I’ve got a new metric for determining when to engage with someone: curiosity. If you can maintain your curiosity for them, if they have curiosity for you, stick around. You can feel it when the curiosity has left the room, & when it has, that’s your cue to leave too.

The best tech does not always win. I know, this is a dagger to your cypherpunk heart. It also broke my heart 💔 But it’s true, and we have to build like it’s true. It’s our job to make our tech usable for the rest of the world, or the rest of the world will use something else.

If you roll with the idea that the purpose of life is to chose your values, well, then this is a great year! So much opportunity! Especially if you're a conservative right now. ...make some choices.

You can support someone's right to free speech and also criticize how they chose to use their free speech.

Trauma, especially childhood trauma, often causes chronic disease. Don’t believe me? It’s actually pretty simple to explain. … Let’s imagine that it’s 10am Friday morning and you get a notification that your boss has scheduled a quick meeting with you at 4:15pm this afternoon. You check the invite, HR is also on the invite. Your pulse increases… are you getting fired? But you can’t just sit and stew about it, you have meetings and reports to finish and so you push through your day but spend 6 hours in a state of functional but constant anxiety. 4:15pm finally comes. They just wanted to ask you about an incident with a fellow employee. It wasn’t even about you, you’re not fired, whew. But after that adrenaline spike, all the cortisol in your system, etc. you’re exhausted! You might just go home and go to bed early. Now instead of 6 hours, imagine spending decades in that state of functional but constant anxiety. When we experience trauma, especially when young, or when we are living in a perpetually unsafe environment, our nervous system gets wired to be constantly on guard. It can literally increase the size of your amygdala. It creates measurable changes in the brain. You don’t sleep as deeply. You have a more dramatic startle response. You’ll likely suffer adrenal fatigue. Your hormonal balance will be thrown off. Your immune system won’t function properly. ...you’ll develop a chronic illness. Your Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) score predicts your likelihood of developing a chronic illness. A high ACE score increases your likelihood of developing a chronic illness by two to four times, depending on the condition.

I’ve been, very slowly, reading a book about leaving fundamentalist religion called Leaving the Fold. The author notes that one of the most difficult things about leaving a religion is that you then have to rebuild your value system. Not knowing how to valuing things in your life can cause confusion, shame, and anhedonia… the inability to experience joy. I think a lot of depressions are caused by this, a disruption in our value system. When something major happens in our life, a divorce, the loss of a loved one, etc. it can cause us to rethink our view on life and thus our whole value system. When you have no way to value things then you have no way to feel good about things. And this is why it’s so important to consciously chose your value system. But that of course is easier said than done. That shit will dig way down into the back of your head. It can take years to rearrange back there.

Maybe there isn't such a thing as "highly sensitive" people. Maybe there are simply people who can easily feel what they feel and people who were taught to feel shame about what they feel. The more you resist a feeling the more it impacts you.... The more impacted the more "sensitive". When every feeling is evidence of your personal failure, emotions aren't waves that move through you, they are waves that knock you over.

When Trump won a lot of liberal people I know went around blaming the evil stupid people that voted for him. Now with Mamdani's win being so high profile a lot of conservative people I know are going around blaming the evil stupid people that voted for him. Y'all, it's never the evil stupid people. The people might be confused or uneducated or in a fear state, but they aren't evil or stupid. Seeing things so simply prevents you from understanding what actually happened, and you can't fix a situation you don't understand. But you can't do righteous indignation and understanding at the same time. You gotta choose one.

I'm reading Virginia Robert's memoir and shit, it's rough. Her story is intense, but it's an accurate reflection of the dangers women face in the world and the ways in which their abuse is enabled and ignored. But what really gets me is that while reading it I keep wanting to send the book to some people in my life who never seem to understand the life of a woman. But I can't, I know... If only intellectually and not emotionally, that they will never understand. When understanding requires an admission of blindness and a changing of world views, when it requires giving up your boogeyman, they won't do it.... They will never understand. And this is why, for me, this is such a tough read. Every section is another reminder that people will refuse to see you or help you when doing so requires seeing themselves differently. They will throw you to the wolves before they will look in the mirror.

Ahh Twitter, always inspiring confidence in humanity.

hawt

We tend to think of libido as just one thing with a very simple measure, Low ↔ High. But actually, it has two components, the gas and the breaks. (This idea shamelessly stolen from the book Come As You Are) While this theory is relevant to everyone, and helpful for anyone who wants to turn someone else on, I think it’s particularly helpful for hetero men. Maybe instead of thinking about how to turn someone on by hitting their gas pedal, maybe spend some time thinking about how to avoid hitting the their brake pedal. Your time is far better spent working on being safe than it is working on having a huge paycheck or huge biceps. Women, in general, for obvious reasons, are very sensitive to a lack of safety. And so any hint of you not being safe for them will slam on those breaks. But if you can demonstrate safety, emotional, physical, etc., if you can avoid touching that break pedal, then any bit of gas will take you a long way.

The massacre in the Sudan is so horrific that the blood is visible from satellite images. What makes this possible is when one set of people forget that other sets of people are human. When we forget the humanity of others. When we lose our ability to connect with their experiences. Thinking that these are just barbarians and this can’t happen near you is committing the same logical error. These people, both the victims and the perpetrators, are just as human as you and me.

Why do so many women have the hots for Pedro Pascal? Well, since you asked, I’ll type up a big long explanation for you! 😉 First: I recently read this book called Come As You Are. It’s about human sexuality and I highly recommend it. The book describes libido not as one thing, but as having two components, the gas and the breaks. I think women tend to have more sensitive breaks, this being mostly for biological reason. Women suffer the consequences of sex, pregnancy. Having sensitive breaks is a necessary survival skill. But it’s a burden, and it sucks. Now we have quality female controlled birth control, but still in the modern world there are SO many things that hit the breaks. For example, men that give lectures on how women need to “submit” to them. Men that think “protection” = control. Men who praise other men who say “your body my choice”. All of that stuff hits the breaks, hard. And it’s so prevalent that you have be constantly on guard for it. Constantly hitting the breaks. Pedro Pascal does none of the things that hit the breaks. And sure he’s a good looking, fit dude. But he’s not THAT good looking, what he is, is safe. I don’t know the dude, I have no idea what he’s actually like, but I know how he presents, or is presented. He presents as someone who would actually protect. He presents as someone you could go to if you had been assaulted or harassed and he would believe you, and help you. He presents as someone who would respect, with out questions, your clearly stated boundaries… the first time you stated them! Wow, just wow. (And how sad that is so rare) So in short, Pedro hit’s the brakes so very, very little that looking at him is like a car rolling down hill, going faster and faster as there are no brakes to slow the roll.