No matter how trying the week may have been, a day of rest is a day for chores. Fighting entropy is the fight to remain among the living. I feel more than a little bit behind on my goals and obligations. Doing chores is the way I exert my own will over a crisis.
I hope that anyone wondering why I’ve not been up to date on correspondence over the last week can glance at the last few days of posts and extend me grace. I’m not sure if I have done anyone wrong but be slow but I notice my own tardiness.
The benefit of public diaries and social media is that it provides a kind of open “what is happening” context for everyone to see why their emails and messages are not being returned.
I was able to do some amount of personal chores around the Airbnb. Then I was hit with another round of migraines and had to lay down. I am not out of the woods yet it would seem. Maybe tomorrow.
I’m sick. I’m in a foreign country. I feel fragile. The way life, and history, keeps progressing it’s not surprising that I feel fragile, sad, and wistful.
It’s my birthday today. I’ve been looking forward to the new decade all year if I’m honest. The final official marker of middle age is now mine. The childhood yearning to be an adult is now finally satisfied. There is no youth left for me. Only the joyful responsibility of shouldering my burdens.
I’ve never been good at making the safe choices in life. I make choices that are driven by my desire to live a life that makes sense to me. Those choices don’t always make sense to others. I take risks. I suffer their consequences. I pick myself up off the floor. I start over. My regrets are few and my experiences varied and colorful.
I feel proud of where I am in my life. I’ve failed in ways both significant and silly. Any success I’ve had were paid in full by my failures.
I am trembling between excitement and exhaustion at the prospect of the next decade of my life. I have personal and professional goals that are risky. Unlikely even. But I feel as if I must take this new decade upon me with as much energy and momentum as I can muster.
If I do not speed up, then the friction of the world will slow me down. My life is filled with friction. I know the pain of a chronic disease and the curse of Cassandra.
But these are motivating factors for me. I see these risks as worth taking for an interesting life. I hope my next decade is as interesting as my last. And I intend to make the choices required to bring about that outcome.
I feel awful. I’m having some kind of serious histamine reaction and the cascade of stress and secondary symptoms have been extremely hard to cope with. I do not feel well physically.
I dislike feeling fragile when the wider world feels like it’s in utter chaos. You’d think I’d be used to it. I’ve staked my reputation on increasing volatility.
It’s simply frightening to feel fragile physically and emotionally at the same time while so far from home. As much as I love Tallinn it is a place that is not my home. It takes extra energy to navigate a new place. I love it but it does drain me.
I hope with rest and taking things slowly I can help myself navigate through the fragility. All types of things contribute to making you feel safe. Sleeping a little bit more. Eating nutritious food. Meditating and breathing exercises. Maintaining a healthy routine is the luxury we cannot forgo when faced with crisis.
I hope I’m taking care of myself well. Seeing the fragility and accepting it reminds me to do what is necessary so I can keep going no matter the stress.
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?
My circadian rhythm has succumbed to the shock of the current crisis. I’m currently on the same time zone as Israel as I’m in Tallinn in Estonia. It’s been a windy weekend with a record breaking wind storm so folks have been advised to stay inside.
That means I’ve been online watching a war breakout with no news delay or influencer filters. There is no defining set of news narratives. Twitter is broken but it’s still largely moved by the enormous traffic of the American dominance on its algorithm. Stories build but American news can whipsaw a single image into our consciousness.
Except there is no one to trust on the platform. The old verification system of the blue check didn’t provide much except that if someone said they worked confidence that the source. It was not a great system. But now there is no system.
It doesn’t seem as if there is a functional trust and safety team at Twitter. So a lot of people have seen horrors that has previously been buffed away by content warnings and nerfings. It’s a good thing and a bad thing.
Keep in mind “trust and safety” is gone might be a fancy way of saying none of the intelligence services have any natural dominance, none of the legacy news institutions are caught up to internet OSINT and you will see things.
And I have. By the time something hits the American audience I’ve had almost an entire work day with the information you are just seeing. And it’s been horrifying. Because it is. And being on the same time zone really lays bare just how much narrative fog permeates war in a crumbling corporate internet.
There are few shocks as jarring as waking up to a war starting. I was preparing to leave for Germany when the current Ukrainian conflict boiled over. I woke up in Estonia today to news of an escalation in Israel. No matter who you are or where you live, the existential dread of a hot conflict finds you.
