Me and one of my kids were having a chat about how our lives would be different if we had been born male rather than female. And she said some rather sad things. She's like "I couldn't listen to the music that I do. I couldn't paint my finger nails..." etc. It's so fucked up that we shame men out of just enjoying their lives. Dudes don't get to go to the nail salon, listen to fun pop music, put on dramatic eye liner, wear pretty clothes, dance with enthusiasm, drink a fancy fruity drink, on and on. We intensely shame them out of enjoying the simple pleasures of life. That's so sad. Don't be one of those people!

I was out having drinks with friends over the summer and one of them said something that just really stuck with me. We were discussing vigilante murders, the Mangione situation etc. and he remarked how interesting it is that this doesn’t happen a lot more often. It could. Pretty much all of us are perfectly capable of doing something like that, and it’s really rather remarkable that it is so very rare. That’s true, and it gives me a bit of hope for humanity. We really are not wired to hurt one another, we are wired for connection. Violence and hatred damages everyone involved, not just the victims but the perpetrators as well. Our minds and bodies do not function properly when we are in ugly, violent situations. Our minds and bodies not built for that. We are built for love, connection, and cooperation.

You can't make someone understand. When the reality of your life conflicts with their understanding of the world, they are incapable of understanding you. You can't fix them. Just walk away.

Dehumanizing groups of people, or seeing them as outside your moral range, is the root of atrocities. If you can’t see trans people, or immigrants, the opposite sex, or those who voted for the opposing political team as fully human, you are the problem. You are the type of person that enables atrocities.

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.