The Bitcoin vibe on Twitter is so sad. All this forcing others to take pills or bend knees 🤢 I’m a big hippie y’all, I’m not here to “dominate” others. I’m just trying to build some cool shit that makes life a bit better… for everyone 🫶🧡✌️

...I am a bit of a vibe coding hater 😬

As always, freedom of speech is wildly important for all sorts of reasons. One of them being that when people can say whatever they want, what they chose to say reveals their character.

Just spent an hour explaining the Bitcoin + Lightning + Taproot Assets stack to my Spanish tutor. Poor lady deserves a raise 😬 I feel like I should get some sort of trophy 🏆 You know you know something well when you can explain it to a novice... in your second language!

¡Me voy a El Salvador en enero! Voy a estar hablando, obvio, del stack de Bitcoin + Lightning + Taproot Assets. ¿Qué es lo que más te daría curiosidad aprender sobre esta tecnología?

What I want, what I pursue, is a world built for and lead by women just as much as it is built for and lead by men. Am I a “feminist”? That’s a word that I tend not to use as it means wildly different things to different people. But I’m constantly reminded of this quote… “I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat” -- Rebecca West

Once again I'm convinced that the red pill mania and characters like Fuentes are being propped up and pushed by foreign actors, probably Russia. This is not a natural organic movement. This is the result of intentional media manipulation.

Because someone else may have it worse does not mean that your struggles aren't real and deserving of attention.

“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.” - Christopher Hitchens

When you finally get into the fancy room you realize that all these “accomplished” people are the most desperate followers that you’ve ever met. Meritocracy, its the idea that people should be in the fancy room, or not, based on their talent and effort. And in theory, I’m a huge fan of meritocracy. But in the states especially, this concept has turned into a twisted sort of status game. There is this desperation to prove one’s value by being “above” others… by getting into the room that others can’t. I was born into that culture and at times embraced it. I desperately wanted to get into that room. I was convinced that only the best of people could be there. The smartest, the hardest working, the most insightful, and that’s what I wanted to be. I wanted to go to the fancy restaurants, the exclusive clubs, the biggest cities, the most expensive hotel, the VIP lounge. And then it happened. I got my name on the list, I sat at the table at the fancy dinner, I met my heroes. And it broke my heart. At first of course it was quite exciting and fun. But it didn’t take long to start to notice the cracks in the facade. All these people weren’t the most hard working, the most intelligent, the most insightful… they were the most desperate. They were not there because “the cream rises to the top” they were there because they were also desperate to prove themselves. That fancy room, it’s just a room full of people all desperate to prove that they too can be in the fancy room. Sad, and pretty sobering when you realize that description includes you. Now inclusion in the fancy room is of course very much a meritocracy, but the “merit” being tested is one’s ability to follow. It’s a test of one’s ability to pick up on what the current culture values and emulate that effectively. It’s a test of your trendiness and ability to curry favor with others. It’s one of those things where once you see it you can’t unsee it. Now when I look at the pictures from the party in the fancy room I feel a bit embarrassed for those attendees. They don’t even realize what a confession that photo they proudly posted is. The world is really a lot messier than it’s comfortable to acknowledge. There isn’t a room full of all of the smartest, the hardest working, the most insightful. The people that you will wind up having genuine respect for are scattered all around in all sorts of rooms. You are very luck when you occasionally meet those people. You might meet them in a fancy room, but you are just as likely to meet them on the bus. It’s a big letdown to realize that “the fancy room” is just a fantasy. You can’t have it, because it doesn’t exist. So I’ll just be drinking with my friends at the dive bar.

