I laid down for a short nap after my workday and promptly fell asleep. I had to force myself back awake so I could write. I could easily sleep straight through.
I don’t know if I should give in to the impulse to be honest. I know I should do other things on my list long of “to do” items but even pleasant simple ones like wash face and eat dinner seem like too much.
I want to slide back into my nap and let it ride. So I will wrap this up and do so. Three paragraphs is enough to count right?
I’m on my way to the Baltics and Nordic countries for the next few weeks. I’m doing a tour to see what Tallinn and Helsinki have to offer as two of the more interesting and established startup hubs in Europe. If you are based in Northern Europe hit me up!
I’ve come to accept lounger trips and more time on the road as the new “work from home” has become “work from your point of maximum leverage.” I do find that even with the glamor of being on the road, there is something about flying that makes me feel as if my body and soul have briefly stretched their bonds.
Damien’s theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can’t move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.
William Gibson – Pattern Recognition
It’s 8am in Zurich and my soul doesn’t feel as if it’s caught up with my body. I’m in an airport lounge drinking my third espresso. Both my Whoop and my Apple Watch are sure I only got three hours of sleep.
I had a regional flight that got me to Chicago from Bozeman first thing Thursday morning. The Polaris lounge was quite good at O’Hare if you were wondering. I had some very decent seafood linguini.
But my Chicago to Zurich flight was that odd 8 hour “overnight” that goes from 2pm Central to midnight. That translates into 6am landing in Switzerland local. The only way you get any sleep is by forcing the issue with pharmaceuticals.
I guess Ambien and Melatonin can only do so much against a regular circadian rhythm. I’ve had three espressos in the lounge here and I’m really debating an another. I was greeted with a magnificent full moon over the river in Zurich. My phone didn’t do it justice.
My final legal of the journey doesn’t begin until 10am. So I just just need stay alert enough to make the final flight, keep an eye on my bags, and drag myself to my Airbnb in Tallinn. Adjusting from there will take the time they it taken
When I first started writing every single day I had modest goals. I wanted to instill a habit of writing more often. My initial goal was to write daily for one month as that seemed both significant but also manageable. But I deliberately didn’t put any pressure on what I would write or for how long I’d keep at it.
Once I had reached my first milestone of writing daily for an entire month, I began considering extending the habit. Maybe I could do it for two months? Maybe I could do it for 100 days? Every new milestone made me excited to reach for a new one.
Once I got to 500 days, I began to feel confident discussing the possibility of reaching 1000 days of writing. I even called that blog post my halfway point. Still I wasn’t sure even then that I’d actually make it to a thousand days. A lot can go wrong in a year or two. But as I learned, with a little bit of perseverance, a lot can go right. Or if you will indulge the pun, a lot can go “write” too.
Still, even as I became accustomed to the habit, I didn’t want to do anything to jinx it. Locking myself into an outcome seemed like a recipe for disappointment. But locking myself into a daily habit? That seemed like a recipe for success. I knew I could keep showing up.
My philosophy for writing has been to take it one day at a time. Habits compound just like money. Small change over time can have a dramatic outcome. I committed to showing up and putting the proverbial pen to paper every day.
And here I am a thousand days later with enough writing for any number of other goals. I’ve got answers to most of the regular questions I encounter in my personal and professional life. I’ve got enough content to turn into a book if I’m so inclined. The volume of my writing is so extensive I could easily train my own artificial intelligence agent.
I don’t know what I’ll do with this body of work other than continue to hyperlink it together and see where it takes me.
And to answer the most obvious question, I do plan to keep writing. I don’t have any desire to stop. I enjoy this practice. It’s conceivable there are other milestones ahead of me. Maybe I double it. Or maybe at the end of the year I decide three years of writing daily is enough.
Who can say? I reached the stretch goal I set for myself. It’s an unbounded journey from here.
Tomorrow is the big day in my daily writing experiment. I am chuffed to see 999 on the title. It seems very auspicious to me. While 888 was a lucky day, today’s number feels like I’m on the cusp of something.
I am set to travel to the Baltics shortly. Perhaps I’ll find some next phase on the adventure of life. I need this optimism today as I don’t feel particularly lucky or auspicious today. I unexpectedly had a few things go wrong this morning and then was rewarded for it with a migraine. I was very angry about it as I had a lot of exciting things planned for the day.
I have to remember that trying to get to the larger numbers is about compounding the many small days filled with mistakes, imperfections and failures. Life happens all around you at inconvenient times. It’s how you muddle through at your goals steadily over time.
