The more you know, the older you get, the more you become aware of your own lack of knowledge. The universe is just way too big and complex. Life is just way too complex. We cling to religion and simple philosophies to avoid the panic of the vast unknown. Sometimes, just for a moment, I can hold just a glimpse of the immensity of my own ignorance and I have to go sit down and take a few deep breaths to avoid drowning in it.

I was 10 years old when marital rape became illegal in all 50 states. Sometimes I remember that when I'm pissed at the persistent rape culture. We've actually gotten a lot better! At least now even if it still permeates the culture it has been removed from the legal code.

If you're in the Psychology is BS camp, give me 5 mins to change your mind. This is a thing that I wrote back in December: 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. It’s complex, but 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 or two 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.

One of the tragedies of our current patriarchy hangover is that most men have no idea how wanted they are. Men are still being taught to get their sense of value from logistical utility, and most women have been taught to feel intense amounts of shame for any sexual desires. The mix of these two things means that women generally don't express desires out loud and men rarely think of themselves as desirable. This is changing, but currently, most men don’t know how to be wanted, they only know how to be needed. And so they panic when they don’t have a sense of being logistically needed. Dudes, stop it. You’re a bunch of hotties, act like it! 😉

You can’t make someone care about you. You can’t make someone care about you. You can’t make someone care about you. You can’t make someone care about you. You can’t make someone care about you. You can’t make someone care about you. You can’t make someone care about you. You can’t make someone care about you. You can’t make someone care about you. You can’t make someone care about you. ...Let them go.

I think I've been to 20 different countries. Is that impressive or are those rookie numbers?

Sometimes when someone says something atrocious I’ll call them on it and be like “that’s not cool” and then they’ll get all pissy and be like “well you’re not any fun”. And I’m just like, bro, do you not know how to have a good time with out doing some gay bashing? Is homophobia a prerequisite to your enjoyment?

I love the idea of men as protectors, it’s a task that they are generally well suited to. Men in general are taller, have more upper body strength, etc. And a very honorable thing to do with physical strength is to protect others. However, men actually doing protecting is pretty rare, at least in my life experience. The most common way that a man, who in theory wants to be a protector, fails to protect, is by not believing that there is a threat to protect from. I have known so many men in my life that I’m pretty sure are not predators themselves, and who in many areas of life are decent and reasonable people, that for some reason shut down on this topic. Unfortunately, being sexually assaulted is very much the norm for women in the world. It has certainly been my experience in life, and also the experience for nearly 100% of the women that I know. And it’s not just anecdotal data here, there are just mountains and mountains of studies that all tell this story as well. The evidence is overwhelming. When I talk to these men about these things I do not accuse them personally of any wrong doing. I do not say ugly things about men in general. I do not advocate the removal of any rights from men. When I am talking to these men I am looking for understanding, but that seems to be the one thing they can’t give. They just shut down and go into defense mode and I don’t know why. So if you have any idea, please please tell me, why are there so many seemingly decent men out there who can not/will not see this reality? What is going on here?

This is not what a man looks like. This is someone who has intentionally, with all consuming dedication, cartoonified themselves for the entertainment of others. No doubt it’s impressive, and very eye catching! 👀 But very likely, for most women, not really that attractive. This dude is no fun. This guy will not join you on a wild night out and do shots and then have tacos. This guy will make your child together cry on their 5th birthday when he refuses to eat a piece of the birthday cake. You’ll never see this guy as he’s at the gym 3 hrs a day. He’s pretty miserable. Most women are going to want men that look like real men.

On a scale of 1-10, how would you rate your interpersonal conflict resolution skills?

I’ve done a lot of different things in my 43 years on planet Earth, but learning Spanish is one of the coolest. I watch YouTube travel videos en español & just sit there & marvel at my ability to understand it. It still blows my mind every time! 🤯

I’ve never had an abortion, I don’t ever want to, it’s a tragic thing to have happen. But the decision to do so or not needs to be mine. Always. If that decision should ever belong to someone else then I do not own my body. Should that decision belong to the state, then I am a slave of the state.

Frustration comes from a misalignment of expectation with reality. I thought humanity would be better by now. The reality is that we are not as good as I thought we would be.