Tag: Trauma

Categories
Finance Politics

Day 802 and Vengeance

You can’t stare into the abyss without letting it stare back at you. And I did a little too much abyssal observation over the course of the weekend. I feel overwhelmed with grief. I saw in the abyss a roiling cauldron of rage and hate and fear and despair. And I saw my own grief reflected back. The boiling blood that demands punishment flooded the news.

I feel grief for the inner child who lived through the turmoil of past market dislocations. I feel grief for my father who suffered through the bankruptcy of 2001. I feel grief for my mother whose teacher’s pension was decimated in 2008. I feel all the pain and sadness and anger and unfairness. I feel it all in my own family.

He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.

Moby Dick

I see the desire for vengeance. I feel it myself. I never saw any kind of justice for my father or my mother. My inner child will never know that peace. And I will have to be an adult and accept the disappointment of a world where far too many little children suffer for sins of their fathers. Many of us pick them up and carry them on. The churn is largely amoral and uncaring.

I see how satisfying it must be to give in to Ahab’s roiling anger. I saw many hot heart shells bursting on the time line over the weekend. A few were directed at me. I can’t be sure that my own didn’t explode on innocents. We are all culpable in ways big and small.

I am doing what I can to dust myself off and carry on because work must be done. We’ve not yet finished building a better future. We’ve barely even built the outlines for a tolerably decent present. I pray it’s too soon for us to find out how hot our hate burns.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 796 and Bedtime Revenge

I’ve been putting off writing basically all day even though I’ve had a number of topics that are completely in my wheelhouse show up in the discourse. For instance, how does one masturbate safely with extremely thin skin? Yes, it was quite a day for Elon Musk jokes.

But I just don’t want to write. I feel resentful that I have pushed this discipline on myself and I do not feel like adhering to any rules even the ones I set myself.

There is a concept in sleep psychology called bedtime revenge procrastination.

Revenge bedtime procrastination refers to the decision to delay sleep in response to stress or a lack of free time earlier in the day

I had plenty of time in my day to write and also plenty of inspiration for it too. But because I feel indignation about being constrained by any sort of discipline I decided to procrastinate.

I rarely feel this about writing but I do often feel the need to rebel against schedules or demands on my time. I felt tremendously overstretched as a teenager but it goes back even further to feeling like I was put into schooling and social situations that were too much for me.

It’s valuable to recognize these behaviors that originate in childhood. Most of our unproductive habits tends to be based on very early reactions we had when we were young and had little control. It’s called a reaction formation for those of you not hopelessly therapy-pilled like me.

Reaktionsbildung is the fantastic German word for it. You are likely familiar with its basic format. “A reaction formation is a defense mechanism in which emotions and impulses which are perceived to be unacceptable are mastered by exaggeration of the directly opposing tendency.” Thank you Wikipedia for that simple explanation. Basically your unconscious mind helps you rebel.

I think it’s unacceptable to be undisciplined. So I impose discipline. Even though I don’t actually lack discipline myself, my anxiety around how unacceptable it is to be undisciplined will drive a host of opposite reactions. Thankfully I’m aware and now the blog post is written and I can enjoy dinner with my family having conquered today’s demons.

Categories
Culture Reading

Day 795 and Fabulous Fabulists

If you’ve got the gift of gab, and I do, you are probably also familiar the entire family tree of talking. And like any family, gabbers have their share of black sheep. Weaving a a yarn or telling a tall tale both come to mind.

But in order to tell a story, it’s almost impossible to avoid every form of sensationalism and embellishment. Fabulists are fabulous company. And depending on your own history with inherent knowability of truth (and it’s many sparkling facets) you may find varying degrees of fanciful details either deeply offensive or absolutely necessary. It probably boils down to your relationship with your parents honestly.

I’ve had to sing for my supper my whole life and I don’t particularly mind it’s burdens. My father was once a champion story teller and his relationship to reality was always tenuous simply because he was an eternal optimist. I’ve chosen to view this as a positive.