Trying to orient your life around exogenous shocks of violence and conflict is part of the human condition. One that we seem as yet unable to evolve beyond no matter how much we elevate rationality. Every time a new rift emerges in the fragile status quo of the global consensus, I find myself wishing I were more surprised. But it’s pointless to be surprised by chaos.
I hesitate to weigh in on a conflict as it emerges as no matter how closely you watch the news it’s a mess of conflicting narratives. All I know is that more external risks like war will continue to drive volatility across all our human systems.
Our many complex human systems, from trade to politics, are already riddled with known endogenous internal risks. You start adding in more variables that can impact a given system and we don’t fully understand what is exogenous anymore. What’s outside the system if we’ve networked the whole planet?
I wish I believed a sunnier outlook was reasonable in the immediate term. Destiny remains in the hands of men. And we are a species prone to reactionary behavior. We are evolved to it. But we are tied together on this planet and every conflict, shock and unexpected event can ripple out to touch us all.
I’ve been working on my Q3 investor update all day. I am a little behind my own artificial deadline for it as I believe it’s good to get it out in the first week of the new quarter. I am chasing down a bigger theme in my market insights section that is being refined as I rework my own narrative understanding in real time.
I feel that there is a collective disagreement on consensus reality. We’ve got multiple worldviews that are being hotly contested. Epistemic status humble as the kids say. And so I am doing what I can to get outside the presumed worldview of my own geography and nation and see if a more global perspective is helpful.
But being able to see any of these different vantage points and narratives will require me to be accepting of other competing or adjacent narratives. The presumption is that I can control my own reactions. My body has to be open. So I am here with my Apollo Neuro band sending sound waves to my body while I listen to Endel’s chill program on my noise canceling headphones. I plan to do a Non-Sleep Deep Rest mediation after I’m finished.
I can only give my best performance when I’m sure my body is in a non-reactive place. Parasympathetic is sometimes called “rest and digest” versus its more active sympathetic nervous system partner “fight or flight.” We must assess our world and the many competing perceptions from a place of non-reactivity. It is the only way through the fog of the moment. Never let the stress of the moment distract you.
I really appreciate being able to get into a routine in a new city. Doing some grocery shopping is a grounding experience. If you can sort out breakfasts and sensible lunches you can probably keep a routine going.
I personally love the search for a grocery store that caters to a hipster class. There is always demand from some some band of picky upper socioeconomic band that expects a lot of its retail.
I found a spot inside of a mall that appeared to be some variant of an Erewon meets Whole Foods. It had an organic section. It had several choices for high end vinegars. There were multiple types of fish counters. I got some gravlox and horseradish sauce. I got some nice bread for toasts. I was got a nice head of lettuce and some balsamic.
I was very pleased with the basics for living. I realize it’s a little cringe to discuss a day in the life but I think people imagine much more glamorous meals. When the reality is always some variant of prepared food no matter where you are. Though I will say I appreciated good bread and good smoked fish. I’m feeling very cozy Baltic. It’s nice when a town has good vibes.
I’m such a homebody that I sometimes thinks the joys of travel are lost on me. But then I go shopping and I remember that markets are muses. What sells tells you something about a place.
Now you may think crass commercialism is more of a vice than a virtue. But I think it’s wise to hear what works. A market can tell you about what’s popular. Being an American is a niche experience but we’ve got a bigger footprint than our mere population would suggest.
But also the spoils of capitalism have priorities that are about the efficiency of the market. And you see it in every large city of any density or wealth. The layers for consumption of good and services have a logic to them that defies too much local concern. The algorithms have trust and safety teams but scale takes you pretty far. And every city at a certain size needs market logics.
It’s just important to remember each market has a local gem. There are great performers that outclass by wide orders of magnitude. It’s usually some combination of what appeals locally but is also legible to the larger global cosmopolitan skill sets.
Many of the food wars are just city tastes fighting country tastes. Some situations are more market based and transactional. Sometimes that is even good. I’m personally delighted that I can show up to a city and get food delivered. There is always orange soda brand in every market. And you can always get French fries.
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.
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.
Leaving behind Montana
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.
A full moon over the water as the lights of the metropolis shine on before sunrise in Zurich
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
