That Welcome to Holland essay has been on my mind. This morning I went for a walk in the park and stopped at the exercise station to do some push-ups and what not. There was a very chatty older man there with his adult son. He introduced himself "I'm Juan and this is my autistic son." And his son wasn't trendy autistic, he was non-verbal autistic. We had a lovely chat about the benefits of being in nature etc and as I was getting ready to move on he asked me to take a video of him and his son working out. He helped his son on to the situp bench and assisted him through a set of crunches. You could tell this was a well practiced routine for them. And as I left it struck me how beautiful that was. Here is a dude that's really making the most of his trip to Holland 🥲🫶

You need to build on an open, decentralized, wild and untamable network… Anything else is too risky! If you’re building something meant to last, you should build on an open, decentralized network, one that can’t be quietly steered by a single entity or reshaped around any one jurisdiction’s regulatory preferences. Anything else introduces a different, and often greater kind of risk, platform risk. Some blockchain networks market themselves as “regulation-friendly” or compliant by design. That sounds convenient, but it raises a core question: compliant with whose regulations? These networks operate globally, across dozens of legal jurisdictions that often conflict with each other. Any network that can adapt itself to the policy needs of one government can, and likely will shift in ways that may not serve your interests. If you’re not the largest or most influential participant in that ecosystem, you have very little control over how those changes unfold. As the network evolves, upgrades may benefit incumbents, politically favored actors, or specific jurisdictions, while leaving others with new constraints or technical burdens. Even if no single entity can change everything unilaterally, systems with centralized governance structures or foundation-controlled roadmaps tend to drift toward the priorities of their most powerful stakeholders. By contrast, truly open and decentralized networks are resistant to this kind of governance capture. They can still evolve, but no government or corporation can simply “push through” a change to suit its own regulatory agenda. Change requires broad consensus among miners, developers, businesses, and users, making protocol-level compliance updates practically unworkable. This structural resistance keeps such networks far closer to genuine neutrality. There’s no perfect platform, every system carries some risk. But choosing a network that cannot be easily reshaped to fit a specific jurisdiction’s rules removes one major category of risk: the risk that the ground shifts suddenly beneath you because a central authority rewrote the protocol. Importantly, this doesn’t prevent you from meeting your own compliance obligations. It simply means those responsibilities live at the application or business layer, where they belong, rather than being enforced deep in the network itself. You get regulatory freedom where it's appropriate, and protocol neutrality where it's indispensable.

Somehow we always wind up back here.

I mean.... there are a few people who come to mind

Boomers love saying “I’m glad we grew up before camera phones!” Millennials then spent decades terrified of compromising photos… and it was mostly just us. Now Gen Alpha can shrug and say, “that’s AI.” So yeah, we were the only generation that actually had to deal with that 😒

Danger is a part of life. What makes it tolerable is when you are proud of your decisions in managing it and when you don't have to do so alone.

You can't always control the reactions that your body has to a situation. But you can control how you interpret that reaction and the importance that you give it.

Hey it's almost like being trapped isn't good for people!

The most powerful tool an abuser has is the misplacement of shame. As such, if you can, one of the best things to do to fix these issues in the world is to speak about your own abuse without any drop of shame. Speak about it like you would about being cut off in traffic. “Seriously? Look at this idiot!” “Did you see that?!?! What the fuck is wrong with this guy?!?” etc. Refuse to carry even a drop of the shame. Put the shame, loudly, where it goes.

Pain is inevitable but suffering is optional. Pain plus non acceptance equals suffering.

I ran across this really great thing, it’s an essay called “Welcome to Holland”. It was written by a parent of a special needs kid and coping with that was the motivation behind the essay, but really it applies to any time in which you need to accept the reality of your life being different than you planned/dreamed. It’s a simple story, you have dreamed of going on vacation in Italy. You’ve been planning the trip for ages, you bought all the tickets, you packed your bags, and the time has come to get on that flight! ...but when the flight lands, the attendant says “Welcome to Holland!”. You were not planning on going to Holland, you bought a ticket for Italy. But that airplane isn’t getting back in the air to take you to Italy. You exit the plane, you are in Holland. Holland isn’t awful, it’s got it’s own kind of charm. So you can sit and mope about not being in Italy, or you can explore Holland. “if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn't get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things ... about Holland.”

Pain is inevitable but suffering is optional. Pain plus non acceptance equals suffering.

“The essence of traditional masculinity is the denial of vulnerability. The more invulnerable you are, the more manly you are. The more vulnerable you are, the more girly you are. Here’s why that’s an issue… The idea that we have to deny our own humanity, our vulnerability, our feelings… All of us men who buy into this are haunted by anxiety. We don’t live up to this standard. We know we don’t live up to it. The reason we don’t is because what we’re trying to live up to is a lie. And because there is no room for imperfection, we bounce back and forth between shame. If we’re not perfect, then we’re unlovable losers. But we have to a low tolerance for that before we’ve puffed back up into grandiosity. And what’s devilish about that shunt from shame to grandiosity is that it works. You feel better in a rage than you do feeling bad. You feel batter being godlike and invulnerable than you feel being defective and vulnerable. That’s why dominance is so seductive to boys and men. But it’s a feel-good illusion that will ruin the lives around them.” – Terry Real

The most powerful tool an abuser has is the misplacement of shame.

If you’ve ever heard stories of sexual abuse and wondered why a survivor didn’t report the abuse, or why they appeased the abusers, or why they just tried to escaped but didn’t go to the police, etc. If this has ever been confusing for you, you need to read Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s memoir Nobody’s Girl. It’s a wildly important book as it details how these things happen and how abusers get away with it. It explains how and why abusers chose those who they will abuse, how they slowly damage their self concept, how they make it clear that they can't go get help, how they set the abused up to not be believed by their community, how they engineer silence, and how abusers give themselves a public image contrary to reality to hide behind. On and on. If you actually care about understanding these thing, all the answers are in that book.