner, for milestones because he was busy building the future. I don’t remember my parents getting divorced, because I suppressed the memories. Family trauma can be like that. The good and the bad exist at the same time. When my father went bankrupt in the Web 1 crash, I was so angry at him for not being more careful, I didn’t speak to him for years. And then I made the choice to become a founder myself. Despite my fury and sadness and hurt I too decided to live my father’s path. And then I married a man who walks it too. I guess the Bojack Horseman joke got it right.

You inherit your parents’ trauma but will never fully understand it. Haha the cop is a cat.

The day you get news you made life changing money is bittersweet because all the trauma of being a startup family member catch’s you to you. You remember the sacrifice of your whole family going back years. The long nights and missed time together. The choices to prioritize the company over your family. In our case 10 years but of course for me it’s been my entire life.

The entirety of my marriage with Alex and my entire relationship with him before was spent at Stack Overflow. I’ve seen the hard work and the pride. I’ve also seen the exhaustion and the agony when something went badly wrong. The hurt when teammates left and the fear of leaving yourself eventually. People grow up together at startups. Other more practical logistics show that not everyone wins. The hard decisions you make when it’s time to leave and you cannot afford to exercise your options are a unique pain. We just three weeks ago sold something in secondaries to afford the taxes to exercise ours. That’s timing and dumb luck. Almost absurdly so. We could easily not be in the position we are. Exits are the end goal and yet not everyone gets to make it despite equal sacrifices. It’s all random and no one deserves any of it. But it changes your life if it does happen.

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Aesthetics Finance Internet Culture

Day 150 and Hypersigils

In the beginning there was the word……or the command line. Naming a thing used to be the literal path to power. Now we are pretty meh about the whole thing. Ritual magic is kind of a satanic panic middle brow thing in America even though we have a history of throwing in with prosperity theology. We’ve got entire evangelical communities dedicated to naming and belief with the expectation it will generate wealth and manifest prosperity. The meme magic folks who wished Trump into office were really just regurgitating Norman Vincent Peale prayers. Plenty of folks like to blame this kind of magic on like Max Weber with his Protestant Work Ethic but I’m mixed on it as I don’t think he envisioned Pentecostals when he said hard work was a moral good.

A friend of mine who knows my interest in both capitalism and its underlying energy in culture suggested I watch an old talk from illustrator and comic book author Grant Morrison.

Honestly you should pop it out and watch the whole thing if you have any interest in creation. But especially if you are interested in chaos. He discusses a term he coined called a Hyper Sigil. He is building on contemporary chaos magic which isn’t too far off from manifestation theology. He contends that bodies of art but really any form of creative work can be turned into collective signs of meaning with willpower and force. He literally means they are magic and if this interests you go read Ray Sherwin and Peter J Carroll. If that doesn’t no biggie the following point still stands. We have sigils in America that are pretty literally manifestations of power.

Corporate sigils are super-breeders. They attack unbranded imaginative space. They invade Red Square, they infest the cranky streets of Tibet, they etch themselves into hairstyles. They breed across clothing, turning people into advertising hoardings… The logo or brand, like any sigil, is a condensation, a compressed, symbolic summoning up of the world of desire which the corporation intends to represent… Walt Disney died long ago but his sigil, that familiar, cartoonish signature, persists, carrying its own vast weight of meanings, associations, nostalgia and significance.

I’ve completely fallen down a Grant Morrison hole as this kind of thinking is crucial to work in attention economy trades like communications, public relations and marketing. But I’m frankly a lot more interested in the practical aspects of how he conceives of himself as a chaos magician and how he we can all affect the reality around us. I’ve purchased his Invisibles comic. When he says imagination is the fifth dimension he literally means it. Multiversity is rad.

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Startups

Day 112 and Unknowability

Human minds seem to prefer predictably. The back brain craves knowing what is coming even as our flighty consciousness seeks novelty. Talk about a tension that sucks. We’ve all seem just now much this is a recipe for misery when you live in a world with no predictability but easy access to low stakes novelty during the pandemic. We are twitchy, bitchy and miserable as we have no idea what our world will be like but we can dopamine drip our pleasure seekers with social media, food and substances for an enjoyable now.