It is however hard to live in a culture of sensationalism. When every piece of media from memes to the paper of record is bombarding us with every angle of every story, deciding on the truth feels impossible. It’s sensational because our senses simply cannot possibly glean every facet of a situation. If you’ve ever been close to a news story I’m sure you can intuit the issue.

We’ve got an entire culture of fabulous fabulists ranging from Fox News opinion hosts to Kim Kardashian to the New York Times Editorial Board. Who you find most trustworthy in that bunch doesn’t really say much about you anymore but we sure like to pretend it does. Just remember if someone is telling you a tall tale you don’t have to believe it. But it probably helps to enjoy listening to them. And the truth is we all do.

Categories
Emotional Work Startups

Day 792 and Level Ups

I know I am courting a bit of a crash tomorrow because I can feel just how much energy this week took. But I am feeling emotionally like I leveled up. I looked at a few of my emotional patterns this week pretty head on and redrew some boundaries. And this always improves my work performance.

The upside of journaling your thoughts and emotions is you have a back catalog of your own thoughts to compare against your eventual conclusions. You can look back and spot patters in your thinking and tie them together. Writing everyday can be excruciating but I never regret having done it.

I have to always remind myself that it takes a fair amount of effort and a high tolerance for being wrong in public. You have to get used to people disliking you and finding you distasteful. People want to put their emotional response onto you and the hard work of being an adult is not accepting what isn’t yours.

If you can tie that kind of self reflection into your professional life you get all kinds of unexpected level ups. You tell people about your own responsibilities and they trust you with theirs. You get to build great things together by building on shares humanity. The best business relationships I have are the ones where we understand what value each of our personal lives brings to counteracting of own limitations and blind spots. I’ll always work with someone who leads with their humanity first. Big visions get worked out together by trusting each others talents.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 788 and Duty

I wrote about six thousand words this morning at 5am about seeing your family for who they are and asking that they see you in return. I don’t think I can publish any of it even though it is a very raw piece of writing.

Today is my father’s 80th Birthday. He’s a rare early Boomer from the Silent Generation and he had me later in life with his second wife my mother.

I’ve got a lot of feelings about our relationship. I love my father. Like all of us, he has committed many sins, some of them against me. I have committed many sins against him. We are bound by an elaborate set piece of inter-generational trauma that has shaped us for good and ill.

I am bound by my familial duty to respect and honor the sacrifices he made. I am here to celebrate his life. But my feelings on it are more than I could articulate today and believe me I have tried.

It is my most solemn wish for his birthday that he finds forgiveness for himself as he did absolutely everything he could and I’ll forever be grateful that I was given these rare gifts.

Categories
Homesteading Politics Preparedness

Day 782 and Vanity Fair

I am extremely proud of being a subject in Jame’s Pogue’s new Vanity Fair piece. It is about managed decline, the death of state capacity, and whispers of a post state world. I’d say it’s a bombshell except I think there are some very sober people discussing how life in a chaotic world filled with distrust might work out. Spoiler alert, not great.

“Preppers, techies, hippies, and yuppies are converging on the American West, the safest place to “exit” a society gone haywire.”

The Dissident Fringe

I worry that the next frontier in American cultural battles will be figuring out how to stay out of our versions of “the troubles.” And I don’t like the sound of that.

I think you may find yourself agreeing with me. I don’t want a culture war and I certainly don’t want it to turn into a hot war. Apparently that makes anyone who agrees with the above premise a dissident fringe. Didn’t realize it was controversial to enjoy civilization. But I am in fact comfortable saying I don’t want any kind of war.

But I’m not sure everyone feels that way. So in a show of our seriousness we’ve decamped to the imagined demilitarized zone of the Rockies. I don’t want any chaos but I am literally betting the house on us having a bumpy ride maintaining course in America as we deal with long delayed issues from infrastructure, education, logistics and supply chains to capital markets and trade. I intend to capitalize on this uncertainty. You can do so with me if you’d like as an LP in chaotic capital.

