Tag: Stream of Consciousnesses

Categories
Culture

Day 1195 and Responsibility

No one seems to be responsible for anything anymore. To take on a duty seems almost quaint in a world where honor has become a historical oddity. To have responsibility means you have an obligation to do something. And sadly many seem to be saying who wants that?

And yet we can’t substitute liability for responsibility. At best a liability has a specific meaning in financial and legal realms.

To be liable for something means there are repercussions if something bad happens. We’ve got whole professions dedicated to avoiding liability.

Browsing for insight on the difference yields interesting Reddit threads. If you want to get into international law you can really get tied into intellectual and moral knots.

The interplay between the obligation to prevent harm and the prohibition to cause harm, the question of cessation and the procedural treatment at the International Court of Justice of the issues of injury, causality and reparation owed

International Responsibility of Public Institutions

This is on my mind because Norfolk Southern reached a 600 million dollar settlement for the train derailment in East Palestine Ohio.

What we owe each other seems to only ever resolve itself when money changes hands. And perhaps that’s simply not good enough. If we only look to reduce liabilities because duty is simply too much to ask (or too dangerous a commitment) then is it any wonder no one wants to be bond to one another?

Categories
Emotional Work Startups

Day 1193 And Peak Performance

I was really struggling yesterday so I didn’t expect to jump right onto a flow state today. I went into town to eat a hamburger.

“You may not like it but eating a burger in the back of a casino in a strip mall in Montana while reading an economics lecture by Deidre McCloskey is actually female peak performance”

Maybe it was the positive effect of a bunch of fat and protein but I was in the zone afterwards. I was able to pull together a bunch of disparate connections on a specialty niche where I’ve had some very promising investments.

I, for a brief shining moment, realized I was almost certainly one of the most expert and well connected people on the planet for something.

So much of not getting eaten by change is simply accepting that you feel absolutely bonkers an enormous amount of time. Learning to live with it isn’t as easy as it looks

If you are lucky and smart and open minded a straight line can appear through what was other completely disparate things. It’s funny that we call putting a line through things regression right? Simplifying things is funny like that.

Learning to act when you see a through line is almost all of the battle. “Noticing things” is only useful insofar as it something you take action on.

I felt as if I had no clear path at all yesterday on anything and then today I did. I didn’t see some kind of perfect Delphic vision of the future. I just realized that work I’d set in motion three or four years ago has yielded results and if I was able to keep going with other people who saw it too then I had done what I could.

Categories
Chronic Disease Emotional Work

Day 1192 and Stasis

I am not feeling well today and used all the capacity I had to simply push at the edges of my universe and scream a bit into the abyss.

Screaming into the abyss is my pet name for being on the internet. Mostly Twitter. I know it sounds stupid.

Sometimes there are actual people on there still which is a small comfort. Just telegraphing into the universe that you are a “live one” is half the battle of bringing the future into the present.

I know it sounds like a stupid way to bring in resources and deals and alliances but it works. Make of that what you will. I’ll get on a phone call now and again if you are really compelling and intelligent. I spent some time on the phone with one of my favorite people and it was more energy than I would have anticipated.

Sometimes that’s just how it goes. There is only so much you can do when your time horizons for results are measured in a ten year cycle anyway.

It’s occasionally embarrassing to admit there are days I don’t have the energy to manage what what I eat, how much I exercise, whether I bath or do farm chores or otherwise manage the work of physical reality.

A few days of the month I do the absolute minimum to manage stasis and I honestly even that was a stretch. But like the classic Monty Python sketch of another era “I’m not dead yet!”

Categories
Emotional Work Homesteading Startups

Day 1191 and 90 Day Horizon

I feel like I’ve got a decent grip on the directions that have captivated markets and where the next decade of opportunities will emerge. My long term confidence on managing through chaos remains the same. Focus on resilience and adaptability.

I feel as if repeat myself constantly in the ways that I live this through my revealed preferences.

In more local “place” resilience we live on land we own land in Montana with our own well, water rights, and powering our energy needs off a large solar grid.

In broader macroeconomics terms, I invest in decentralized ecosystems like Bitcoin, open source software projects and compute exchanges. Hell, I was even the first check into a nuclear energy company last year. Energy and networks matter.

Yet I have no idea what I intend to do with my next couple of months or where I should even spend my time except “keep doing what you are already doing!”

I’ve come to some crossroads on my attention and the decisions I need to make in the short term feel challenging. I’ve never had more opportunities in front of me and it’s exhilarating. But I also don’t feel like it’s clear how to best allocate my attention in the very near short term.

But I also don’t have high confidence on what I should be cutting out or bringing to the forefront in the next 90 days or so. There is simply so much happening (and those effects are potentially existential) that it’s a struggle for me to say “fuck it we ball” to what’s in front of me. What ball? What am I saying fuck it to? Is it a fuck no or a fuck yes?

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 1188 and Existential Stability

I’d like you to consider that our current culture of safetyism is not trying to provide you with any actual safety but rather a pantomime of one. Security theater. And this is why we see whole generations of existentially insecure “adults” trapped looking for more signs of stability.

People aren’t really looking to be economically stable before they start families; they’re looking to be existentially stable.

Luke Burgis

Luke Burgis rightly reminds us that the only existential stability that exists is one in which you make decisions and take responsibility for the consequences.

Yes, sometimes consequences can be quite dire. No, you cannot put off making decisions until you have 100% certainty though I hear the restaurant at the end of the universe has a great drinks menu. Try the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster.