Maybe it’s the sheer busyness of day to day life but I didn’t notice it becoming fall. I felt as if I was in the clutches of summer forever. But then the first day past after the autumnal equinox we turned on the heat.
I woke up to the comforting sounds husband building a fire in our wood stove. What a relief to have a chill in the air. You’d think in Montana we’d have scant need for air conditioning but we easily had two straight months of running it daily this summer.
We installed mini-splits this year because we got caught in a heatwave last summer without so much as a window unit. It was brutal. Air conditioning just isn’t a standard feature in Montana because it didn’t have to be. But it sure seems like going forward it will be. Invest in HVAC companies if you are looking for a growth sector.
I’m happy for the reprieve. I don’t intend to be anywhere hot anytime in the near future. My travel for the remainder of the fall will involve colder climates. The seasons will favor me till April. That old aphorism “make hay while the sun shines” doesn’t apply well to me. I’m more of a “do business when it’s dark and cold” type.
I’ve got some travel coming up that I’m excited about. I’ll be headed to Europe and more specifically the Baltics. I’ve got plans for both Tallinn and Helsinki. If you are based there and want to hang out drop me a line and let’s get together.
It’s funny how longer trips act as a focus on what’s really crucial to get done. The care that goes into making sure your life (and the items in it) functional is constant.
I often put off errands and services with a “maybe next week” mentality. One week becomes one month and then suddenly I haven’t had my haircut since May and it’s October. So I’m packing a bunch of “to do” appointments to make care the care and maintenance of myself, my body and my belongings.
Even as I place orders for vitamins and find myself reorganizing the toiletries cabinet, I am reminded that the list of care and maintenance never gets any shorter.
There is always a dentist appointment or a salon visit. I’ve got a pile of clothes that need mending and tailoring that hasn’t been addressed since before the pandemic. Yes, I’m one of those types that thinks a tailor and a cobbler are crucial services for civilized living. I like to take care of what I own. That includes everything from my body to my boots.
You see the marker up in the title that says “Day 990?” Yeah, it means I’m getting close to a thousand straight days of writing.
It’s not a thousand posts interspersed over years or weeks or decades. Though that would still be impressive. It’s a thousand days in a row of writing. No days off. No vacations. No missed days. Every single day I write something and post it on here publicly.
I got started with this experiment in the middle of the pandemic on January 1st 2021. A lot has happened in the intervening years. And I’ve chronicled so much that happened in my own life. I still have quite a bit of 2023 to go but if you want to see my favorite posts from 2022 and 2021.
Because I approach this as a habit, I am intending to make to my thousandth post but I can’t say for sure even with ten days left that I’ll make it. A lot can happen in ten days so it’s entirely possible I won’t. Though the odds have never been better.
I do intend to continue the habit of writing every single day past day 1000th. It would be weird to stop in the middle of the year and I like the symmetry of an entire year of writing as much as I aspire to write Day 1000 in a title.
At this point changing how I write would be an adjustment. I often wonder if I could manage being more polished or more researched or more focused. But I suspect that those types of documents come on their own timelines and I’d simply write more to accommodate them. I wouldn’t necessarily want to lose this daily journaling habit. Something about keeping it simple and consistent appeals to me. So I’ll round the turn and see if I make it to the finish line. And then I’ll see if I keep going.
Humans are horny for hierarchy. We are eager to give our power away as a species. Please will someone else just be responsible for making our decisions for us? Can someone point me to the person in charge? “Take me to your leader!”
If someone seems smarter, richer, more capable, more aggressive, heck even if they have better taste than us, they become an instant candidate for us delegating our authority over to them. My most popular blog post ever was about dickriding. Yes it was about Elon Musk’s fans.
I’ll be the first to say that people who court you to gain power should be viewed as suspect. But someone who has power is not themselves always suspect by default. I know it’s a fine distinction. But people fall into positions of authority simply by going out and being competent. Competence is a fast route to power.
Sure being competent has a lot of downsides. Suddenly you’ve got power you maybe didn’t want. We have an incentive shunt power off to someone else as it generally sucks to be in charge. It’s energetically expensive to be responsible. Just ask one of your friends with a toddler.
Sometimes we have to wield power because it’s our job to take care of our corner of the universe. Again ask someone with a toddler. We are in charge of sustaining some portion of the grand experiment called life. Even if it’s just our own families. Even if it’s just yourself.
So why am I titling this post “I am Beff Jezos?” Right now online there is a movement gaining recognition for encouraging people to have agency and build for the future. It’s a movement that wants you to own your own power. And to help others get more power of their own.