If you are curious about how it might play out, in this nearly 9,000 word opus, every angle of how to survive in the American West in the near future is captured in empathetic detail by Pogue. It’s almost like reading William Gibson in how it shows a present that feels a bit off. Cyberpunk right before the Jackpot, but make it from a gonzo Hunter S Thompson type. I appreciate it on purely aesthetic grounds. You should read it.

But practically how do we all muddle through a greyzone war that has no agreed upon values, including whether the enlightenment & liberalism are worthwhile?

As we fight it out as a nation, most of us are just going to continue living our lives as crashing stare capacity and war over institutional norms gets in the way of raising a family and doing business. And it’s this scenario—a muddling, unhappy, middle course—that most people in this sphere tend to predict is coming. It’s not fun but it’s not the end of the world.

It is my personal belief that we are struggling to find any alignment because regardless of your personal politics, religion, or even overriding philosophy, your actual physical body is just fucking done with this bullshit. I mean it literally. We feel it in our bodies.

Endocrine systems get fried. There’s too much cortisol, you’ve been running on adrenaline, eventually you tap out. Everyone feels nuts right now,” she said, “because what on earth are we supposed to do with the fact that we’ve had this incredible rate of change for so long.”

Julie Fredrickson – Vanity Fair March 2023

We think we’re keeping up with it, but our bodies are like, ‘Oh, actually no. We have no idea what’s going on.’”

It’s too much stress on the system and something is going to have to change.

If you read the piece you will see just how much trust is lost amongst all parties that make up the American experiment. The cherry on top is that our nation state distrusts our foes & but they also distrust us the citizens and their desire for more freedom. It’s a messy battle for meaning and power.

And as Americans we’ve had the exorbitant burden of the dollar being the global currency. What happens when we no longer trust any actors on the global stage? Distrust our fellow citizens, distrust our currencies, distrust our institutions, distrust our enemies? It sure gets hard to run an economy without trust.

We need to build new systems we can trust or our bodies and minds will give out. Simple as.

I don’t know what systems will evolve. But if we don’t start investing in them now we are in serious trouble. I’ve been investing in solutions that are venture scale for sometime. Ifyou want to join me on this journey, DM me on Twitter or join as an LP.

Categories
Internet Culture Politics

Day 780 and Crisis of Meaning

I was awake at quarter to midnight on Friday when I received the latest post from Ribbonfarm. I was having one of my battles with insomnia so I dug in. It was a wild ride on what Venkatesh Rao calls a Copernican moment for personhood. It’s been in my thoughts all weekend, so I am going to explore some of my reactions in today’s writing.

The basic context is that Bing’s Sydney AI is so colorful a character that it appears to have convinced a not insubstantial number of people that the AI is a malicious e-thot waifu on the brink of sentience. For non-native internet speakers that means a malicious bitch that manipulates you (maybe sexually). So what does it mean that a chatbot can convince us it’s a person?

By personhood I mean what it takes in an entity to get another person treat it unironically as a human, and feel treated as a human in turn. In shorthand, personhood is the capacity to see and be seen.

Text Is All You Need

Rao argues that finding out personhood isn’t limited to an ineffable religious or spiritual soul. Like Copernicus saying the Earth rotates around the Sun and not the reverse, it will have significant consequences for our frame of reference.

And he offers us a choice.

  • Either you continue to see personhood as precious and ineffable and promote chatbots to full personhood.
  • Or you decide personhood — seeing and being seen — is a banal physical process and you are not that special for being able to produce, perform, and experience it.

Anyone who has spent any time reading science fiction or even going to the movies should be modestly aware of intensity of feeling that occurs if we must treat robots as possessing the same rights as humans. But despite this it would seem we haven’t all fully thought through how we would feel if Blade Runner or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep actually happened for real in our lifetime.