You don’t understand therapy. It’s not a pity party, it’s adulting. Two years ago it was difficult for me to just be in a car, and driving one was a gut wrenching experience. I was struggling just to drive two blocks away to the shops via side streets and parking lots. But this morning I woke up early, made a cup of tea and decided to head out for a nice relaxing drive. I got in the car and drove to the shops 30mins away on roads going 45 mph. And it was relaxing. How did I pull off that transition? Therapy. And this is why the chronic misunderstanding of therapy and mental health practices in general rather irks me. It is not self indulgent victim cosplay where we absolve ourselves of responsibility for the state of our lives. What kind of insanity would that be? Instead it is the intentional management of our mind and our thought processes. It is simply necessary maintenance for optimal health. You eat a decent diet, you try not to drink too much, you get good sleep, you stay close to your friends and family, and you consciously manage your mind. That’s some proper adulting. When I say “mind” I mean your thoughts, your ideas, your “mindset”, your perspective on yourself and the world. It’s what happens in your brain that impacts your experience. We are only consciously aware of a small percent of what’s happening in our brain. The vast majority of what we “think” throughout the day we are not consciously aware of and this creates an interesting challenge. That one weird thing your uncle said to you about relationships when you were 7 might have formed some sturdy neuropathways in your head… and still be there to this day without you being consciously aware of it! So let’s hope your uncle was a wise and loving man otherwise that old thought pattern might be causing you some trouble. You can think of your subconscious mind as the operating system that you are running. The issue is that updates don’t happen automatically. If you want to run a new and improved operating system, you have to painstakingly install a new one yourself. Sometimes one line of code at a time. There is an interesting thing about humans, we are born too early. Now this has to do with complex evolutionary things like humans learning to walk upright and the size of our hip bones and what’s optimal for walking vs what’s optimal for childbearing. Long story short, we are born too soon. Most babies in the animal kingdom emerge capable of independent mobility and communication. But humans, wow are we helpless babies. And for that first year of our life, our operating system is still being installed. Our nervous system is still forming. And this brings us to a very popular therapy trope… Tell me about your mother! That’s the cliche right? You walk into a therapist's office, lay down on the couch, and the first thing your therapist says is “tell me about your mother.” Then you describe in detail everything your mother has ever done wrong, your therapist absolves you of any responsibility for any of your errors and you both toast your success with some champagne! Right? Of course not. Questions about your early childhood, or your upbringing, and questions about your mother, or whoever raised you, are indeed very common. But here your therapist isn’t looking to find the person to blame, they are asking you, “what operating system are you running?” You see most of us get an operating system installed that is rather optimal for the environment that we were in during our early childhood. But decades later when we wind up on a therapist couch, or zoom meeting schedule, it’s almost certainly because that operating system is wildly outdated and no longer helping us. So it may very well be that you are having a problem with workplace anxiety and your therapist asks you about your mother. But of course none of this is about your mother, it’s about the operating system that your mother installed in your brain 40 years ago that desperately needs an update. This stuff is of course complex and I don’t want to do it a disservice by over simplifying it, but, I do think it’s fair to say a very big factor, and for a lot of people, the primary factor in depression and anxiety are damaging old subconscious thought patterns. Our perspective on life and ourselves, our “mindset”, our damaging old operating system. This is how “therapy” helps us improve ourselves. It is the work of determining what operating system you’re running, sorting out which parts of that are now holding you back and in need of an update, and going about updating that software. Unfortunately, most of us don’t wind up “in therapy” until something has gone very wrong in our life. Therapy is expensive, it’s time consuming, it’s difficult, and there is still some stigma around it. And so we don’t make that call until we are really suffering and desperate for a solution. And when we do finally make that call we generally have no idea what we are doing and have no idea what kind of help we need, and so we start with some good old fashioned talk therapy. Talk therapy might not be what you wind up needing, but it’s a great place to start to get an education. Comedian Vidura Bandara Rajapaksa has a great bit about going to therapy. He says he thought that a therapist would fix him like a mechanic fixes his car, but instead he found that therapy is much less like going to a mechanic and much more like Ikea for your emotions, “where you are given some tools and materials but you have to put your sh*tty table of a personality together all by yourself.” Because talk therapy is a great place to get an understanding of which operating system you are running and in which ways it’s erroring out, but you still have to do the work of updating that operating system. For some people their operating system isn’t in need of that many updates and just talking to a therapist and installing a few new insights and perspectives will be enough of a solution. But for many others, a full upgrade may be needed, perhaps even some database migrations, and that requires some serious upgrade tools! Thankfully there are many, many options these days. Deep journaling work like the Neurocycle process, Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT), Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), psychedelic assisted therapy, and many more. While all of these have their own approach, they are all essentially tools for a serious operating system upgrade. And this upgrade is hard work! This isn’t about blaming grandpa, this is about re-wiring your mind, on a physical level, one neuropathway at a time. You keep an eye on your blood pressure, you step on the scale to check your weight, maybe you use a sleep tracker! And, if you are being a responsible adult, you monitor your mind. When your blood pressure is too high you call your doc and take some pills and change your diet. And when your anxiety starts to kick up, you call your therapist, maybe take some pills, and update your operating system. Therapy isn’t a pity party, it’s not about who to blame, it’s the conscious management of your mind. It’s hard work, and it’s proper adulting.

Confession: I sometimes read Ryan Selkis Twitter feed just for the entertainment value. I’m rather liking this latest iteration of the white supremacist misogynists. They’ve gone so far it’s now just cartoonish.

Years ago I watched a YouTube video on anxiety where the presenter described anxiety as a security guard. You need your security guard! You don’t want to get rid of it. And ever since then I have pictured my anxiety as Lieutenant Commander Worf. Well I was talking to my therapist the other day and you know, you always try to calm your nervous system before you tell your most horrific stories and so we were thinking of calming places and the lazy river at a Wisconsin Dells water park I went to years ago came to mind… and then this picture appeared in my head. If I can’t unsee it, then neither can you!