My natural optimism is looking for the positive. If you go in for numerology 14 is a good number for the moment as 1 represents independence, leadership and change while 4 is stability and balance.
The world is shifting but my path is clear in front of me. We may be on a chaotic course but the adaption brings us new opportunities. I’ll just do my best to get enough sleep when things get exciting
Running red light for 2-3 hours before bedtime may help lower cortisol levels and increase melatonin production. Plus it gives your bedroom a fun boudoir vibe so we thought why not try it?
Philips Hue 60W Bulbs
We bought a set of Philip Hue bulbs for the three lamps in our bedroom. They sell their own automation systems to manage your thoughts but we already use Home Assistant from the Open Home Foundation for automation because it allows us to run basically everything entirely locally with no cloud dependence or internet access.
For our existing lighting we use a combo of Lutron Caseta (for built in lighting) and Philips Hue bulbs (for plug in lamps). For the purposes of the red light experiment in the bedroom, we are using all plug in lamps.
For the Hue bulbs, instead of using the Hue Bridge and the Hue App, we use the built in Zigbee radios to pair directly to Home Assistant.
Phillips should be commended for using open protocols and enabling users to use these non-proprietary standards. Interoperability is good.
To achieve the light color changes we wanted, there is a plugin called “adaptive lighting” that automatically color and brightness shifts the bulbs through the day (subject to plenty of configuration options).
In our case, Alex set them to go very red (1000K) while also limiting the sunrise to no later than 6am and the sunset locked to 630p in order to fit into our routine and preferred bed timings.
iPhones have an automatic white balance on their cameras but it is actually quite red at night
The lights mostly work automatically but for when manually control is wanted, there are Zigbee remotes on each side of the bed as well as Home Assistant bridged to Apple HomeKit so everything can be controlled via the Apple Home app or through Siri.
It may sound complicated but there are plenty of tutorials in the open source community to help guide you. As we get more data from our own biometric tracking I’ll be sure to discuss it here and on Twitter.
I’m sure many a doctoral thesis has been written on the obsession with bodily purity and eternal search to rid oneself of toxins.
I’m not an academic but I was on the original Goop team in the far distant past when I worked for legendary adman Peter Arnell. So I’ve had a lot of exposure to particular purity culture that is modern consumer culture detoxing.
While I had hippie experiences with detoxification and also real ones like mercury chelation (which is a fun story), nothing is as intense as rich white women detoxing. From herbals to enemas to fasts you have a lot of choice.
I am all for the woo woo. The aspiration that if one just exercised enough control over oneself that all ailments could be cured is alluring. It’s also fucked up. Bodies are notoriously difficult to control and medicine is littered with mysterious ailments afflicting saints and sinners.
Alas I’m still tempted by this philosophy. I spent four days in Miami and I feel like a bunch of expensive detoxification treatments would be just the ticket. I’ll probably just sleep it off though.
Opting into someone else’s personal metrics is a misery. When you dump a group of powerful or influential groups with adjacent but not aligned values you find status competition with in-group and inter-group.
I find this to be a little bit of a breach of decorum. People who pursue different goals don’t want other people’s rules applied to them.
So you find fearful politeness if you are unsure of inter-group norms. Everyone is interesting but not everyone has the same incentive sets or motivation.
The harder it is to feel safe within your in-group the less openness you will have with outsiders. Finding a way to ease the competitions for status only improves relationships between the allied groups. Find what you value and value the people who share those values.
The frustrating part of living with human limitations is that it doesn’t really matter to anyone but you and your family. Life goes on no matter what is going on in your body or personal context.
The constant barrage of anarcho-tyranny across the globe will build up reactive low trust feelings in anyone.
Harden your hearts and open your mind. Find the facts of your situation. The accommodations of your particular circumstances won’t matter if you can find a way to contribute by acting on the world. You need to bring something to the table even if it’s simple as a good attitude.
The current cultural battles of responsibility seem to hinge largely on who has responsibility and at what stage of abstraction and remove (our city, our regional government, our national state apparatus). We are caught in the same system as anyone else to some extent.
What are the ethical ways of being with each other? How do we show up with trust when so little is trustworthy. What do we owe each other knowing not all are good faith?
I think some of this is simple and no amount of effort or obfuscation gets over the fact that you must contribute some good to the whole. You must be high trust to get back high trust.
Humans are on the whole less transactional than we imagine in our fears. I’ve always found reason to be hopeful. You can act in the face of uncertainty. You can act in an awful world.
I don’t swim very much as an adult but I grew up in an era with mandatory swimming tests (even at university).
I was lucky enough to not only learn to swim in the Pacific Ocean but in Colorado I spent a lot of time in our many creek, rivers and lakes. Freshwater has its own appeal and I’ve seen the tides work on the Great Lakes. But little is as magical as the buoyancy of seawater.