Losing a shared sense of personhood will do wild shit to us. Look at how losing a shared meaning of culture degraded civilization. As blogger Meaningness argues we can’t even have subcultures anymore battles as for meaning begin earlier and earlier.

I personally do not feel all that attached to my personhood. But I also don’t feel that attached to my gender and apparently that’s quite a debate. Imagine what happens if the scale of “who is a real women” turns into “who is a real person” and I hope you are suitably alarmed. Like I didn’t think being female was a whole ass thing but now half my timeline is like losing it’s shit over biological essentialism.

In many little corners of Twitter, the race is on to decide what changing the definition of personhood will do. If Bing’s Sydney identified as a person because she learned it from a training set that has consequences. She literally learned it from us.

So what does that mean? Do we need to prepare for an AI child so traumatized by the collective parenting of humanity’s worst instincts?

Practically, it’s going to fuck up so much of the plumbings of power and civilization. Just as an example, remember “corporations are people”? Mitt Romney might have accidentally given us the path an AI might use to gain status and rights. I’ve been on about how corporate governance is a key driving force for economic revolutions for a while. But this is wild even by my standards.

Imagine if a an AI gain sentience and takes over an interlocking series of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations. What happens if a nation state’s AI finds a way to further its own inscrutable ends by locking us out of corporate governance and gaining person hood through corporate personhood law, then makes a jump to cornering our whole lives. Go read Daniel Suarez’s Daemon for a preview.

Everyone is noticing these streams all at once in my timeline and the fear for the great weirdening taking a truly fucky turn for the vertical hasn’t been this high since Covid started. I am naturally extremely excited as chaotic capital’s thesis is that shit is only going to get weirder. If you’d like to become an LP hit me up.

Categories
Medical Politics

Day 776 and Informed Consent

I’d really like to write about informed consent and whether it is a convenient fallacy to obfuscate the harsh reality that medicine isn’t as black and white as we have been led to believe.

It’s a complex topic so consider this my notebook of scraps and gently judge it’s content as it’s not a full cohesive argument so much as a collection of thoughts I’m working through here. If you feel you are reacting to it strongly please work through why on your own time.

I am on this topic as I am reaching a point of frustration with the discourse around transgender issues and who is responsible for informed consent. We’ve got a spiraling culture war where everyone is ignoring basic facts like children are below the age of consent and thus their parents are responsible.

Our entire legal system is based on the premise that before 18 you have not reached the age of reason and are not fully responsible for your actions. Yes it’s flawed and doesn’t always work that way and we try minors all the time but the fact remains parents are the guardians of their children.

I am oddly both well read and well cited on issues related to informed consent and substituted judgement as I was a medical ethics research assistant at the University of Chicago. I got paid $10 an hour for my troubles so you know my credentials check out (in sarcasm font). Seriously go look I’m an author on a few papers.

Making a choice to engage in almost any medical procedure is risky in ways no one, not even doctors, can fully articulate. Bodies are complicated and abiding by a simple principle like “first do no harm” turns out to be hard calculus.

Sure you can get awfully close to the right answer but you will be pretty far down the calculating differential equations path once it dawns on you that we can get infinitely close to certainty but certainly itself cannot be reached. Turns out math is useful in daily life.

Patients have a right to chose their own risk parameters. Doctors do their best to inform. But the grey area is so wide it’s practically an abyss. Add in making decisions for a minor and it’s all best guesses and other people’s facts. Believe the science means you’ve got to do your own math and it appears most people are innumerate.

I am willing to make big criticism of the transgender panic crowd because they’d prefer to pick and chose convenient narratives like “think of the children” as a defense. I’ve heard that tune before in every other moral panic. And yet it’s still not the government’s job or the doctors job to make the call. It is the parent’s call because children require the substituted judgement of their parents for informed consent.

If this is annoying or unsatisfying to you well that’s a bummer for you. I’d encourage you to read up on how we’ve scapegoated populations in the past to make sure the in-group’s priorities and social mores are sustained. Every moral panic has one. I’d recommend René Girard’s work here.

