Tag: Stream of Consciousnesses

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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.

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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
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.

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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.

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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
Politics

Day 958 and Civic Engagement

We hosted a little get together at our house this evening. Montana has been in the midst of a renaissance of optimism. It was encouraging to have thirty or so of our neighbors over to discuss our priorities for Montana’s future.

The state has many challenges ahead of it as a result of increasing growth and desirability. You can choose to approach that as an opportunity with a growth mindset. Or you can shrink back and pass laws limiting trouble and keeping things safe. Here in Montana a diverse set of constituents struck back against government overreach.

We discussed the recently passed YIMBY policies in Montana’s 2023 Legislative Session and the Frontier Institute‘s future plans to ensure Montana is a place that all can thrive.

While we all disagreed about a lot, what cemented the coalition is that we all agree that we want more freedom and less government. And you’d be surprised at how much flows from that basic positive oriented.

It was a pleasant night to stay indoors as it was past 90 outside. We had pizza and salad from Sidewall Pizza. And we chatting about knocking down bureaucratic barriers and ensuring opportunity for all. I know it sounds hokey but I honestly fell hopeful.

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Community Internet Culture

Day 957 and Will It Blend?

We are deep in the dog days of summer. I ran a fever and found myself dead asleep till nearly 1pm as my body valiantly struggled to process deluge of stress hormones I’d let pile up. I missed recording a podcast but the fever broke. I’ll catch up.

Meanwhile, on the website formerly known as Twitter, an epic battle of meaning was waged. The group mind egregore known as “this particular corner of Twitter” asked you to take a pill and/or hit a button.

A classic “my child said” poast with a twist on Newcomb’s Problem and Nash Equilibrium

And thousands of jacked in minds, from neu-fascism-IQers-must-speciate-eugenicists & red-rose transhumanist-luxury-space-communists to normie-Dad-banger-poasters, all raced to decide the meaning of the ultimate symbol.

Who lives and who dies when we can no longer coordinate exclusively within our ingroup?

Absolute fucking chaos. The collective of our shared internet went into a frenzy of consensus making.

Would you walk away from Omelas? Or would you save yourself? Would the gods of rationalism betray your soul with the knowledge that the good of the one can and does outweigh the good of the many?

In which selective phrasing has me deciding I shouldn’t jump into a blender but because I am me I also must immediately counter signal

Are you willing to step into a blender to save the normies? No? Yes? Fuck! Roko (of Basilik fame) redefined the problem space.

And then because we all must troll, we all stepped into a blender for the good of our species. Well, I wanted to annoy Roko. So I said I would when I voted that I wouldn’t. Because all serious social question can and should be trolled.

The choice is yours and yours alone

In the space of a day, we all leapt into the proverbial blender to save the naive, the kind, and the fucking stupid. It’s what Spock have done for us. Pro-social is the logical choice. Or is it? Is it better to be red than dead? None of us know.

I personally hope we all continue to create an eternal refinement culture of love and hope across all cycles of time to come.

I found it to be a privilege to be a member of the hive mind. We are all the alignment. Our consensus efforts inside the plutocrats toy is more likely to bring about the singularity than almost any other activity I can imagine.

It is a privilege to be in the egregore. My smol sensemaker syncretic smooth brain being hooked up into the wider hive for “Red vs Blue Walk Away From Omelas Boogaloo” is quite literally divine. To retweet each others bangers is to see the face of God. Just try and remember the truth. There is no blender.

Categories
Community Internet Culture

Day 956 and A Mood

It’s clearly the deep dog days of summer as I’m in a bit of a mood. I’ve got all kinds of things on my mind and yet it’s slow going executing on anything. The doldrums has certainly gripped me. And yet I take hope.

This corner of Twitter is going through a paroxysmal fit of whether it’s rational to be embracing pro-social behavior. Without having to cite all my sources we had Jane Goodall being packaged into a deceleration meme about removing a billion or so people.

And a guy named Roko was shocked that people might hope the golden rule is a universal ideal. And so a few of us jumped into a metaphorical blender for the good of the species.

So I think my entire mood when staring down the barrel of the future is “what’s it going to cost me in my soul?”

At this stage of the simulation I have to ask
What color are the pills, and how many people are dying?

The cost of knowing it’s not just about us is slamming into the hard reality that you can’t do a damn thing about other people. And so we have to ask if we preserve what we have or do we leap into the great unknown. I don’t know anyone who is in the mood for much safety at the moment. There doesn’t seem like much to be had.

Categories
Medical

Day 950 and Good Teeth

I’ve always quite liked dental hygiene. Twice daily brushing and flossing after every meal has always been one of those daily habits for me. I do not compromise on it. You’ve probably seen me with a toothpick after a meal. Taking care of my teeth is just engrained into my routine.

It would seem a lifetime of good habits pays off. I’ve only had a handful of cavities (I think two) and no issues with grinding, my gums, or other periodontal problems. My teeth have been so chill that when I was broke I went to the NYU dental school for care. I learned a lot and it was cheap.

I finally found myself a dentist in Montana and went in for an intake and a cleaning today. It has been about a year since my last dental visit. I came through with a clean bill of health. They took a bunch of X-rays and fancy imagery and nothing looks problematic. Flossing really does pay off it would seem. You should do it!

I am happy my teeth are in good shape but slightly pissed. You see last year a dentist in Boulder did her best to convince me that I needed a root canal. A lifetime of good dental health and I’m being pushed for oral surgery for a tooth that didn’t even hurt.

I said I didn’t feel any pain or discomfort so I wasn’t inclined to get surgery prophylactically. She seemed a bit pissed. She did her best to insist I go see an oral surgeon. I demurred. I did not want an additional medical issue that was voluntary.

Now a year later, a dentist with much more advanced equipment could not locate the issue and told me I’ve got nothing to worry about. Maybe she got it wrong? He couldn’t quite be sure what she saw as his imagery and X-rays didn’t show any issues. I had no sensitivity or nerve issues so it’s possible she got it wrong.

We have a tendency to believe credentialed professionals like doctors, dentists and lawyers. They must know right? I’d never have considered saying no to a root canal before last year but at the time I just didn’t feel like I could handle an invasive procedure. And thank goodness I pushed it off.

And it does turn out that dentistry as a profession has issues with unnecessary treatments and fraud. This investigation in the Atlantic discusses how prevalent unnecessary treatments are in America.

Had I not turned down a root canal last year I would have subjected myself to something I didn’t need. Given my chronic health issues, you can imagine that I’m not eager to spend money and time on treatments I don’t need. Particularly ones known to be painful with the potential for side effects like infection. So be careful out there. And I hope you have a dentist like mine in Montana.