But today I was able to take a swim. I put on a bathing suit and was able to casually swim with just enough force applied to steady myself in a comfortable place against the increasingly forceful tide coming in. I felt like I’d won even if it was just for thirty minutes. I enjoyed a nice healthful thing in between the chaos of a very busy moment.
I’m not much of a Fitzgerald fan and but the joy of finding the limitations in one’s life as you mature is the relatability of feeling the weight of a one’s years as you push against the tides.
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past
So many decisions cannot be undone and yet we steady ourselves against forces much bigger than we are. Pushing against some of the vastness of a sea while relaxing into its much bigger whole is quietly humbling
I feel good about pushing against the vastness but also not being so sure about my own place in much larger forces. It’s no wonder man yearns for the horizon.
I took a shower and immediately went back to work. But it was nice to be a human doing a human thing while all of this is going on around me. I held my own against the tides. And I intend to keep doing.
Americans have one of life’s finest luxuries in our protected and ample open spaces. Our cities are bustling economic hubs of opportunity, but unlike in many other countries American has an incredible heritage of publicly owned wilderness.
We may take this access to ample elbow room for granted. Having spent the weekend with a diverse groups of people with interests in how we manage and care for our American ecosystems, it was an incredible reminder of our vast shared inherited wealth.
One friend pointed out that other nations may have become accustomed to the density of a megapolis but Americans come by their space loving “don’t crowd me” individualism honestly. Another friend pointed out that many of us would find ourselves over-socialized in other culture.
Peacefully watching the water go by in the sunlight of late summer
I felt this especially as I’d been socializing with people I enjoy and respect. And even though I had an amazing time I am exhausted from even the love and joy of fellowship.
We’d picked a spacious spot where we had plenty of privacy. It was an intimate group working through topics close to all of our hearts. And yet after a long weekend, I’d like to be quiet and quite alone for just a little. Fortunately I can do just that.
Maybe the intensity of sensory inputs is worse than it used to be, but I think of myself as being a sensitive person.
I have strangely acute hearing, I struggle with bright lights but in particular screens, and I am often unsettled by smells, flavors, and textures. Life feels like it’s having at 10x the density and clarity that I’d prefer.
It’s probably just the flavor of autism that seems to plague every other person on the internet.
Today I found myself focused on the texture of a pair of socks that I’d just purchased. It felt as if they were rubbing the top of my feet raw. But it all looked fine when I took them off. I applied moisturizer and put them back on but it still itches.
Sensitivity is annoying and I am chalking it up to fatigue. I’ve been excitedly putting in long hours for work so every input might simply be on raw nerves.
It’s always baffling to me when something that is supposed that is supposed to make you feel good makes me awful. And yet it’s a very consistent experience for me.
Every time I get bodywork done (massages, acupuncture, osteopathic spinal work, physical therapy) I feel like absolute shit for 24-48 hours afterwards.
I have an autoimmune condition called ankylosing spondylitis which is a fancy form of arthritis. It’s well controlled with medication and a healthy lifestyle but I am always looking for ways to increase my functionality as well as my capacity to tolerate stress.
This naturally leads me to want incorporate positive stress techniques like cold showers, saunas, and the thousands of other hacks to improve your capacity to tolerate stress.
I’ve tried supplements magnesium supplements to adaptogenic mushrooms and most major modalities of body work to even the whackiest of woo.
Yesterday I had an amazing osteopath work on my spine and yet today I feel about 10x worse than I did before I went in. The dip is just a misery of exhaustion, pain which leads to some anxiety from being tired and in uncomfortable.
I trust I’ll feel better after this dip and some progress as I recover from the good stress but at the moment I’m just miserable.
My assumption is that many things in life that make you feel better in the long term are uncomfortable. Delayed onset muscle soreness is a common issue for new weight lifters and pushes many out of their routines before they even get started.
It’s such an art finding the correct amount of stress to put your body under and I wish I had a more perfect intuition about how to do it. Until I do I’ll probably have to work through many types of dips.
I enjoy noting numbers that represent milestones (100, 1000) for my daily writing habit. But I’m really a sucker for the cool dates. Today is day thirteen hundred and thirteen of writing every single day.
1313 is terrific. It’s an odd number. It’s also a composite number. 1313’s prime factors are 11, 7, and 17 so really a fan favorite set of numbers just on mathematical properties alone.
I asked perplexity for a synopsis on the numerology and enjoyed the very woo woo response. 1 represents new beginnings, leadership and self assertion. 3 represents creativity, self expression and embracing change.
Isn’t it funny what has staying power? Sometimes you’ve just got to keep at the ridiculous things in check and keep at the thing no matter how ridiculous it looks to others.