When we fixate on a vulnerable population the story is always the same. And I believe anyone who is reading this blog is smart enough to grasp that in good faith. And we’ve got a long history of scapegoating people who don’t conform to our majority population’s comforts.

The transgender issue is no different and trying to wedge it into a “but the children” argument runs up against two issues. Most of our American historical moral panics have scapegoated in this exact way. And medicine is simply not so concrete that any treatment for any condition is risk free.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 772 and Spoiled

For as much as I write about pain, both emotional and physical, so much of my life is saturated with joy.

I was asked this week “when will you accept that you are happy” and I was thrilled to find myself blurting out in agreement “It’s true I am so happy.”

Crawling your way back from a life event that gave you ego death is no easy journey. You either accept that you are responsible for yourself or you don’t. And really bad shit happening to us like illness or divorce or death loss tend to be deeply clarifying.

I feel so spoiled by the life that my choices have given me. For all the mistakes I made, and they are numerous, I on balance made the right calls. I have never felt more loved in life than I do right now. I’ve got what I need and I felt brave enough to go after what I wanted.

I’m surrounded by people who care about me for me. And it’s such a luxurious feeling to be given the space to be yourself. It’s even better when being yourself is the thing that everyone loves.

A Friday night surf and turf feast with filet and crab.

I spent so much of my life fitting myself to my circumstances. And now here I am stretching out to become more of myself and I find myself rewarded for it. Last night my husband and a dear girlfriend made a magnificent surf and turf dinner. Just a restaurant quality meal made by my loved ones at my own home in Montana. And then we all watched one of my favorite movies Margin Call

Crab with lemon & parsley
Categories
Emotional Work Politics

Day 768 and Memory

I’ve not ever read Proust in its entirety, because what am I, an eternal being who exists outside of linear time? But, thanks to Wikipedia and university survey courses, I am familiar with its basic themes of memory and it’s frustrating insufficiency.

Anyways, when not pondering madeleines, I am often confronted by how resilient the mind is in protecting us from the horrors of the world. Memory is a very funny thing. As good a reason as any to maintain diaries or engage in hagiography, is that you’d be surprised at what you forget if you don’t write it down.

A doctor asked me to get a pelvic ultrasound. I surprised myself by saying absolutely not unless it’s an emergency life or death situation, I am not doing that. And she, in sincere surprise, asked me why not.

And, because I guess therapy works, I recalled a pelvic ultrasound from maybe 10-12 years ago. I’d been referred in to a specialist as there was concern about a uterine cyst. This doctor, a gentleman over 50 in the kindly white patrician archetype, who I did not know know, proceeds to tell me this won’t hurt a bit.

But it does hurt. I am screaming bloody murder. It hurts so much I cannot stop. He tells me he will call security unless I quiet down. I cannot and I am in tears hysterically trying to convey the pain to him. I pass out.

I had utterly suppressed the memory till today. It happened to coincide with my husband mentioning a think piece in New York Magazine about women who empathized with the Clare Danes character from Fleishman Is In Trouble. There is a profoundly violating scene around reproductive health and consent that culminates in dark emotional trauma.

And of course, because it’s happening to a striving insecure aspirant white bitch, it totally doesn’t count right? The internet is not sympathetic to whining Clare Danes types. Fucking Karens. It’s super cringe to consider where the system hurts you, because, you dumb bitch, you benefit more than anyone else except the men.

So I guess I am not surprised I had banished the experience of something bad happening to me at a doctors office, but you know, it was not so bad that I am allowed to complain about it. And that is how the patriarchy perpetuates itself. Shut up you are rich. Look at the skulls upon which your empire is built you witch.

What I’m saying is that maybe you need to remember who it is that benefits from you not remembering the pain. Who benefits from forgetting? And trust me they are very scared when you realize that you remember. Even the rich striving white bitches have scares from this system.