Douglas Adams “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe” the sequel to The Hitchhikers’s Guide to The Galaxy.
Categories
Emotional Work

Day 1187 and No Joke

I don’t really care for April Fools. I can’t say I live in a time where I’m looking for additional cognitive overhead. And yet I am laughing all the time.

It feels a bit silly but sometimes I’ll just lose my shit laughing. Objectively funny things are happening as non-normalcy continues on. The Normie Restoration is upon us. And it’s just fucking funny.

If it feels impossible to pay attention as responsibilities mount then you already know you will cut back. Close the aperture. The return to living your own life. I’m sure they will enrage lots of people. Which is often the sign of a good joke.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 1182 and Unreal

Fairytales aren’t meant to inspire you. They are meant to make you afraid. But fairytales aren’t real.

So there is no need to fear, even when it seems like the scary stories of our childhoods may be becoming real.

Simply marching forward through is all it takes to move to the other side.

Categories
Internet Culture Politics

Day 1177 and Binge Monomyths

I spent the day on binging a monomyth in service of focusing some attention on where we might be going if this is in fact a Cambrian explosion era. If you need a synopsis I’ll extract it from Twitter if I can find the toolsets. If you know the toolset please share them.

The fellowship of the ring will not doom the hobbits to torment and death

My assumption that property rights underlined some of this still stands. If you’ve been holed up in Middle Earth (me too nice place unclear though unclear if I’m a Hobbit or an elf or a dwarf or a wizard or an orc Or Tom Bombadil) everyone thinks Mordor somehow their pet theory or sin. It is industrialism or fascism or some combination of horrors because history becomes legend and legend becomes myth. I don’t know. Ask an autist.

Hug a hippie. Be kind to a hipster. But fight to the death for the hackers. Or pick a princess who likes trade disputes in the galactic empire. I can’t translate all the monomyths in one day.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 1174 and Don’t Everybody All At Once

I have gone through a turbulent reentry into the timeline over the past week or so, and have been steadying into its depths. I’m sure you’ve noticed the pops, pings, hisses and howls of psychological re-pressurizing. We are now at a comfortable cruising altitude for Julie. You are free to roam about the psyche.

A lot of people have been asking me for things. It’s been in a way that is both jarring and seemingly unconnected while simultaneously hitting the apophenia like a thumber hits drumsand on Arrakis. Thump thump thump. Attention is drawn. It has rhythm. Walking without rhythm so as to not attract the worm doesn’t seem to be an option any longer. I recognize your footsteps old man.

I recognize your footsteps old man

Let me try again. Imagine a beautiful woman who may or may not be available is at home during a rainstorm. She’s on her phone but has no need to go out. Everyone who thinks they have a chance texts her. Too much trouble to go out and hunt in the rain but if you’ve got a number maybe. Then maybe you take the trouble. The woman she laughs or sighs depending on the overtures. Sometimes she even responds. Her motives may seem clear to you. The motivation of her suitors may similarly seem clear. Maybe you can even predict. And yet chaos still exists in the hearts of men and women.

I am closing my aperture just as many others are opening theirs back up. Many do not like they see. No matter how much advance warning you may give people about trouble on the horizon if they are trained to ignore they will. Until they can’t. And then in the rainstorm they communicate with the people they can reach. Beacons in the storm.

I myself am less troubled by the rain. It would seem that we are in a moment where any number of timelines have diverged completely. Many storms are raging. The sun shines elsewhere. We continue to have our dead.

We’ve put up fences to keep the sight out. We put up sand bags. But you can’t stop the smell from all the fires. Maybe you can’t outrun the rising tides. Maybe you are a civilization level smoker jumper going from one fire to the next. Maybe an actual one. Maybe there are no weather metaphors that can be tortured into a form that reaches across to you.

The beacons I am responding to, as per usual, are not the ones you’d expect. I wouldn’t be a very good node in the network if I were too programmable but neither can I be so unpredictable that “it” doesn’t reach out. It pings. It pings. It pings. It calls out. It reaches out.

Miller the Detective. It reaches out
Categories
Media Politics

Day 1172 and Inference Ups

Something must have acted as a catalyst on a set of wrongly presumed dormant inputs in my mind yesterday.

A catalyst works by lowering the activation energy required for a chemical reaction to occur, making the process more efficient without being consumed itself

How does a catalyst work PerplexityAI

I delivered a series of schizo-style-poasts so lucid that I turned them easily into an essay on the natural rights basis for the freedom to compute. I barely labored at all to connect the dots. Years of reading, learning and reasoning condensed into form with a few simple connections.

I credit the wide availability of accessible artificial intelligence tools for this magical ease in myself. Programs like PerplexityAI (my preference for asking questions where I need precision in my answer) and ChatGPT (my preference for open ended queries) make it effortless to connect ideas and intuition.

Even a vague input like “story about a town that turns rhinoceros as metaphor for authoritarianism” is enough to get me off to the races with Eugène Ionesco and reopen the intuition library of my mind. This era of easy connections is giving my own inference powers a huge level up.

I can bring up “schizophrenia and capitalism” as a mere footnote and my past reading is immediately available and accessible on my phone with simple cross checks. It’s beyond liberating.

Just a few titles on the topic of schizophrenia in radical poststructuralist scholarship I have in my own library

I can see why it would be disconcerting for powerful institutions and gatekeepers of knowledge that someone like me can go down elaborate scholarship tangents without any guidance.

Sharp readers will enjoy that the examples I use here include Deleuze and Eugène Ionesco. Those who are unfamiliar with why this feels salient and ironic please feel free to go down a few rabbit holes of your own. I’m sure you too will connect the dots as swiftly as I did.