I’ve written at length in this experiment about my frustrations with unreliability especially when it comes to my own body. It’s one of the hardest aspects of managing a recovery from an autoimmune disease. I need to be mentally strong enough to not let bad days shake my routines so I keep building towards the wider goal. I can’t be distracted by one data point. It’s about movement towards the goal. Ironically this is a skill I learned from startup life.

While the entire planet is getting a crash course in unpredictable futures now, startups are defined by their desire to solve problems that don’t yet have defined solutions. No one in a startup knows if the predictions will be right. If they are working on something that will have the intended outcomes is unclear. You work on faith. You trust that over a longer time frame the daily tasks and routines you push (sometimes we give them dumb names like OKRs to fake a sense of control) will actually get you where your mind’s horizon sees.

I sometimes wonder if those with religious faith would do better on average in startup life. We have some degree of comfort with the inscrutable. Mysteries are sources of joy rather than fear. We trust that there are things beyond our knowing and our control and yet we must live on despite that.

The obsession with data and trend lines and the potential for prediction, surety or knowing amuses me. Sure sometimes you can plan a lot. You should plan. You have some inputs that consistently deliver the predicted outputs. Your best guess are better than other people’s facts (thanks Spock!) But if it were all so neatly defined there would be nothing new to create. We wouldn’t be able to build value. It’s the undiscovered country that we seek.

In faith, in life, and in startups you must manage your squishy human mind that is constantly tortured by its own biology. We want to know and we want it to be predictable. But we also love the tickle of a new experience against our dopamine seeking biology. The spike of pleasure we find pleasure in the newness. That’s why we do it. And it’s on us to balance the tension between our need to predictably build and our addiction to novelty. Manage that and you may get far in your journey. Or it’s a miserable sine-wave that makes you nauseous as you go up and down trying desperately to bring the future forward between impulse and planning. It’s usually both if I’m honest. So if you don’t enjoy roller coasters I wouldn’t get on this ride. But if you do well you just might see God.

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Chronic Disease Chronicle

Day 66 and Moralizing Health

I’m sure there is a perfectly reasonable evolutionary explanation why humans developed a bias correlating health with moral righteousness. Jesus and lepers aside, teaching the herd that you needed to stay away from infectious individuals is what formed the “winning” population is probably a lesson some reply guy will shove down my face. Like I get it, fucking and producing offspring is what makes you Darwin fit.

It’s just a deeply stupid thing to continue when we have the scientific method at our disposal and can actually test for what causes disease. This isn’t to say that lots of behaviors we moralize around strongly can’t correlate to poor outcomes (smoking, alcohol, food) but depending on the person you’ve got countless other variables. Population level statistics are crucial for actually gaining certainty on a hypothesis and what happens “most of the time” but there are always edge cases. We shouldn’t let edge cases dissuade us from good policy that will benefit most of us. But we should always leave wiggle room and exceptions for the outliers.

I don’t even mean this grandiosely, more like if you are a heroin addict switching that to cigarettes is a better addiction substitute. Maybe you get lung cancer or heart disease but that’s still on balance the better outcome when faced with overdose. For me weed is a better drug comparatively than opioids for chronic pain. Would I be thrilled to require no drugs ever? Maybe! Or maybe that is just centuries of stories moralizing the clarity and goodness of our leaders who never once required aid or comfort on their journeys to power. Lol, sure humans love to retcon the stories of our historical victors. The only hero who didn’t try to write out the sinning part was Jesus Christ and we sure hate to be reminded of the failings of his friends and family. Mary Magdalene was such a slut amirite?

So next time someone shits on you for doing something that is unhealthy for the general population but healthy for you, I give you my full permission to tell them to shove it if they are being an asshole. Don’t like dunk people for sharing their joy at making decisions that improve their lives. But don’t expect that it has to be done to everyone’s lives.