One of the anonymous posters associated with it calls himself Based Beff Jezos as a play on Jeff Bezos the founder of Amazon and the meme “based” as in Lil B’s “based means being yourself.” It’s a silly joke.
The movement itself identifies as e/acc which is a shorthand for effective accelerationism. It encourages people to do more, build more, take charge of their own corner of the world and make the future arrive sooner. The tagline? Accelerate.
It’s principles are simple. The future will arrive and we should build like it’s coming. Slowing things down, or even worse, going backwards, is not a solution to our problems. We can only go forward. If you’d prefer a driving metaphor, we should accelerate into the curve. Slowing down just spins out the car. Civilization is the car.
So what, you want to just uplift humanity, build AI and populate the universe with the maximum diversity and quantity of life?
e/acc
The movement is more of a meme space than anything else. It is decentralized. I’ve not met anyone that runs it though I’ve spoken to many vocal supporters. And I’ve chatted with folks that are at the nexus of of its online presence. Everyone is positive and friendly. Most of them are anonymous. I’m not even of sure if some of the accounts are singular or plural. Which is pretty cool. It doesn’t have a president or a CEO or even a founder who owns anything with any amount of authority. It could be one dude or multiple dudes gender non specific.
It’s just a bunch of people who make stuff. It’s popular amongst engineers but it’s an ethos that to anyone who can make something. Even this blog post counts. I am e/acc as much as anyone.
Naturally if no one is in charge it’s a bit threatening. If there is no hierarchy how do we control it? If no one is in charge then what will we do if someone under their banner does something bad?
Such is the beauty of an idea. A meme can’t really be owned. A decentralized group of goofballs on the internet can’t really be snuffed out for bad think. Maybe a few nodes go down. They literally cannot kill all of us.
The messages does seem to be resonating. I know being hopeful has improved my mood. A decent number of people who make shit want the future to come a little faster. They want more people with more ownership of the building process.
More complexity and more abundance is appealing even if it seems impossible to achieve. Don’t worry, just build for your corner of the world. Put power and responsibility in as many hands as possible. We can build it together.
You too can have a toddler and own the joy of being responsible for your corner of the universe. It’s dangerous for sure. Folks will tell you for your own good you need to have a hierarchy and someone responsible for the power.
But guess what? It can be you. And sure heads will get bonked. Crying will ensue. Remember I said ask someone with a toddler? What if you are the competent and in charge parent? Shit right?
We’ve got to go forward. I am Beff Jezos. You too are Beff Jezos. And they can’t stop us all from arriving at the future. Go ahead and accelerate into the curve.
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.
Do you recall learning Hippocratic Oath at some point in your schooling?
First do no harm
That turns out to not even be in the original oath but one of the many varied additions over the ages. The more often repeated phrase is translated as follows. “I will abstain from all intentional wrong-doing and harm.”
The document dictated standards like keeping professions secrets and avoiding using poisons knowingly for suicide or abortions. But somehow in popular imagination “do no harm” has really stuck.
Now we are stuck with the precautionary principle as it’s heir. The principle suggests there is a social responsibility to protect “the public” from harm when there may be a plausible risk even in theory. Big ups to Hans Jonas’s imperatives on responsibility for giving us the ethical frameworks for technological skepticism.
We apply the precautionary principle in many fields from medicine to the military. It suggests precautionary protections should be relaxed only if there is evidence that no harm will result. It’s for your own good!” It’s included as a statutory in some areas of law. Progress can’t be too fast lest someone get hurt
But before you give too much credit caution, it’s important realize the cost of inaction can be high.
As Mercatus Center’s Adam Thierer put it, “Where there is uncertainty about future risks, the precautionary principle defaults to play‐it‐safe mode by disallowing trial‐and‐error progress, or at least making it far more difficult.”
The inclination to play things safe can have incredibly high costs for people who need progress. Much the current debate around artificial intelligence is centered on doomsday scenarios. Safety and alignment researchers bring up terrifying scenarios as justification for taking things slow.
But we shouldn’t be too quick to dismiss what AI can do to make life better. You want to tell someone with a painful chronic illness it’s better to wait on medical progress because of some theoretical harm? They already live with an all too real harm that we should be just as eager to to fix with powerful new tools like AI.
I’d rather we adopt a more ambitious attitude towards problem solving. Fuck your safetyism.
We need to put a complete moratorium on the precautionary principle until we’re sure that it doesn’t have any negative consequences